Australia's Online Safety Regulator Wants Smartglasses to Automatically Blur Strangers' Faces

eSafety warns companies risk pitting accessibility benefits against safety and privacy as camera-equipped smartglasses from Meta and Kmart spread, with no automatic protection for bystanders.

Australia's online safety regulator, eSafety, says smartglasses equipped with cameras — including Meta Ray-Bans and budget options now sold by retailers like Kmart — should automatically blur the faces of people caught on camera who haven't consented to being filmed. The regulator's concern centers on a real tension it says companies risk mishandling: these devices offer genuine accessibility benefits, particularly for vision-impaired users who rely on camera-assisted description and navigation features, but the same always-on camera capability creates serious bystander privacy and safety risks when there's no technical safeguard preventing casual, non-consensual recording of strangers. eSafety's proposed fix — automatic face-blurring by default — would need to work without undermining the accessibility use cases the technology is genuinely good for, which is a harder technical problem than it might sound. A vision-impaired user relying on the device to describe who's in front of them needs the camera to actually see faces clearly; blurring everything indiscriminately breaks the core accessibility function the regulator itself wants preserved. This builds directly on the piracy-driven push already underway in UK cinemas to restrict Meta smart glasses, but the framing here is different and arguably more fundamental — it's not about protecting a specific venue or industry's revenue, it's about a baseline expectation that a stranger walking past someone wearing smart glasses shouldn't have to wonder whether they're being recorded and stored without consent. As these devices move from niche tech-enthusiast product to mass-market retail item sold at places like Kmart, that bystander consent gap stops being a hypothetical and starts being an everyday public-space problem.