Australia Investigates the App Behind Kmart's $89 Camera Glasses
Australia's privacy regulator has opened an investigation into Shenzhen Qingcheng, the China-based company behind the HeyCyan app that pairs with Kmart's $89 Anko camera glasses. Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind announced the inquiry in a blog post on Wednesday after the company failed to respond to questions from her office. The Guardian
The investigation
The inquiry cites concerns raised by outside testing of the technology and by the company's privacy policy, the statement that describes what user information it collects. Kind's office asked the developer for information before moving to a formal investigation. That lack of reply triggered the next step in the regulator's process.
The scope is narrow. The investigation will examine how and where the company collects and stores personal data, meaning what information it gathers and where it keeps it. Barron's No other company is in scope. Kind said none of the other companies contacted will be investigated as part of this process.
The investigation follows a request from the Australian attorney-general for Kind to assess the privacy implications of smartglasses. During that review, Kind wrote to Kmart and BDI Technology as retailers of the glasses, and to Shenzhen Qingcheng, Meta and Google about smartglasses privacy. Only Shenzhen Qingcheng now faces investigation.
The glasses and the tests
Kmart's $89 Anko camera glasses sold out online within a week. LSJ An ABC investigation found more than a dozen serious security flaws in the HeyCyan phone app used with the glasses sold by Kmart. ABC A separate ABC examination found the very cheap smart glasses exposed Australians' sensitive data, images and videos to hackers. ABC
The broader context here is the enforcement problem with low-cost connected wearables, devices like glasses that link to the internet through a phone. The low price helps them spread fast. The companion app acts like a control centre for creating accounts, moving photos and video, setting permissions and sending data to online storage. When that software has flaws, passwords, media files and phone or device identifiers kept on handsets and any remote storage can be exposed.
Looking at what this means for regulators and retailers, the process is instructive. Canberra asked the privacy regulator for an assessment, the regulator contacted firms across the supply chain from retailer to operating-system provider, then narrowed formal scrutiny to the app developer. For practitioners, the questions to watch are jurisdictional reach, or whether Australian rules apply to an overseas firm, data localisation, or where data is kept, retention controls, or how long it is kept, and remediation duties for units already sold, or what must be fixed for current owners.
