AINEWS
Kmart's $89 Anko camera glasses sold out in days. A 21,000 signature petition is calling for a ban. The consent model for face mounted cameras hasn't caught up.
He was sitting at a cafe in Melbourne when a stranger took his photo. He never saw the flash.
A man was photographed at a cafe and the photo arrived in his Grindr inbox a few minutes later. The Guardian reported the account on record: the subject, Rhys, described glasses with a built-in camera and an LED that is supposed to light up when recording. He had not noticed the LED, the glasses, or the person across the room.
Smartglasses have been around since 2021. What's new is that the price floor for a face-mounted, always-recordable camera has collapsed into ordinary consumer life. The consent model hasn't caught up: a small LED, a stranger you may not notice, no public-space norm.
Kmart Australia's $89 Anko-branded camera glasses sold out within days of hitting shelves. Amazon and Temu list cheaper clones. Meta says it has sold more than 7 million Ray-Ban pairs worldwide and recruits Kylie Jenner to advertise them. Snap is pursuing its own version. The category is no longer something an early adopter buys. It's a $40 stocking-stuffer at a national retailer, with knockoffs behind it.
The asymmetry is built into the device. The camera sits on the wearer's face. The signal sits on the frame. The person being filmed has no reason to look for it and no way to know it's there.
Rhys spoke to The Guardian on the record about the cafe incident. He was sitting in a public cafe. A man he had not noticed was nearby. A photo taken through the glasses, of Rhys as he sat mid-conversation, arrived in his DMs a few minutes later. He did not recall seeing an LED or the glasses.
Meta's design calls for a small LED to light up on the front of the frame whenever the camera is rolling. Other subjects in the same Guardian report describe the LED as easy to miss in daylight or in the corner of vision, and as something a bystander has no reason to know to look for.
The knockoff tier widens the gap.
Kmart's Anko camera glasses are a private-label pair of sunglasses with a small camera. They sold out in days after launch, triggering a GetUp petition calling for a ban that had passed 21,000 signatures by Friday. The petition is addressed to the Australian federal privacy regulator and to Kmart itself, and its language is unusually direct for a GetUp campaign. It calls the glasses a tool for "covert recording of women, children, and other vulnerable people in public."
Amazon and Temu host a deeper tier of clones, some priced under $30. None of them are subject to the design review that went into the Meta product. The category has fractured into a regulated flagship and an unregulated long tail, and the long tail is what's selling.
The activist group Everyone Hates Elon, which has run pointed campaigns around Musk-adjacent products, has put up a print ad featuring Jeffrey Epstein wearing a pair of smartglasses with the slogan "glasses for people who don't do consent." The line is meant to circulate, and it has. In the current market, it is also an honest description of the failure mode: a $40 device with no published indicator, sold at a major retailer, used by a stranger you did not notice.
The legal system is starting to treat this as a problem. It's slower than the retailers.
In the United Kingdom, the Independent reports police are investigating TikToker Scott Margerison for allegedly secretly filming strangers with Meta smartglasses, and trade outlet PetaPixel has covered the case in detail. It's one of the first formal probes tied to a named creator, and it has put pressure on the platform side. Instagram has begun cracking down on what Fortune calls the "pervert glasses" problem, removing accounts that distribute covert footage filmed through the frames.
Australian legal analysis from the Hugo Law Group frames covert recording with smartglasses as potentially a criminal offence under state and territory surveillance and intimate-image laws. The analysis is commentary, not statute, but the direction of travel is clear. A device that films by default and signals only with a small LED is being tested against laws written for a different category of camera.
Australia has been on this beat for a year. ABC Stateline reported in March 2025 on a US content creator who covertly filmed Sydney women using sunglasses with camera lenses and posted the footage to Instagram. The Kmart Anko launch, the GetUp petition, and the Rhys report are the same story arriving in different forms: the hardware is cheaper, the device is more ordinary, the footage is more shareable. The Australian regulators named in the petition, including the federal privacy commissioner and eSafety, have not yet issued a public response.
The harder question is what consent looks like for a camera on a face.
The Meta product at least has a published LED and a corporate review board behind it. The Kmart Anko pair and the Amazon and Temu clones don't. The 21,000 signatures on the GetUp petition are not a regulatory ruling. They're a marker that a public-space norm does not yet exist for this device, and that consumers can see the gap.
For Rhys, the gap arrived as a photo in his DMs. For the rest of the public-space camera question, it's arriving at a checkout counter.