A pair of glasses that can photograph and film whatever the wearer is looking at now costs $99 at Kmart, and privacy researchers say New Zealand law was never built for the moment that hardware became a supermarket-aisle purchase.
The Anko Camera Glasses, listed on Kmart’s New Zealand website, look like ordinary sunglasses. They carry a camera for stills and video, a microphone, small speakers for calls and podcasts, and a companion phone app that adds image recognition. Comparable products from Meta and Ray-Ban have been on sale for several years at several times the price, which is the point privacy specialists keep returning to. At $99 the technology stops being a gadget for enthusiasts and becomes something anyone might be standing next to at a bus stop.
RNZ reported on Friday that academics who study privacy regulation think the rules have fallen behind the hardware. University of Canterbury professor Annette Mills described the glasses as “essentially a computer on your face”.
Her concern is not that people are recorded. It is that the recording has stopped announcing itself. Holding up a phone is a visible act, and the people around you can see it and react to it. A camera built into a frame gives no such signal beyond a small indicator light that most passers-by will never think to look for.
“We expect to be recorded in some places, such as by CCTV cameras in supermarkets. But we certainly don’t expect to have that everywhere we go,” Mills said.
She also pointed to what happens when a camera is paired with software that can identify what it sees. “You could literally look at someone and say, ‘Tell me everything there is about this person’. That can make someone feel very vulnerable,” she said.
The legal problem she identifies is structural rather than one missing rule. New Zealand privacy law is written around organisations, telling an employer, a retailer or a government department how it must collect, store and use information about people. It has far less to say about one individual pointing a lens at another.
“Our privacy regulations are primarily aimed at protecting individuals, but they are targeted at organisations and what organisations do. They are not set up to deal with personal information collected by individuals,” Mills said.
Her preferred fix goes further than policing misuse after the fact. “I think we need to come up with not just regulations that deal with the use, but also controls that deal with the deployment of these devices,” she said.
The Privacy Commissioner told RNZ the Privacy Act applies whatever the technology, and that covert filming can breach it where the collection would be highly offensive to a reasonable person. A spokesperson acknowledged the wider shift. “Tools like CCTV, drones, and smart glasses make it easier for individuals to record each other. If individuals do not use them in a responsible manner, that can lead to serious privacy harms,” the office said.
The office also noted that privacy law is not the only law in play. “Other laws are also likely to be relevant, such as the Harmful Digital Communications Act, stalking offences or other crimes under the Crimes Act,” the spokesperson said.
That last point matters more than it did a year ago. Stalking became a stand-alone criminal offence in New Zealand on 26 May 2026, carrying up to five years in prison, and the Ministry of Justice lists recording and tracking among the behaviours that can make up a pattern of stalking. Someone repeatedly filming a person who has asked them to stop is on far firmer ground for prosecution than they would have been in 2025. Filming in genuinely private situations was already an offence.
What none of those laws govern is the ordinary, unremarkable case. Someone wearing camera glasses past a school gate, through a doctor’s waiting room or around a community meeting is not obviously committing an offence, and the people around them have no practical way of knowing whether the camera is running.
The Ministry of Justice told RNZ it has no specific regulatory response to smart glasses planned.
There is a strong argument on the other side, and it comes from people who have waited a long time for exactly this device. Blind Low Vision New Zealand chief executive Andrea Midgen said cameras that read signs, menus and labels aloud, without needing a free hand to hold a phone, change daily life for people with little or no sight.
“This is the most exciting game changer thing that we’ve had in technology for our community ever,” Midgen said. She argued the privacy question is not new. “This is just a different form of what already happens with smartphones,” she said.
University of Auckland commercial law professor Gehan Gunasekara raised a separate issue that has little to do with the person wearing the glasses. Footage and audio processed through a connected app can travel to the company running that service, and what the company learns is not limited to any single image.
“The platform also knows all of that information. They can map trends, see where people travel and the kinds of stores they shop at,” Gunasekara said. Location and movement data drawn from thousands of wearers is commercially valuable even when no individual is named, and it usually leaves the country to be stored and analysed.
A Kmart Group spokesperson said the glasses belong to an established and increasingly mainstream category of wearable technology, with similar products sold worldwide by major technology and eyewear brands. “As with any device capable of recording images, we expect customers to use the product responsibly, respectfully and in accordance with applicable laws and community expectations around privacy,” the spokesperson said.
That expectation is doing a lot of work. Retailers can ask customers to behave well but cannot enforce it, and the responsibility lands on buyers who may not know where the lines sit. The practical rule is close to the one that already applies to phones. Do not film people who have said no, and do not record where people undress or seek medical care.
For everyone else, the change is quieter and harder to respond to. Cameras in public are not new, but until now they belonged to councils, retailers and police, and sat in fixed places you could learn to expect. A $99 pair of glasses moves the camera onto the face of the person queueing behind you, and no law currently requires them to tell you it is there.
What do you think? Should New Zealand require camera glasses to signal clearly when they are recording, or is this no different from someone holding up a phone? Leave a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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