Norway is not the only nation considering national restrictions on smart glasses. According to The Guardian, members of parliament in Great Britain are considering measures that would restrict where people can use smart glasses and even who can buy them.
The Guardian reports that in a debate, MP Satvir Kaur said:
“The benefits of smart glasses must be weighed against the harm they can cause. The government is already looking at options to restrict smart glasses in certain settings and restrict sales to certain users.”
What’s interesting here is the last bit about “certain users.” It is not clear which users these would be.
As is the case with any other proposed or enacted ban surrounding smart glasses, the main concerns are privacy and security. According to The Guardian, MP Anna Sabine said that smart glasses have the potential to “erode security and privacy in public spaces” and that they “raise important questions about consent.” Those concerns are, for the most part, quite well-founded.
Since the rise of Meta and its many AI glasses are smart glasses for extortion, fraud, and generally just filming people (mostly women) without their knowledge. It’s not a great look, and the reactions to these incidents are starting to roll in at an increasingly rapid clip. Major cities such as Hamburg, Germany, have banned smart glasses in public spaces, and bans in private spaces such as pubs, cruise ships, and clubs have also risen.
In the US, in-depth, top-down regulation has been slow to gather steam, but states like New York have banned smart glasses in courts, while school districts have enacted their own bans on a piecemeal basis in different districts.
Although the United States has not been so quick to legislate from the federal level, that does not mean that regulation is not coming. Just last week, lawmakers in the Senate put Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on notice regarding concerns about his smart glasses and their collection of data to train AI, adding to previous inquiries about the company’s interest in facial recognition on hardware.
As we have seen many times about tech regulation, the United States does not always follow with regulators in Europe, and if it does, it may take time, but the temperature is clearly rising on smart glasses, and companies like Meta are the ones who feel the heat.