The Committee for the Study of Spectacles

Brisbane City Council has banned the wearing of smart glasses at its public pools. Not swimming while wearing them, which nobody had proposed, but recording other patrons with them, a distinction the council felt worth legislating separately from its existing rules about cameras, phones, and general decorum near a changing shed.

The eSafety Commissioner would like manufacturers to blur faces automatically, delay livestreaming by a few seconds, and fit a light that actually tells you when you're being filmed, the current ones being apparently optional, decorative, or aimed at the wearer's own eyebrow. The Attorney-General has written to the Privacy Commissioner asking for the matter to be treated as a priority. The Privacy Commissioner is now understood to be considering it with the gravity reserved for such correspondence.

The Greens want the devices banned from import for twelve months. Independents have signed on, apparently persuaded that a brief window before a technology floods the market is best used doing something with it. Jason Clare's office has confirmed the childcare-centre ban already covers the glasses, on the basis that a device capable of recording a child was always covered, glasses being, on inspection, a device.

And this week the Commonwealth released a consultation paper and draft legislation containing a right to erasure: an Australian may now demand their personal information be deleted from digital platforms with revenue above five hundred million dollars, or more than two and a half million monthly users. The Attorney-General noted the laws are technology-neutral, built to anticipate whatever arrives after the glasses, on the fair assumption that something always does. It was, by the government's own account, a significant and wide-ranging reform. It addressed data brokers, consent standards, and platform accountability with real thoroughness. Politicians, it seems, will regulate anything about a photograph except the taking of it.

A council, a commissioner, an Attorney-General, an industry report, a draft statute, and the collected energies of the Greens party room, all trained with real diligence on a pair of spectacles. Nobody has yet addressed who owns the face digitally inside them.

Ask, and the silence is instructive. Not whether a person may be photographed in public, that question was settled decades ago and settled sensibly, journalism and street life require it. The question nobody has put to a minister is narrower and ruder: once your face has been taken without your knowledge, who, if anyone, owes you a say in what happens to it next. Not just the taking, but The rest of its life afterward.

Because the image does have a rest of its life. Say it starts at a café table, a stranger's glasses catching a woman mid-argument with her partner. It gets posted, first, by whoever took it. It gets reposted by someone with a larger audience who finds it funnier than the original poster did. A still gets pulled from it. Somebody in the replies identifies her, helpfully. A caption gets added that has nothing to do with what actually happened. It turns up on an account that specialises in this sort of thing, with a title implying something about her that isn't true. At no point in that chain, from the café table to the fourth repost, does the law currently require anyone to have asked her anything. The erasure right, once it exists, will let her write to whichever of those accounts happens to clear five hundred million dollars in revenue. There is unlikely to be one.

Call the original culprit Darren. Darren is not a platform, has no revenue to speak of, and rather fewer than two and a half million followers, and no reform before Parliament so much as glances in his direction. Darren films the argument at the next table because he finds it funny, and posts it because several thousand people generally agree with him about what's funny. The Privacy Act does not trouble him, having been built to restrain organisations, and Darren, for all his faults, is not one. He could do this with the glasses. He could have done it, with marginally less style, on the phone already in his pocket. Nothing currently before the Commonwealth changes aything either way.

None of this is without precedent. In 1888 Eastman sold the public a portable camera, and the public responded with banning orders, outraged newspaper columns, and a nickname, the 'Kodak fiend', chased off beaches for the crime of taking your picture without asking. The panic burned out within a decade. The actual question, what a person is owed once their face becomes someone else's material, was never answered so much as mislaid, and has resurfaced politely every time the box has changed shape since: the camera phone, Google Glass and its glassholes, now this.

Politicians have become extremely good at studying the object. They convene panels for it, draft thresholds around it, ban it from pools. What no politician has yet managed, in a hundred and thirty-eight years of practice, is asking what's owed to the person standing in front of it, or to their image once it starts the rest of its life without them.

Submissions to the consultation close in a matter of weeks, capped at a thousand words. Darren, one assumes, will not be filing one.