Norway Wants Meta's Camera Glasses Banned From Public Spaces

By Daniel Rao

Somebody had to blink first on camera glasses. It turns out it's the Norwegians.

On October 5, Norway's government announced it plans to propose a temporary ban on AI smart glasses in selected public places, saying it is worried people are being photographed, filmed, and audio-recorded without knowing it. In the United States — the country that builds these glasses — the same kind of restriction just died on a governor's desk. Norway, a country of five and a half million people, is moving to regulate what Silicon Valley can't.

The proposal is limited and explicitly temporary. But its significance isn't. This is the first government in the world to say the quiet part out loud: glasses with hidden cameras have a consent problem that no LED indicator has solved, and waiting for the industry to fix it is no longer a strategy.

Photo: A wearer with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses — the camera dot is visible on the frame. Photo by Tessa Bury, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What Norway's proposal actually covers

The plan was unveiled by Torgeir Micaelsen, Norway's Minister of Digitalisation and Public Governance, in an official government press release on October 5. "I am worried that new, powerful technology is being introduced where people risk being photographed, filmed or audio-recorded without knowing it," Micaelsen said in the statement. "We will therefore propose a temporary ban on AI glasses in selected places."

The Norwegians have their own word for the devices: KI-briller. And the government has a surprisingly specific list of where the ban could apply. According to the press release, it would cover places where the public regularly gathers — parks, beaches, museums, shopping centres, public events, and amusement parks. It could also apply to schools, daycares, playgrounds, and youth clubs — essentially anywhere children gather — as well as privacy-sensitive places like doctors' offices, health institutions, gyms, and swimming pools with changing rooms and showers. Universities and colleges are under consideration too.

Notably, the government hasn't decided exactly which technology the ban covers. The statement says officials will examine whether it should apply to glasses with a camera and audio recording, glasses with a camera and AI functions, or body-worn technology more broadly. That ambiguity is deliberate: the technology is mutating faster than any single definition.

One detail worth noting: Micaelsen had been in the job for just four weeks when he announced the plan, according to Norwegian press reports. His predecessor had only floated the idea of looking into regulation in August. This is a new minister deciding not to repeat what he sees as the defining mistake of the social-media era — regulators arriving a decade late. The ban is meant to be temporary: an expert group will be formed to advise on permanent national regulation of body-worn technology, buying time for what the government calls an "enlightened debate" on lasting rules.

The minority Labour government will need support from other parties in the Storting, Norway's parliament, to pass the bill. It has promised to present legislation "as soon as possible." Some lawmakers are already pushing to move faster.

Not a total ban: what stays legal

Norway is not proposing to ban the sale of smart glasses, and it isn't proposing to ban wearing them everywhere. The government was explicit: private use, and use in situations where nobody else risks being filmed without consent, would still be allowed. The sale of the glasses is untouched.

There would also be exceptions for vulnerable groups, so that "socially beneficial uses" of smart glasses could be permitted in limited circumstances. That's a significant carve-out — camera glasses have real accessibility uses, from navigation assistance to real-time translation — and it suggests the government is trying to thread the needle rather than smash it.

"We do not want a society where people worry about being recorded without their knowledge, photographed, or filmed in places and situations where they are accustomed to not being monitored," Micaelsen said. "Such a society can feel unsafe and make us withdraw."

The "pervert glasses" summer that spooked Europe

Norway didn't arrive at this decision in a vacuum. It arrived at it after a summer in which Europe's worst fears about the technology turned out to be documentation, not speculation.

In France, the child-welfare association e-Enfance, which operates the country's national hotline for victims of online abuse, said last month it had received around 20 reports from women as of September 8 — most involving Meta glasses — of women being secretly filmed with camera glasses. The pattern it described was chillingly consistent: a content creator approaches a young woman or girl in a public place, discreetly films her with smart glasses to provoke a reaction or make her uncomfortable, then shares the footage on social media, mainly TikTok. Those filmed were often then targeted with ridicule, misogynistic insults, and even threats. In one case, a teenage girl filmed at a Paris street music festival with Meta glasses saw the video go viral on TikTok, Instagram, and X — and then received hateful comments and death threats.

"We need to strengthen oversight of these devices from the design stage," e-Enfance's Veronique Bechu told Agence France-Presse. "And when creators make a business model out of humiliating strangers, platforms must adopt a zero-tolerance approach and suspend repeat offenders."

The Paris public prosecutor's office opened several criminal investigations in September after receiving complaints about women filmed on the street without consent using smart glasses. Under French law, the offence can carry up to two years in prison and a 45,000-euro fine. The prosecutor's cybercrime division even tested smart glasses itself in September to identify other potential offences — including criminals filming cryptocurrency wallet recovery phrases to steal funds.

Norway is hardly alone in reacting. Oslo has already banned camera-equipped glasses in its schools. The Dutch eyewear chain Hans Anders suspended sales of Ray-Ban Meta glasses across some 400 stores in the Netherlands, saying in a statement: "This decision follows the ongoing public and political debate surrounding smart glasses and the questions being raised about the conditions under which this technology can be used." In Britain, the UK Cinema Association has restricted camera-enabled glasses, a petition has demanded a ban on their sale, and courtrooms and pubs have posted their own bans. Campaigners have a nickname for the devices: "pervert glasses."

Meanwhile, the market keeps growing. Meta sold seven million pairs of its smart glasses in 2025, according to AFP, in partnership with Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica. Google and Snap are preparing their own AI glasses. The glasses are, by most commercial measures, a hit.

Meta's defence is wearing thin

Meta's response has been a mix of user guidance and engineering. The company advises customers to respect people's preferences — "Not everyone loves being photographed. Stop recording if anyone expresses that they would rather you not," it says on its site — and points to the LED light on the glasses that indicates when recording is underway. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has argued that only a few "bad actors" are disabling the glasses' indicator lights, which has given the devices their unsavoury nickname. Meta recently rolled out a software update in which the camera stops working if the light is covered or tampered with.

Here's the problem with that defence, and it's the problem Norway's proposal is aimed at: a consent model based on a blinking light that most people around you won't notice, on glasses that look like ordinary eyewear, in situations where asking permission is socially impossible, is not a consent model at all. It's a liability waiver with a hardware component. When Meta's own technology chief has to publicly concede that users are covering the indicator light to film strangers, the engineering has already failed the trust test.

We reviewed Meta's public guidance and the Norwegian government's statement side by side. The gap is striking. Meta's position assumes a world of conscientious wearers. Norway's proposal assumes a world of actual ones.

Same debate, opposite outcomes: the California contrast

The timing of Norway's announcement makes for an almost absurd contrast with what just happened in the United States. On September 30, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 1130 — America's first serious attempt at a smart-glasses privacy law — arguing the bill's definition of a "wearable recording device" was too broad. As we reported when Newsom killed California's smart-glasses privacy bill, the vetoed law would have penalised recording people without consent in places like changing rooms and doctors' offices.

So the score is now: the home state of the company selling millions of these glasses can't pass a law because of drafting quibbles, while a Scandinavian country of five million is drafting one that covers parks, schools, and gyms. One of these two regulatory cultures will be remembered as having read the moment correctly. The other's governor blamed "sloppy drafting."

This is the wider pattern. Washington has been moving away from AI self-regulation toward harder rules — see the White House's shift on AI self-regulation — while Europe regulates first and argues about the details later. Britain just extracted a sweeping pledge from ten AI giants under watchdog pressure. Norway's move fits squarely in the European model: act while the technology is still young enough to shape.

The reckoning camera glasses were always going to have

Let me be blunt: this ban is long overdue, and it's a shame it took a government ban to do what the market should have done itself.

Camera glasses are a genuinely wonderful product idea wrapped around a genuinely shoddy treatment of everyone who isn't wearing them. The technology's pitch is augmented living — translation, navigation, memories captured hands-free. Its documented reality, in France's hotline data and prosecutors' files, is men filming women who never consented and children being recorded in schools. A product category whose fastest-growing use case is street harassment doesn't get to plead "bad actors." When the bad actors are the growth story, the product is the problem.

Meta has botched the trust question twice. First it shipped glasses that look like normal eyewear with a recording indicator nobody checks for. Then, when users started taping over the light, its answer was a software patch — as if the failure were optical rather than moral. A company that has spent a decade apologising for privacy failures launching a wearable camera and acting surprised that it got used as a wearable camera is either unserious or dishonest, and neither is reassuring.

Norway's temporary ban is blunt. Temporary bans always are. But bluntness is what you reach for when the alternative is a decade of workshops while millions of people wear cameras into playgrounds and changing rooms. The expert group will have its enlightened debate. Until then, Norwegians get to walk through a park without wondering whether a stranger's sunglasses are livestreaming them. That shouldn't be a radical policy position. In 2026, apparently, it is.

What happens next

Photo: Karl Johans gate in Oslo — exactly the kind of crowded public space where Norway wants camera glasses temporarily banned. Photo by W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The proposal is not law yet. Norway's minority government must present a bill to the Storting and secure support from other parties to pass it. Expect lobbying — Meta has a European policy operation and a lot riding on the category — and expect the expert group on permanent regulation to become a battleground over definitions: what counts as an AI glass, what counts as a public place, and whether body-worn cameras of any kind get swept in.

Expect Brussels and London to watch closely. The EU AI Act already restricts certain biometric surveillance uses, and Norway implements EU rules through its EEA membership, so whatever Oslo lands on could inform the continent's wider approach. If Norway's temporary ban survives parliamentary scrutiny and public debate, it becomes a template. Other governments — France, Germany, the UK — have the same data Norway has. They just haven't moved yet.

The camera-glasses era is barely two years old as a mass-market phenomenon. It is already producing its first ban. The industry should treat that as the verdict it is.

Sources: regjeringen.no (Norwegian government press release, October 5, 2026); Reuters; The Associated Press; Agence France-Presse; NTB; e-Enfance; Privacy International. Quotes from named individuals are attributed to the outlet that reported them.

Daniel Rao is a technology journalist covering AI, privacy and regulation at TechPulse USA. He writes about the collision between new technology and old norms.