Norway Wants to Ban Smart Glasses

It's Sunday, October eleventh. Last week, Norway proposed something that sounds like it belongs in a Black Mirror episode: the government wants to temporarily ban smart glasses from parks, beaches, schools, playgrounds, museums, concert venues, and shopping centers. Not just ban them from sensitive places like locker rooms or doctor's offices. Ban them from basically anywhere you might be on a normal day.

I started reading about this and learned that, five days earlier, California's governor Gavin Newsom had vetoed a bill that would have done something similar here. A bill that would have penalized people for secretly recording others with smart glasses in places like changing rooms and medical offices got killed. And the group lobbying against it was TechNet, whose members include Meta, Google, and Amazon.

So we've got one country saying this technology is moving too fast for society to handle, and the place where that technology is literally being built saying existing laws are good enough. Somebody is wrong. And I think the answer matters more than most of us realize. We've been here before. In 2013, Google released Google Glass, a computer you wear on your face with a camera built in. It cost fifteen hundred dollars. The public reaction was immediate and hostile. Bars and restaurants banned them. A journalist wearing them got physically assaulted in a San Francisco bar. The word "glasshole" entered the vocabulary. And within two years, Google pulled the consumer version entirely.

The core objection in 2013 was the same one today: you cannot be certain whether someone is recording you. That uncertainty changes how people behave. You stop being a person and start being a potential subject. And that was when the device was a chunky, obvious, nerd-looking thing on your face. Everyone could see it.

What's different in 2026 is that the glasses look like normal Ray-Bans. Normal Oakleys. You cannot tell them apart from regular eyewear unless you know exactly what to look for. Meta sold roughly seven million pairs in 2025 alone, triple the combined sales from 2023 and 2024. The ratio is staggering: Meta's glasses are estimated to make up more than eighty percent of all smart glasses sold. And Apple, Google, and Snap are all reportedly releasing their own versions within the next year. Citi analysts project a hundred million people could own a pair within a few years. Meta's glasses have a small LED light that's supposed to glow when recording is happening. If the light is blocked, the camera is supposed to disable itself. The problem is that hundreds of vendors, easily findable online, have figured out how to disable the LED. One guy in Los Angeles who runs a service called Ghost Metas told the Guardian it takes him about fifteen to twenty minutes per pair with a drill, a dental pick, and some resin. He said he charges around a hundred dollars and has done about a hundred pairs. When asked if what he's doing feels wrong, he said: "If you're really worried about your privacy, don't go outside."

Even when the LED works as designed, it's dim in daylight and hard to spot from any distance. BBC and Guardian investigations found men using the glasses to secretly film women on boardwalks, college campuses, and outside bars, then posting the footage online. One woman who asked someone to take down a secret recording of her was told removal was "a paid service."

The backlash outside Norway is starting to build. A major eyewear retailer in the Netherlands, Hans Anders, suspended sales of Meta Ray-Bans entirely, saying it's waiting for the political debate to settle. UK cinemas introduced policies in August to prohibit or restrict smart glasses, citing both privacy and film piracy. Privacy International, a watchdog group based in Britain, called Norway's move "a welcome protection against big tech's greedy attempts to extract ever more data." The split between Norway and California tells you everything about how unsettled this question is.

Norway's digitalization minister Torgeir Micaelsen (tor-GAIR MICK-ell-sen) said the temporary ban would give authorities time to hold an "informed debate" before deciding on permanent regulation. The ban would cover places where "privacy is particularly important," but that list stretches from hospitals to parks to the beach. The Norwegian Consumer Council went further and urged retailers to stop selling smart glasses entirely until there's legal clarity.

In California, Newsom vetoed the bill saying existing laws already cover unlawful recording. The tech industry's main lobbying group, TechNet, argued the bill was "not the right approach." Meta positioned itself as the helpful innovator, pointing out that it provides the glasses to blinded veterans to help them read documents and identify objects.

Both sides have a point. These glasses do actually useful things. Parents capture moments without a phone between themselves and their kid. Delivery drivers use them as body cameras. People who are blind or visually impaired navigate the world more independently. But the product whose tagline is "Record life as you live it" is also a product that makes it impossible to know when you're being recorded, and those two things are not easily separated.

Meta reportedly plans to add facial recognition to an updated version, meaning the glasses would not only record you secretly but identify you in real time. That feature is apparently ready to ship; the company filed the patent in August. Norway is betting it can pump the brakes and figure out the rules before a hundred million people are wearing camera-glasses. California is betting the existing legal framework can absorb the change. What's interesting to me is that, in 2013, the backlash killed Google Glass before it could scale. This time, the backlash is happening and the product is scaling anyway. The difference isn't the technology. The technology is basically the same. The difference is that this version looks like a pair of Ray-Bans. And that might be the detail that decides whether we get a say in this or not. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.