State Government must act on AI glasses

QCCL President Michael Cope said today, “The recent public disquiet over the use of AI glasses exposes the failure of both the previous and current state governments to respond to the Queensland Law Reform Commission’s comprehensive 2020 report on surveillance devices.”

The current law dealing with the recording of private conversations is the 1971 Invasion of Privacy Act, which is in technology terms antediluvian. Under that law a participant in a private conversation can record it without the consent of the other participants.

The other Queensland law potentially relevant to AI glasses is section 227A of the Criminal Code which prohibits recording another person in circumstances in which a reasonable adult would expect to be afforded privacy, when the other person is in a private place or engaging in a private act, without the other person’s consent. But that law obviously is of relatively narrow application.

The Commonwealth Privacy Act only applies to businesses or organisations

There is now a Statutory tort of serious invasion of privacy. But it sets a high bar by requiring the invasion of privacy to be serious.

“The Law Reform Commission proposed in its report that it would be illegal to record a private conversation, even if you were a participant, unless certain exemptions, including consent, applied. A position QCCL endorses.”

But the proposed Bill, like the current law, only applies to private conversations, while many conversations involving these glasses are likely to take place in a public space.

“In our view, there is privacy in a crowd. But the use of Meta AI glasses raises complicated issues. On the one hand, it would be a vast over reach for the government to ban people from taking photographs in public. Equally it would be a significant overreach to ban the recording of all conversations”

In the Council’s view what is required is that the government should either introduce the bill drafted by the Commission and refer it to a Parliamentary committee to consider these issues or the government should issue a new reference to the Law Reform Commission to review its report in the light of recent technological developments.

“In the council’s view the fundamental proposition is that the law needs to enable individuals to decide for themselves which aspects of themselves they wish to keep private and which they do not.”

Mr Cope said, “In our view AI glasses should be prohibited from being sold if they do not have a prominent warning light which shows people that they are being recorded and it should be an offence to disable that light.”

Secondly the law should ban glasses with the capacity to undertake live facial recognition.

We will be writing to the Attorney General to call upon her to take action in relation to this important privacy issue.

ENDS

For further information contact Michael Cope President QCCL on 07 3223 5939 during office hours and at all times on 0432 847 154 

18 August 2026