Who owns the footage when $99 glasses film your gym changing room?

A mass-market device the law never anticipated

Wearable cameras just stopped being a tech novelty. Kmart’s Anko camera glasses are now on sale in New Zealand for $99, a fraction of premium alternatives like Ray-Ban Meta glasses that start at $337 and climb past $700. They sold out online by Monday 3 August 2026, sitting on the shelves alongside kitchen appliances rather than in some specialist gadget aisle.

University of Canterbury professor Annette Mills calls the device “essentially a computer on your face”, combining cameras, microphones, speakers and AI functions in ordinary-looking eyewear. The problem is not the recording itself. It is the invisibility. Unlike a smartphone, which someone has to visibly raise before filming, smart glasses capture footage discreetly, making it hard for bystanders to know they are being filmed.

The legal hole retailers now own

Here is the core problem for any business operator. New Zealand’s privacy framework, the Privacy Act 2020 and the Privacy Amendment Act 2025 whose first part came into force from 1 May 2026, is built around what organisations do. It is not built for a person quietly filming everyone around them.

As Mills puts it, “our privacy regulations are primarily aimed at protecting individuals, but they are targeted at organisations… They are not set up to deal with personal information collected by individuals.” The Office of the Privacy Commissioner agrees the Act is “largely focused on regulating the actions of businesses and organisations, not individuals.” Covert filming may breach the Act only if the collection was “highly offensive to a reasonable person”, a high and conditional threshold. Everyday use largely falls outside current legal protections.

That vacuum lands squarely on business. As Inside Retail NZ notes, shops, workplaces, landlords and hospitality operators are forced to make their own rules “in real time, without clear legal guidance or frameworks.”

Where your customers’ footage actually goes

There is a second, quieter exposure. University of Auckland commercial law professor Gehan Gunasekara points out that when footage uploads to the cloud platforms behind these devices, “the platform also knows all of that information. They can map trends, see where people travel and the kinds of stores they shop at.”

For a retailer, every customer wearing a pair may be feeding behavioural data about your store, your layout and your staff to an offshore platform you have never contracted with and cannot audit. That data sits well outside New Zealand’s regulatory reach.

The usage data is not reassuring. A survey of more than 1,000 Australians found 13.5% of smart glasses owners admitted to dangerous use such as filming while driving, and around 17% admitted to prohibited use including recording people without consent. Those are self-reported figures, so the real numbers run higher.

The playbook already exists

Business does not need to wait for Parliament. New Zealand worked through a close cousin of this problem with facial recognition in retail. The Privacy Commissioner’s June 2025 inquiry into Foodstuffs North Island’s FRT trial found it complied with the Act, but only because of the controls around it. The trial scanned 225,972,004 faces across 25 supermarkets, deleting 99.999% of scans within a minute, and delivered an estimated 16% drop in serious harmful behaviours and 21% drop in shoplifting.

The lesson was that surveillance tech can be lawful if the operator builds the right framework. In February 2025, then-Retail NZ chief executive Carolyn Young said the Privacy Act “enables you to use facial recognition… You have to make sure that you don’t breach the Privacy Act and in doing so, you need to have really good controls and protocols in place.” The same discipline applies in reverse when the technology walks through your door on a customer’s face.

The trap to avoid when writing your policy

One warning before any operator reaches for a blanket ban. Blind Low Vision NZ chief executive Andrea Midgen describes AI smart glasses as “the most exciting game changer thing that we’ve had in technology for our community ever”, reading signs and menus aloud for people with vision impairment. A flat ban risks breaching disability access obligations, so any policy needs a carve-out.

Mills wants regulation covering “not just… the use, but also controls that deal with the deployment of these devices”, and warns future facial recognition integration could let a wearer “literally look at someone and say, ‘Tell me everything there is about this person’.” Until the law catches up, the sensible move is to write a wearable-camera policy now, include the disability carve-out, and document the reasoning. The FRT precedent is clear that when the Commissioner looks, it looks at controls. A $99 pair of glasses just made that homework urgent.

Sources

• Privacy experts warn of gaps in NZ law, as camera glasses hit Kmart shelves (2026-08-08)
• ‘Specs offenders’: $89 Kmart glasses spark privacy nightmare (2026-08-07)
• Kmart’s $89 glasses can record what you see. But what happens next? (2026-08-07)
• Why cheaper smart glasses are a mass-market privacy problem (2026-08-07)
• Office of the Privacy Commissioner – FRT Inquiry Report (2025-06-04)
• Govt quietly reviewed Privacy Act for barriers to facial recognition (2025-02-18)