--- title: "Governments Are Starting to Notice the Camera on Your Face" description: "Norway is drafting smart-glasses rules, Australia is weighing bans, and courtrooms are already saying no" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-05T13:39:30Z modified: 2026-10-05T17:14:55Z url: https://rews.cc/a/governments-are-starting-to-notice-the-camera-on-your-face-453c99 language: en tags: ["ai", "privacy", "surveillance", "wearables", "regulation", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Governments Are Starting to Notice the Camera on Your Face *Norway is drafting smart-glasses rules, Australia is weighing bans, and courtrooms are already saying no* By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/governments-are-starting-to-notice-the-camera-on-your-face-453c99 ## In brief - Norway has proposed new rules on smart glasses, calling the matter a “high priority,” with a draft law due in parliament soon - Oslo says it does not want a total ban, defining acceptable use as situations with no risk of filming people without consent - Australia is weighing bans in some public spaces; courtrooms in several countries have already banned the devices, per the FT - Counterpoint Research estimates consumers will spend over $1 trillion on wearables from 2026 to 2032 as Meta, Google and OpenAI bet on glasses If someone points a phone at you, you generally know about it. That is the whole social technology of the phone camera: it is visible, it is held up, there is a little moment in which the person being photographed can duck, object or pose. Smart glasses quietly delete that feature. The camera sits on the wearer’s face, and the people it records are bystanders who never agreed to be in anyone’s footage. You can think of the regulatory problem as being about privacy if you like. It might be more precise to think of it as one company selling a product whose value depends on millions of non-customers being unable to opt out. Governments have started to notice, and the Nordics are first in line with actual lawmaking. Norway’s government has proposed restrictions on the glasses, calling the matter a “high priority” and saying a draft law will be presented to parliament soon, according to the Financial Times. The current proposal stops short of a total ban: Oslo’s working definition of acceptable use is essentially any situation where there is no risk of filming people without their consent, which rules out quite a lot of what these devices are sold to do, but leaves the door open to uses the government hasn’t thought to prohibit yet. The stated reason for going slow is that Norway wants time to write permanent rules rather than a sweeping prohibition it would have to walk back. > We do not want a society where people are concerned about hidden audio recordings, photography, and filming in places and situations where they are used to being without being monitored. Such a society can be experienced as unsafe and cause us to withdraw. That is Micaelsen, the Norwegian minister quoted by the FT, and it is about as clean a statement of the externality as you will get from a government: the cost of the product is paid by people who never bought it. Norway is not alone. Australia is considering banning smart glasses in certain public spaces, and courtrooms in several countries have already banned them as wearable use spreads. In the Netherlands, the backlash has been commercial before it has been legislative: [retailers there suspended sales of Meta’s smart glasses](https://rews.cc/a/dutch-retailers-suspend-sales-of-meta-s-smart-glasses-as-fil-540ee9) amid a national row over covert filming, while the government held off on a ban. Some campaigners have taken to calling the devices “pervert technology,” which is not the framing the marketing departments would have chosen but does have the advantage of directness. ## The trillion-dollar gateway Why does Big Tech keep pushing a product that gets compared to pervert technology? Money, but specifically platform money. According to the FT, Meta, Google and OpenAI all see wearables as the potential replacement for the smartphone, the main gateway through which people reach AI. The logic is that talking to an AI that listens to your conversations and watches your daily life is easier than opening an app and typing queries. Analysts at Counterpoint Research estimate consumers will spend more than $1 trillion on wearable devices between 2026 and 2032. Divide that through and you get something north of $140 billion a year, for seven years, on gadgets that put sensors in public space. I think the interesting question is whose consent matters. The buyer consents; the buyer gets an AI assistant. Everyone the buyer walks past becomes training data and raw footage without being consulted, and the industry’s trillion-dollar forecast assumes that this arrangement is simply Accepted by Society, the way phone cameras eventually were. Norway’s counter-theory is that society, via parliament, gets a vote. Anyway, someone is early. Either Oslo is ahead of a global regulatory wave that will make covert recording eyewear the next cigarettes-indoors, or the trillion dollars is right and the glasses will be normalized before the Norwegian draft law even gets out of committee. The people being filmed do not get a say in either scenario. That, Micaelsen might note, is the point.