Brisbane has banned smart glasses at its pools, and privacy law is scrambling to catch up

Brisbane City Council just did something federal privacy law still cannot manage: actually banning smart glasses from filming people without asking first.

From the coming weeks, none of the council's 21 public pools will allow camera-enabled devices, including smart glasses, phones and action cameras, to record anyone who has not agreed to it. Lifeguards get the power to boot anyone caught filming without permission, no warning required.

The trigger is the rise of cheap AI smart glasses, particularly the Anko brand sold at a fraction of the price of Meta's Ray-Ban glasses, which look like ordinary sunglasses but can quietly record video through a lens built into the frame. Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner said the goal is simple. "We want everyone that uses our pools to know that they're not secretly being recorded by other users of the pool, that their children are not being recorded," he said. "It's everyone's right when they visit a council pool to feel safe and comfortable."

Here's the awkward bit. Under Queensland law, filming someone in a public place without their consent is completely legal. Brisbane's council rule works because a pool is council property, so it can set its own conditions of entry, but it cannot touch what happens the second someone walks out the gate.

That gap is exactly what has Australia's Privacy Commissioner, Carly Kind, worried. She has warned that wearable surveillance could fundamentally reshape public life, and pointed out the Privacy Act mostly regulates businesses and government agencies, not individuals wandering around wearing a camera on their face. Digital Rights Watch has been blunter, arguing people should not have to fear being covertly filmed and uploaded without consent just for going outside.

The federal government has flagged a second round of Privacy Act reforms that would widen what counts as personal information and tighten consent rules, but none of it exists yet. So for now, a council swimming pool in Brisbane has stricter privacy protections than the footpath outside it.

Bring your togs, not your tech, and maybe start acting like every stranger nearby is one blink away from recording you, because increasingly, they might be.