Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses
barrons.com125 points by pseudolus 5 hours ago
125 points by pseudolus 5 hours ago
Does anyone else remember in the early 2000s the concerns around privacy with cell phone cameras? [0][1][2][3]. How long until people feel the same way about camera glasses?
[0] New Privacy Menace: Cell Phones? (2003): https://www.wired.com/2003/02/new-privacy-menace-cell-phones...
[1] More trouble for camera-phones (2003): https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2003/06/195-2/
[2] Camera Phones Raise Whole New Set of Privacy Issues (2004): https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/camera-phones-raise-w...
[3] Cam Phones, Go Home (2005): https://time.com/archive/6671091/cam-phones-go-home/
I'd like to see this framed as a ban on surreptitious recording, not specific to glasses. But it's a little hard to figure out exactly what the parameters should be.
> Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses
I see what you did there.
So a Smart Monocle is ok?
It's a partial ban of smart glasses, so presumably either the left lens or the right lens will be banned. That leaves a monocle, so it will definitely be OK.
Is it weird that I'd be happier with that? Easier to spot and has a "we're bringing that shit back" vibe that goes well with a disruptive product.
It's still a torment nexus, but at least there's whimsy in this one. Beats the alternative.
I would not recommend. Whenever a rambunctious youth acts against my well-founded advice, mine pops off and I must replace it quickly lest I miss any moment of the cricket match.
Why isn't the publishing of the captured video banned? If you want to upload content involving someone else (not just in the background) in it then you should need consent.
That’s already the case. Same question is why guns are regulated when killing someone is already illegal.
In this example smart glasses are the equivalent of walking around pointing a gun. Obviously shooting the gun is the real issue but simply pointing it around alarms people and fatigues them to spotting a real threat.
Smart glasses should not be allowed to have a camera always pointed at people. If needed, let them integrate with a phone to use the camera which is much more visually obvious to people when it is being used.
It probably also is. But easier to enforce at the time of capture.
If it were made illegal then news journalism, documentary filmmaking, sports broadcasting (crowds), street photography, and police-body camera footage would become extinct almost overnight.
No, it wouldn't. Countries with such a law exist, all you need is reasonable exceptions. With some blurring even Google Streetview is not an issue.
lol what?
The point is if you’re recording with a handheld device at least you can ensure there is some level of awareness to those around who can duck/signal they don’t want to be in it.
How can you do that with meta glasses?
Get real man.
A temporary measure. Knowing the current regime they will use years & millions on comittees, reports, reviews, expert groups and all kinds of bureaucratic wage labor I don't have english vocabulary for. And then, the EU, which we a not a member of, decides everything behind our back.
It’s not behind your back. It’s what being in the EEA means.
The "democratic" processes in EU seems rather opaque and hidden from my point of view. Not like the rest of norwegian politics. Just ... here's the latest batch of out-of-touch decisions from Brussel.
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Exactly. Either way would be better. We have no vote but all the rules.
A couple of examples:
* We have one of the worlds best bottle deposit systems. Now that the EU has made their rules. Norway has to spend tons of money regressing to a common system. [1]
* Norway has good cleansing facilities for water/sewage. Now that the EU has made their decisions - based on research from urban regions of southern europe and the pollution of rivers - sparsely populated fjord communes of Norway dont know how the fuck they will pay for upgrades to their already modern systems, other than passing it on to an already strained population. [2] (Norwegiens are not generally rich. Our state is rich. They use the money for investing in anything but Norway. Manhatten real estate is good. Norwegian roads, hospitals and elder care is not*).
[1] https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/eu-vil-tvinge-norge-til-a-innfor...
[2] https://www.nrk.no/vestland/nye-eu-krav-til-avlopsreinsing-k...
* It's arguable that the poor state of many affairs in Norway is due to a spoiled bureaucracy and wastefull economy rather than lack of investement.
Let's not exaggerate though, we have some of the best roads in the world. I have driven many, many places. Even the small fjord roads on the west coast are well paved, signed, and lit.
And we're building one of the most advanced tunnels in the world (deepest, longest, most complex), between Stavanger and Haugesund.
I agree the state could be less frugal, but it's hardly poverty conditions. It's not perfect, no where ever is. But I grew up in an actually corrupt nation and region. It is not like that here.
For healthcare, I don't know what you mean either. Specialists for non-time sensitive matters can take a while, but anything immediate (cancer, acute emergencies), is immediate access to some of the best healthcare on this planet, for free.
I saw family die in the US for our hospitals and healthcare. You have no idea how bad it is elsewhere if you think it's poor here.
I'm not saying things can't be better. But you're sitting on top of the mountain and complaining it's not tall enough. Look around you.
I hear you. We are just not hitting the same notes. And people are dying from Scrooge-affairs of healthcare and eldercare here as well. I guess you have seen elderly turn into a skeleton and die because they stop eating when they hit the elderly-home? Would'nt feed their stuff to my dog. "Worlds richest country". Manhatten apartements.
Elder care really is bad, I know. I work in medical technology. I don't know why they're so frugal. I worry about getting old more than anything else.
Hope Sweden copies Norway and bans data fusion for ads data sharing glasses.
> The ban could apply to parks, beaches, museums, shopping centres, schools, daycare centres, healthcare facilities, gyms and public events.
True - many places where photography and video recording by people and organizations is already done on a broad scale with both smartphones and infrastructure cameras.
> "We do not want a society where people worry about being recorded without their knowledge, photographed, or filmed in places and situations where they are accustomed to not being monitored"
... I think we're gonna need a bigger ban
This seems similar to how much of East Asia requires a “click” sound from camera apps, to prevent surreptitious photos, or how some US states require both parties to consent when recording audio of a conversation. There’s plenty of precedent for privacy laws related to public recording, across the world. And they don’t have to be perfect—the goal is to limit access to casual snooping and creepshots, and to ensure that those who habitually violate privacy can be prosecuted if caught.
Just because you’re in public doesn’t mean it’s ok to take secret upskirt photos, film in the gym showers, etc. There actually is a certain level of privacy expected in public.
Edit: corrected SE Asia to East Asia.
Banning harmful behavior (like secretly recording someone) is pretty defensible and not all that controversial. Banning the mere possession of generic tools that could potentially be used to engage in harmful behavior is a lot more dubious. It requires infringing the rights of a bunch of innocent people merely because they might use that freedom to do something wrong.
I agree in part. Rather than a full ban, it makes more sense to require manufacturers to implement obnoxiously obvious “tells” (blinding LED plus sound perhaps), and to ban commercial businesses that remove these features. No need to ban possession. For DIY creepers a ban on the behavior is enough, they will get caught eventually.
The point is to ban widespread normalization of tools that make invasion of privacy easy. You can go find a shirt button spy cam on Aliexpress, but if you get caught wearing it then everyone knows what you’re up to. Wearing one in certain places could be taken as criminal intent.
(I don’t think restrictions like this would work in the US without an amendment, but I think we’re long overdue for a privacy amendment to clarify some things.)
Single party consent empowers those who are underhanded in uneven situations. For instance, the ability to secretly record my employer, who has far more resources than me, benefits me. I personally benefited in being able to defend myself by using single-party consent for audio recording, which helped me both avoid legal trouble and would have allowed me to offer more evidence had it ever come to actual legal action.
There are two sides to privacy laws, and the downside is not often discussed.
The obvious solution is to have them behave like drones - where their behavior is geofenced.
Only issue with that is that enforcing it requires you to make open source smart glasses illegal, since open source software cannot be used to coerce users the way closed-source software can.
Perfect enforcement isn’t required, neither is a ban on DIY solutions. The intent is to prevent normalization. Laws against murder don’t prevent all murders either.
Someone wearing weird 3D printed camera glasses is going to be obvious. Someone with the skill to disassemble a tiny glued together smart glass frame, bypass any hardware protections, and flash a custom OS will be rare, and they’ll get caught anyway when they “accidentally” wander into the women’s locker for the third time.
I don't want people to have to know how to solder to install an open source OS on their personal computing device. That sort of thing should be normal and easy.
So yeah, I guess as long as you're okay with a law like that potentially becoming very easy to bypass then I don't have a problem with it. But I think once things start going down that path, most people aren't going to be satisfied with leaving it at that; they'll hear about a bypass and start pushing to restrict the freedoms that enabled it.
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I suspect that in practice, the "or sell products that do" part of that has had a significant negative impact on the market for open source radio firmware. But I'm not an expert in this space. How difficult is it to flash the modem on a modern cell phone? Why has nobody built a garage door opener app for Fairphone?
> This seems similar to how much of SE Asia requires a “click” sound from camera apps
I live in "SE Asia" - specifically Vietnam - and I've never heard of such a law. I just looked it up and the two countries that come up are Korea and Japan, neither of which are in SE Asia.
I guess you’re right, I always refer to them as SE Asia but it’s technically considered East Asia. Thanks for the correction.
> it’s technically considered East Asia
This phrasing seems odd, considering that those two countries are firmly in East Asia, and would not be considered as a part of SE Asia by any definition.
Yeah, lets also ban smart phones, cameras and recording devices just in case.
Somebody check this guy’s camera roll
Those kinds of comments usually come from either wrongdoers in denial or paid marketeers defending a policy/product...
I 100% agree with this outlook. People that have ignored encroaching surveillance for decades at this point are finally concerned once we start suggesting we literally strap them to the face of a sizeable chunk of the population.
Personally, I gave up years ago. People don't care about actual privacy, they just care about the illusion of it.
You cant expect any privacy in public settings.... also what are the communities that banned these devices going to do once robots (very soon) become ubiquitous in our every day lives? robots need to have vision and will record everything... so they are just delaying the inevitable unless they go full amish in their communities which good luck with that....
Why can you people never draw a line between "my neighbor sees what I do and forgets about it" and "my actions are permanently recorded 24/7 and available to governments, corporations, and stalkers at all times for the rest of my life"?
You are making lots of assumptions here instead of understanding the reality of the world. Nether what you or i think matters in the face of facts, this world is marching towards a world with very little privacy, you can scream at the clouds all you want be my guest...
That future is avoidable, but not with this self-fulfilling prophecy mindset.
How is different from another device ? Phone, digital camera, etc .. someone can use that for taking the same photo ..
Is it the added convenience of the glasses?
It's like treating concealed carry of a weapon differently than open carry. I think it's reasonable to say "you can do this in public but only if it's clear to other people that you're doing it".
Targeting smart glasses specifically seems to narrow though, because there are obviously many other ways to carry around a hidden camera in public, like one disguised as a pen in your pocket or something.
Interestingly, in my jurisdiction open carry is banned should concealed carry is not.
I feel like that is for most places in california isn't it? Open carry is illegal but conceal is not.
I think it's because it's more plainly obvious if someone is taking photo if they're lifting up a phone to do it. Someone taking a photo with glasses can be done more covertly.
It’s easy to see if someone has a phone or camera pointed at you. If someone’s looking in your direction while wearing glasses, you would not typically expect them to be recording you.
There's a big difference between holding up a phone and taking a picture and just... existing with glasses and having everything recorded without your knowledge.
Is there though? I could walk around with my phone in my shirt pocket just recording everything and no one would be the wiser. And there's plenty of discrete camera options out there, not just smart glasses. Creepers gonna creep.
Trying to ban recording in public is silly. People just need to realize that they're probably being recorded in public. That cat has been out of the bag for many years now.
I didn't consent to being recorded in public, so don't agree that we just shrug it off.
Consent or not, most laws allows that anyway. This is the publication that is usually limited and usually only in cases where people can be too easily recognized. These exceptions are a bit vague on purpose so that it is still easy to publish stuff without having to ask every single person you came accross in the street for their consent.
But the world has changed. For instance last year I recognized my father in a travel video published by a youtuber from another continent. You would have thought that it is no big deal if a latin american can record video of people in europe because its target audience is unlikely to recognize anyone. Yet here we are, people nowadays can have relatives, friends and or former colleagues spread all over the globe, or consuming content published online but targetting a public from very far away.
Until now it wasn't a big deal as it was still easy to spot someone recording a video from quite far and move away or hide your face. And we would rely on good old shame and citizen vigilance to spot people recording kids for example. "spy cameras" used to have such a crappy quality you couldn't do anything too bad without getting close and in good light. Now it becomes a bit complicated with these glasses.
In the US, you have consented. It is settled law that there is no expectation of privacy while you’re in public. This is how paparazzi, among others, can work their trade. If consent were required, every star would ban photos of themselves in public. They can’t and nor can you.
People care more about the illusion of privacy than actual privacy itself.
Even if we banned smart glasses, we'd still see ever-expanding networks of privately owned cameras that record every movement you make. We'd still have networks of ring cameras and similar devices. We'll still have ever-increasing use of AI to sort and categorise the content.
Privacy is dead. Smart glasses are just an uncomfortable reminder of this fact, and banning them without addressing the over-arching issue is similar to sticking our collective head in the sand.
Privacy doomerism sucks. You can fight (and win) some battles without winning everywhere—in fact that’s how life works in general.
Just because we haven’t yet beaten ALPRs doesn’t mean I want some dickhead recording me at a hot spring without me knowing. Having both things to deal with is worse than having just one.
One mans doomer is anothers realist, I guess. I'm 40, and every year I've been alive I've had less privacy than the one that preceded it and I see no reason to believe that trend will continue. I'm open to compelling arguments if you think I'm wrong.
Maybe if we started with the "strap cameras to the face of the population" plan we'd all have been less inclined to act like frogs in rapidly warming water. Alas.
If you don’t like the trend, why are you trying to convince people to stop fighting it? Make it make sense. It’s like telling doctors not to bother because everyone’s eventually going to die anyway.
I would understand if you felt this way privately, in fact I can relate to that.
I'm not. Fight away, I enjoy watching someone piss into the wind as much as the next person so long as I'm not standing too close.
Society at large spent a long time ridiculing people with these concerns, are you really so shocked that I am enjoying the moment where the issue comes home to roost? I'm not obligated to be a constructive member of society in all regards.
Smart glasses that were clearly designed and visible were odious and shunned, so Meta (et al) have developed covert designs instead.
It's the same as a buttonhole camera used for spying. The differentiator (vs a phone or SLR or similar) is that its primary function is concealed.
I don't understand how this question can be asked in good faith?
If you have to defend smart glasses based on a technicality, that doesn't reflect very well on the glasses.
This is short-sighted; smart contacts are viable.
Pun intended?
Laws will seldom work 100% of the time, but I profoundly disagree with your implied attitude. "They don't cover this future case, so we shouldn't do anything now".