The Australian government is considering what it describes as a "world-leading" ban on smart glasses in its offices and service centres, as councils around the country push the camera-equipped technology out of public spaces over privacy concerns.
The government has stopped short of a sweeping ban on importing the devices, and has so far encouraged individual workplaces to set their own rules.
The public service minister, Katy Gallagher, said on Thursday that she had asked the Australian public service for advice on whether the glasses should be prohibited.
"We need clear and consistent guidance for public servants," Gallagher said. "Smart glasses can raise legitimate privacy and security concerns, particularly because of their ability to record and capture information."
Commonwealth-run workplaces range from bureaucrats' offices to Centrelink service centres and CSIRO laboratories. Schools and hospitals run by state governments would be left to set their own rules.
Australia's online safety regulator has said that smart glasses should automatically blur people's faces while filming.
Local government has moved faster than Canberra. In August, Brisbane city council became the first to ban the glasses from its pools. Melbourne's Yarra city council has banned them from playgrounds, childcare centres and gyms, and the City of Sydney and Blacktown city councils have prohibited pool patrons from using them to record.
Other jurisdictions have taken narrower steps. Courts in England and Wales and in New York state have banned the technology. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency reportedly classified the glasses as body-worn cameras and barred them from the "federal workspace".
No national government has banned the glasses' use across its agencies, which is the standard the Australian government says it is seeking to set.
The federal attorney general, Michelle Rowland, praised the councils' decisions when speaking to Channel Seven earlier this month, and said she would consult businesses on their approach.
A prohibition of this kind rests on a definition, and the definition is where the difficulty begins. A smart pair of glasses is distinguished from an ordinary pair by a component that its designers have worked very hard to make invisible from the front.
This produces an enforcement method with an unusual property. To establish whether a visitor to a Centrelink service centre is complying with a ban on recording faces, an official must first examine that visitor's face at close range, for some seconds, with attention. The regulator's own proposed remedy is that the glasses should blur faces. The building's remedy is that a person should study them.
The American approach avoids this entirely by reclassifying the object. Once smart glasses are body-worn cameras, the question of what they look like stops mattering, because the rule now describes a category rather than an appearance. Our analysts regard this as the most efficient regulatory instrument yet devised: a definition that changes what a thing is without changing the thing.
Australia has not taken that step, which leaves it with the harder version of the problem and only one method that works reliably at the door. The safest assumption in any Commonwealth building is that every pair of glasses in it is recording, because that assumption is never wrong in a way that matters.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has therefore certified the proposed ban as already fully effective, in every office, laboratory and service centre in the country, on the grounds that nobody has yet looked closely enough to find an exception.