Australian Founder Says Smart Glasses Privacy Should Be Solved on the Device, Not With a Ban

As regulators scrutinise camera glasses, OpenTraining blurs faces on the device before footage is saved, and pays tradespeople to teach robots dangerous work.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, October 21, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Australian founder George Bancs has entered the national debate over camera-equipped smart glasses, arguing that the privacy risk should be addressed through how the devices are engineered, rather than through a ban.

Bancs is the Founder and CEO of Open Technology LLC, which operates OpenTraining.ai, a platform that uses smart glasses to capture skilled trade work as training data for humanoid robots. According to the company, face detection and pixelation run on the device in real time, before footage is written to storage, so the stored file contains the redacted image rather than the original camera feed. The company says licence plates and documents are handled by the same pipeline, and that unredacted frames are not uploaded to its servers or viewed by human reviewers.

The announcement follows a period of scrutiny for the category in Australia. On 7 October 2026, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner opened an investigation into the maker of the HeyCyan smart glasses phone app, and Kmart subsequently removed its camera glasses from its website. The Australian Greens have also proposed legislation to restrict imports of camera-enabled glasses.

"Everyone is arguing about whether the glasses should exist. I think that is the wrong argument," Bancs said. "The risk comes from raw footage being captured, uploaded and then anonymised afterwards. Anonymising later is not privacy. It is a promise."

"We built it so that trusting us is not required. If the unredacted copy is never created, there is nothing to lose, leak or sell."

Bancs is calling for a technical standard rather than a prohibition. "Legislate the architecture," he said. "Require redaction before storage, on the device, for any camera worn on a face. That is enforceable, and it is testable."

Consent and provenance

According to the company, every capture on OpenTraining.ai is consented at the point of recording, reviewed before it enters a dataset, and stored as a fixed version with its consent record and provenance chain attached.

The second part of the announcement concerns who benefits.

Safe Work Australia figures released this month show that 222 workers died from traumatic injuries at work in Australia in 2025, the highest annual toll since 2012.

Through OpenTraining's Training Economy program, skilled tradespeople record demonstrations of their work on smart glasses and are paid for each approved capture, with a share of downstream dataset licensing routed back to the worker who recorded it. The program was featured on 7NEWS in October 2026, in a report that included an apprentice electrician paid an extra $3 an hour to wear the glasses on a Sydney construction site.

"A tradesperson has always been expected to train the apprentice," Bancs said. "Nobody ever paid them properly for it. We do. The difference is that this apprentice is a robot, and thirty years of skill becomes an asset you earn from instead of something that retires with you."

The platform records two tracks from each capture: the work performed, and the safety knowledge within it, such as hazards identified and avoided. Open Technology has authored hazard profiles across 16 industry verticals, beginning with building and infrastructure, and is prioritising higher-risk work.

"The first tasks we are teaching robots are the ones that kill people, like confined spaces and working at height," Bancs said. "If a machine takes that work, and the tradesperson who taught it is paid every time it is licensed, I will defend that in front of any crew on any site in the country."

The capture platform currently integrates with Meta smart glasses, with native applications in development.

About Open Technology LLC

Open Technology LLC owns and operates OpenTraining.ai, a training data platform for physical AI, and is a member of the NVIDIA Inception program.

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