Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has announced a second tranche of privacy reforms that would hand more control to government systems, local councils and state governments as Australia tries to catch up with the harms of smart glasses and other wearable cameras. The package includes public safety measures, an IDLock system and a proposed “right to erasure,” but the people most exposed to the damage are still the ones expected to manage it themselves.
Who Pays for the Tech Mess
The article opens with the people already living under the gaze of other people’s devices. Women are filmed in shopping malls, at the beach, at work and during breaks on campus. Men follow women through parking lots and into the stairwells of apartment buildings. Underage girls are filmed and then berated for refusing to play along with a pick-up artist’s seduction spiel. Young boys are filmed using smart glasses to harass young girls in schools. One video showed a woman, seemingly unaware she was being filmed, performing fellatio on a man as he drove a car over the speed limit.
That’s the world the reforms are responding to. Not a theory. Not a future threat. A daily grind of surveillance and humiliation, with the burden falling on ordinary people who never asked to be content.
The attorney-general has often cited research by the Governing Immersive Technology team at the University of Sydney, which analysed 350 Instagram videos and found that, in a subset of covert POV footage, around 60 per cent of interactions could be classified as potential harassment. The article says the reforms were inspired by those concerns, and asks what will be done when it comes to smart glasses protections.
What the Government Is Offering
IDLock, which Rowland said can be thought of as a digital padlock, will be accessible through myGov in 2027. It would allow people to block, unblock and monitor the use of eligible identity documents such as passports or driver’s licences through the government’s Document Verification Service. The aim is to make it harder for stolen identity documents to be used for fraud.
The second measure, a “right to erasure,” would allow individuals to seek the removal of their digital footprint from Big Tech companies and their platforms. That sounds like relief, but the article makes clear where the pressure lands: on the individual to chase down the harm after the platforms and devices have already done their work.
The article says some of the more egregious examples have since been removed, but the videos still appear under different hashtags or behind pleasant thumbnails of smiling women that conceal the harassment about to take place. For every video removed, dozens more spring up in their place. Women regularly message the author to recount incidents, including men attempting to upskirt them in a local café or striking up a conversation only to admit they had been filming the whole time.
Who Gets the Job of Fixing It
The onus, according to Rowland’s announcement, now falls partly on local councils and state governments to decide what constitutes surveillance and what measures, council by council, should be implemented to protect society’s most vulnerable and others. The federal government has rejected, for now, the import ban proposed by the Greens, supported by members of the crossbench and championed by Senator David Shoebridge. It has also rejected the proposed slow-down, a moratorium of sorts designed to give Australia’s privacy laws time to catch up.
So the machinery keeps moving. The state says it will sort out the edges while the devices spread.
The article says that if Australia aims to be an innovation state, decisions about emerging technologies cannot be divorced from questions of trade, investment and long-term prosperity. It says the challenge is to ensure that the pursuit of innovation does not come at the expense of the people expected to live alongside these technologies. That’s the familiar bargain: growth first, damage later, and the rest of us left to absorb the fallout.
The “right to erasure” could potentially offer relief to those captured in online content, but the article says the onus appears to have been placed on the individual to protect themselves from harms produced by emerging technologies. Wearable cameras, including pins and earbuds, are set to proliferate, and the article says the sky is the limit when it comes to harms across personal safety, surveillance and privacy.
The eSafety Commissioner has already offered a head start through its Safety by Design approach. Reasonable measures include blurring bystanders, more visible recording indicators, stronger controls over harmful content and human-led moderation capable of gauging context. The article also says informed consent should apply, and that a content creator in smart glasses should seek permission to turn an encounter into content.
That’s the whole arrangement in miniature: people asked to consent to being watched, recorded and turned into material, while institutions debate which patch will slow the bleeding. None of us signed a release form to become content for your Insta-stream.