As interest in smart glasses balloons, aversion toward them has tracked right along with it. In fact, that aversion is so strong that entire countries are now looking to restrict when and how smart glasses should be allowed.
Take Norway, for example. The Norwegian government, specifically the Ministry of Digitalisation, just announced that it’ll be seeking “stricter regulation” of smart glasses and is apparently urging both public and private entities to “consider their own guidelines,” according to the AFP.
The reason? Privacy, of course. In a statement, Minister Karianne Tung made the scope of perceived problems with smart glasses adoption pretty clear.
“We can see that people’s private lives and privacy are coming under pressure from new technology, and I therefore want to regulate smart glasses and similar devices more strictly than today,” Tung said in a statement to the AFP. “This could, for example, mean banning features such as facial recognition of other people in public spaces.”
While that last specter, facial recognition, isn’t currently an issue, Meta, the biggest purveyor of smart glasses right now, is reportedly looking in that direction. In fact, latent code for a facial recognition feature was already discovered in the Meta AI app, though no such feature has yet made it to its devices. Since that discovery, Meta has tried to talk down skeptics, stating that the feature would be encrypted and information would be stored locally on-device, but that clearly hasn’t done much to assuage concerns.
European regulators are already preparing a report about the potential privacy risks of smart glasses via the European Data Protection Board, which is set to be finalized this summer, and in Germany, privacy groups have raised criminal complaints over smart glasses, with claims that they violate the country’s Telecommunications, Digital Services and Data Protection Act.
The idea of smart glasses regulations in Norway is still in flux, to be clear, and there are no countrywide regulations yet, but it’s not difficult to see a world where that happens. Most new technologies have a tendency to rub some people the wrong way, but smart glasses seem to have a particularly problematic knack for it.
