Norway is considering banning camera glasses: the minister says the problem is not who is filming, but who is being filmed

Norway is considering banning smart glasses and other wearable devices with a built-in camera. Not labelling them, not regulating them at the margins - banning them. These are devices of the kind made by Meta and Snap: with a camera, connected to the internet, and soon perhaps with facial recognition too.

Digital minister Karianne Tung, quoted by the French agency AFP, described what the government sees: "a clear trend towards combining artificial intelligence with cameras and microphones built into glasses, headphones, caps and other items we use every day." Then she said the sentence everything turns on: "We must prevent this equipment being used to track other people in public places."

The key word is other. The entire marketing of these devices is built around the buyer - your hands are free, your memories are recorded, your assistant sees what you see. Nobody asked the person across the table. They have no button, no notification and, unlike a phone raised towards a face, not even a sign that anything is being recorded. Which is why the nickname "creep glasses" has already stuck in public - a name no marketing department came up with, and which stayed anyway.

Tung also announced an expert group to advise the government, and a possible ban would cover facial recognition of other people in public places too. That is a second, harder threshold: a camera records, but facial recognition from a recording creates a searchable record of somebody who agreed to nothing.

Norway is not an EU member, but it is not outside its rules either - and on questions like this it is usually the first to draw a line rather than the last. The question that remains is not whether the technology will reach us too, but who here would be responsible for saying anything about it when it does.