Policy/ privacy · wearables · smart glasses · regulation

Norway Weighs Regulating Camera Wearables Over Privacy

Norway says camera-equipped wearable headsets carry privacy risks serious enough to warrant regulation.

Norway says the cameras built into wearable devices need dedicated regulation.

Norway's government has flagged wearable camera headsets - the kind of device sometimes nicknamed "pervert glasses" in tech coverage - as a privacy risk it wants to address through new rules. The announcement is brief: no draft bill, enforcement mechanism, or timeline has been made public. It's not yet clear whether officials are aiming for a law specific to camera-enabled wearables, or an update to existing privacy rules that would cover them explicitly.

Camera-equipped glasses have been trickling into the consumer market for a few years, most visibly through products like Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, and the ability to record bystanders is usually the first thing critics raise. A government moving toward dedicated rules, rather than treating this as a routine surveillance-camera question, suggests regulators are starting to see wearable cameras as their own category of problem.

Norway hasn't banned anything yet. Right now this is a country thinking out loud about a device category most regulators have been slow to touch.

TR

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