# Norway is weighing a ban on face recognition in glasses

Source: https://idevice.com/norway-is-weighing-a-ban-on-face-recognition-in-glasses
Published: 2026-09-02

> Karianne Tung has no bill and no timeline. She has the first government saying out loud that the LED is not enough.

Norway's digital minister does not think a small light is enough. Karianne Tung told AFP the government is weighing tighter rules on the camera and AI wearables Meta and Snap are selling, aimed at stopping the equipment being used to record people in public without their consent. The rules under consideration could extend to banning facial recognition that identifies people in public spaces. We read the report through Digital Trends. Gizmodo carried the same AFP statement a week earlier, on August 26.

There is no bill. Tung said she plans to convene a group of experts to advise the government, and no timeline for legislation has been announced. What there is, for the first time, is a national government saying out loud what nightclubs and gyms have already decided on their own.

Those bans are the part worth counting. Music venues, nightclubs and fitness chains across Europe and the United States now prohibit camera-equipped wearables on their premises, and schools have raised alarms after reports of students filming classmates and teachers. Every one of those is a door policy written because the product's own safeguard did not hold.

It did not hold in a way we published this morning. [Meta's Ray-Ban](https://idevice.com/smart-glasses/meta-ray-ban/roadmap)s stop recording when the small LED indicator is covered, and people cover it anyway, with electrical tape and physical modifications. Meta's answer was to detect the tampering afterwards and remotely kill the cameras on the glasses that did it, which it confirmed this week. A safeguard that has to be backed by a kill switch is a safeguard that was already being beaten.

Civil liberties advocates make the narrower version of the argument, which is that a camera on a face blurs consent in a way a phone does not, because the cue that recording is happening is easy to miss. A phone held up is a posture everybody reads. A frame with a lens in it is not.

Google worked this out years ago and answered it with a word.

It told Glass Explorers not to be a Glasshole, its own term for people who filmed others without asking, and left the rest to manners. Manners did not scale. Meta's Ray-Bans went on to succeed where Glass failed and inherited the same problem at a size Glass never reached, which is how it arrived in the mainstream.

Tung is pointing at the next hardware more than at this one. These wearables run multimodal visual analysis, which means processing a live view of your surroundings continuously rather than when you press a button. Adding face recognition to a device already doing that turns it into continuous public surveillance, and that is the capability some makers are reported to be building into future devices and the one Norway would ban before it ships.

Meta shipped the glasses. The venues wrote rules. The schools complained. Norway is assembling a panel.