How to Talk to Teenagers About Smart Glasses (Before Someone Gets Filmed)
A pair of camera glasses now costs less than a school jumper. Kmart’s $89 Anko model sold out within a week of going on sale in late July, Meta’s version has been in Australian stores for a while, and the cheap imports are one click away. So the question schools have started asking me this term isn’t hypothetical any more: what do we actually say to students who turn up wearing them?
Most schools reach for a ban first. I understand the instinct, and I’d back a hard rule in all school contexts. My concern is what a ban leaves undone if it isn’t coupled with conversation, context, and consideration. The students wearing these will most likely be wearing them at training, at parties and in each other’s houses, where your policy doesn’t reach and no teacher is watching.
Which means the conversation is where the work happens. The device is new, sure; but really, the conversation isn’t. If your school has done any respectful relationships work at all, your students already have the language for this. They just haven’t connected it to a pair of sunglasses yet.
What makes smart glasses different from a phone?
A phone is a visible decision. When someone lifts it, everyone in range knows a camera has been pointed at them, and they get the chance to move, object, or say no. Smart glasses remove that cue. The person being filmed never gets the moment where they could have declined, and that missing moment is the entire problem.
Say exactly that to a group of teenagers and watch how quickly they get it. In sessions on consent I’ve found students can be ahead of the adults on this, because they’ve spent their whole lives being photographed. Adults argue about the technology. Students argue about whether it’s fair, which is the more useful argument and the one that transfers to whatever device arrives next year.
Start with being filmed, not with filming
The opening move matters more than anything else you say. Do not begin with the device, the policy, or the consequences. If you do, the ones you are trying to target have switched off (Because they probably already have a little ‘rage against the machine’ perspective!) Begin with a question: has anyone here ever been filmed or photographed when you didn’t want to be, and what did that feel like?
In a high school room you’ll get most of the hands up, and if the room is running well, you’ll get honest answers. Once a student has described what it felt like to appear in someone else’s footage without being asked, they’ve made your argument for you and you’ve spent none of your credibility. My suggestion is to stay in that discussion for a good five minutes before the words “smart glasses” are said aloud.
I appreciate this is harder than it reads. Students will test you, someone will make a joke, and the temptation is to shut it down and hand out the rule. Please resist the rant on the podium – no how good it feels to be giving the ‘talk’. A student who has reasoned their way to a standard will apply it at a party in October. A student who has been told a rule will apply it until the bell.
Be honest about what the law does and doesn’t do
Then tell them the truth about where the law sits, because they’ll find out anyway and it costs you if they hear it from someone else. Australia’s Privacy Commissioner, Carly Kind, has been direct that the Privacy Act covers organisations and government agencies rather than individuals, so it offers very little to a person filmed by someone else’s glasses. Kimberlee Weatherall and Milica Stilinovic at the University of Sydney make a similar point about the patchwork of state surveillance laws, which differ on what counts as a private conversation or activity (lets of course hope this changes with our new reality).
For students, the honest summary is that in many everyday situations, filming a person without asking is not illegal (again this is out of schooling contexts and school codes of conduct). The standard therefore has to come from them rather than from a statute. That framing works better with teenagers than any threat does, because it treats them as the people responsible rather than the people being managed.
The conversation boys need
There is a specific version of this discussion for boys, and it should be had by someone who won’t flinch. Dr Stephanie Wescott at Monash has warned that in school settings these devices can extend existing forms of gendered harassment, because covert recording becomes easier and much harder to detect. That risk is not theoretical, and the students most exposed to it are girls and gender diverse young people.
So name the defence before it gets used. “It was just a joke” and “I wasn’t even recording” are the two lines that will be offered, and both are worth taking apart in advance. The question I would put to a room of boys is simple: if you have to hope she doesn’t find out, you already know what you’re doing. Ask it, then wait, rather than answering it for them.
Give them words, not just rules
Finally, hand them something to say, because the situation they’ll actually face is a mate wearing the glasses, not a stranger. Two scripts are enough. For the person being recorded: “Are those on? Can you take them off while we’re talking?” For the bystander: “Turn them off, she doesn’t know.” Practise both out loud in the room, awkward as that is, because a script rehearsed once is a script available under pressure.
This is the part that outlasts the device. Staff cannot police what they cannot see, so peer standards are the only enforcement that scales, and every hour spent building them pays out on a technology nobody has invented yet.
My recommendation is allowing twenty minutes of pastoral time / year assembly / wellbeing class on this before the first incident rather than the week after one, using your existing respectful relationships language rather than anything new. You know your cohort and where their pressure points are, so treat this as a contribution to your judgement rather than a substitute for it.
Empowerment-Ed delivers respectful relationships and consent programs from upper primary to Year 12 across Australia, as an endorsed Trusted eSafety Provider. The year level breakdown is on our Empowering Relationships page. Please do reach out if I can help you shape this one and where it might fit.
Further reading
SBS News, Could smart glasses breach Australians’ privacy rights?
Kimberlee Weatherall and Milica Stilinovic, Smart glasses are going mainstream. Do current privacy laws protect us from the risks?, The Conversation
EducationHQ, Keeping up with smart glasses: how the tech could affect your school