Smartglasses should automatically blur people's faces ...

Ah, marvellous. Australia's online safety regulator has peered into the ever-growing realm of face-capturing eyewear and decided that the answer is... blurring. Yes, the same regulator that has surely exhausted its patience with Meta's privacy apologies has now 'urged' smart glasses companies — including Meta with its Ray-Ban collaborations and Kmart with a device that costs less than a fortnight of oat milk — to automatically blur the faces they film. Because nothing says 'we have this under control' like asking the people who profit from hoovering up your face to please consider smudging it afterwards. The word 'urged' is doing heroic heavy lifting, as always.

And the second ask? Make it clearer when someone is filming. Clearer. The devices have been on sale for years, recording strangers in public, and the best idea the regulator can muster is a suggestion that there might be, perhaps, a little light somewhere. Meanwhile the federal government is facing 'pressure to ban the technology' — pressure from whom, we wonder, and applied with what, a wet paper towel? We have seen this movie before: industry says it will self-regulate, regulator issues guidance, guidance is ignored, and a decade later we are all wearing cameras and signing waivers we never read. The kill switch bill we noted last week is about switching off AI; this is about switching on a polite request.

But here is the real kicker: blurring faces on a recording doesn't un-record them. It doesn't stop the glasses from capturing your face in the first place, or the models back at HQ from learning everything about you before the blur filter even loads. Kmart's glasses and Meta's Ray-Bans are just the visible tip of a surveillance iceberg that has already melted. So by all means, let's have the blur. Let's have the little light. Let's have the regulator pat itself on the back for a job 'urged'. The rest of us will just carry on being filmed, blurred, and stored, in that order.