Are Kmart's $89 Camera Glasses Legal in Australia?
Wearing them and filming a public street is broadly lawful. Recording a private conversation is where the law splits: permitted for a participant in three of the eight states and territories, an offence without consent in the other five.
For most of a year the smart-glasses privacy argument in Australia was about a device almost nobody owned. Meta's Ray-Bans cost several hundred dollars and sold through a handful of channels. Then, in late July, Kmart put a pair on the shelf for $89, badged Anko, next to the phone chargers. Target had them too. They sold out.
That is the fact that changed the question from a thought experiment into a real one, because $89 is the price at which a thing stops belonging to early adopters and starts turning up on the train. And the answer people reach for is wrong in both directions at once. One version says these glasses let you record anyone, anywhere, and that Australia has no law to stop it. The other, repeated in a lot of the coverage of the Kmart launch, says the opposite: that recording audio without consent is a crime in every Australian state. Neither is true. The honest answer is that it depends on which state you are standing in and on whether you are part of the conversation, and the gap between the states is wide enough to be a genuine trap.
What is actually in the frame
The Anko glasses are, on the spec sheet, a cut-down copy of the expensive ones. SmartCompany, reporting the launch on 28 July, put the camera at 8 megapixels with 1080p video, plus a microphone, speakers, Bluetooth and image recognition through a companion phone app. There is a small light that flashes when the camera is running — the same disclosure feature Meta leans on, and the same one people have spent a year learning to distrust, because what that light actually covers is narrower than the reassurance suggests. Kmart's own line, quoted in the launch coverage, was that buyers should use the product "in accordance with applicable laws and community expectations around privacy." That sentence does a lot of quiet work, because the applicable laws are not one thing.
The easy half: wearing them, and filming a street
Start with what is not complicated. There is no Australian law against wearing camera glasses, and there is no general law against pointing a camera at a public place. Australia has no statutory right to privacy that an individual can enforce, and the federal Privacy Act 1988, the thing most people mean when they say "privacy law", is built around agencies and businesses, not the person filming the footpath. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner says as much: for an individual acting in a personal capacity, the Act largely does not apply. Photographing or filming strangers in a public space, on its own, is broadly lawful across the country.
Two things sit on top of that baseline and are where the trouble is. One is sound. The other is the small set of places and images the criminal law treats as off-limits no matter where you are. Almost everything difficult about these glasses lives in the first.
The hard half is sound, and it moves at every state border
Australia does not have a single recording law. It has eight: one per state and territory, and they were written to govern "listening devices," which is exactly what a pair of glasses with a microphone is. They agree on one thing and split hard on another.
They agree that recording a private conversation you are not part of is an offence. Eavesdropping on two strangers with a hidden microphone is unlawful everywhere the conversation counts as private. Where they split is the case that matters most to a person wearing a camera into a café: recording a conversation you are yourself a party to.
In three of the eight, Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory, a participant may record without the others' consent, because the offence is written to catch only the outsider. Queensland's Invasion of Privacy Act 1971 makes it a crime to use a listening device to record a private conversation, then removes the crime, at section 43(2)(a), "where the person using the listening device is a party to the private conversation." Victoria's Surveillance Devices Act 1999 does the same by omission: section 6 bans recording a private conversation "to which the person is not a party," and says nothing against the participant who records their own. The Northern Territory's Act, at section 11, uses the identical "not a party" construction. In those three, being in the conversation is the whole defence.
The other five treat the same act as an offence and then carve out exceptions. Western Australia's Surveillance Devices Act 1998 is the clearest example of the harder rule: section 5(1)(b) makes it a crime "to record a private conversation to which that person is a party," full stop, and a participant escapes only through a narrow gate — section 5(3)(d), where a principal party consents and the recording is "reasonably necessary for the protection of the lawful interests of that principal party." New South Wales, at section 7 of its 2007 Act, is built the same way: recording your own conversation is prohibited unless every principal party consents, or the recording protects a lawful interest, or it is not made in order to pass the conversation on to outsiders. Tasmania's Listening Devices Act 1991 and the ACT's 1992 Act repeat that structure almost word for word. South Australia's 2016 Act reaches the same place from the consent side: recording without every principal party's consent is prohibited, with a lawful-interest and a public-interest exception on top.
So the count is three permit, five restrict, and the line does not follow any intuition about which states are "stricter." It is a drafting accident of the 1970s through the 2010s that a Queenslander recording a work meeting on the glasses commits no offence under the state Act, while someone doing the identical thing across the border in New South Wales needs an exception to fit. This is the specific error worth naming, because the tidy line the launch coverage reached for — "audio without consent is illegal everywhere" — flattens exactly the difference that decides a case. The mirror image of it plays out in the United States, where the same participant-versus-all-party split runs state by state and, in five states, carries a felony charge rather than a civil one.
One more clause of the wording matters, and it is the reason none of this is as absolute as it sounds. Every one of these Acts bites only on a private conversation: words spoken, in Queensland's definition, in circumstances showing the speakers wanted to be heard only by themselves. A shouted exchange on a crowded platform may not clear that bar. Avinash Singh, principal lawyer at Astor Legal, made the point to SBS that the category is wider than people assume: "private conversations don't necessarily have to be in a private space", but it still turns on the circumstances of the particular conversation, not on where the recorder happened to be standing.
Even a lawful recording is not a free clip to post
The participant who records lawfully in Queensland, Victoria or the Northern Territory then hits a second wall the first one hid. Making the recording and publishing it are separate acts under the same statutes, and the second is restricted even where the first was fine. Victoria's section 11 makes it an offence to communicate or publish a record of a private conversation, subject to its own list of exceptions: consent, a public-interest test, the protection of the publisher's lawful interests. The Northern Territory's section 15 is drafted the same way. Queensland is the outlier again, more permissively: its publication offence bites only on conversations obtained in breach of the recording section, so a party's lawful recording is not caught by it, though that says nothing about defamation, or the terms of the platform it goes to. The through-line is that "I was allowed to record this" and "I am allowed to post this" are two different questions with two different answers.
The image line that holds everywhere
The one place the map is simple is the place the glasses make easiest to cross by accident. Filming a person in a private or intimate circumstance, a bathroom, a change room, up a skirt, without consent is a criminal offence across Australia, and it does not soften because the camera was worn instead of held. A device that records from eye level without a raised phone to announce it is, in that specific setting, an instrument the voyeurism offences were rewritten for. Nothing about the $89 price or the flashing light changes that this is the hardest-edged rule attached to the device, and the only one with a consistent national answer.
For a reader in Britain the shape of all this will look familiar and the substance will not: the UK has no consent-state system at all, and the limits arrive from different law entirely. That is the pattern worth holding onto across the whole subject. The device is global and identical from country to country; the law it lands in is local, and in Australia it is local down to the state line. The Kmart glasses did not create the question. They just priced it low enough that a lot more people are now standing on the wrong side of a border they cannot see.
Related coverage
Can You Film Strangers in Europe With Smart Glasses? — the same recording question in the EU, where it turns on the household exemption rather than state surveillance-device Acts
Sources and verification
The recording provisions were read directly from the legislation for six of the eight jurisdictions: Queensland's Invasion of Privacy Act 1971 (s43, s44), Victoria's Surveillance Devices Act 1999 (s6, s11), Western Australia's Surveillance Devices Act 1998 (s5), the Northern Territory's Surveillance Devices Act 2007 (s11, s15), Tasmania's Listening Devices Act 1991 (s5) and the ACT's Listening Devices Act 1992 (s4), each from its government legislation register.
For New South Wales (Surveillance Devices Act 2007, s7) and South Australia (Surveillance Devices Act 2016), the official registers and AustLII were unreachable from our network; the section text for those two is taken from reachable authoritative secondary sources — a New South Wales barrister's reproduction of the consolidated NSW Act, and the South Australian Law Handbook published by the Legal Services Commission of South Australia — and the exact South Australian subsection numbering could not be confirmed against the primary text. No penalty figure is stated for those two jurisdictions beyond what those sources support.
The federal position is from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner's guidance on surveillance and monitoring. The product details, launch, sell-out and Kmart's statement are from SmartCompany's reporting of 28 July 2026; the legal comment from Avinash Singh of Astor Legal is from SBS News, 5 August 2026. No court has yet applied any of these Acts to smart glasses; the point made here is that the statutory wording reaches the device, not that a case has been decided.