Meta’s smart glasses a privacy risk invisible to Chicagoans
Meta’s smart glasses a privacy risk invisible to Chicagoans
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/03/18/opinion-meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-chicago/
Publish Date: 2026-03-18 06:28:00
Source Domain: www.chicagotribune.com
Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses have a small LED light on the frame that blinks when the camera is recording. According to Meta, this light is the privacy feature, a design solution for the fact that you are now wearing a camera on your face in public.
I find myself thinking about that light. Not because it is inadequate, though it is. I think about it because it invites interpretation, like all urban objects do. The stoplight, the security camera, the construction fence: Interpretation is how we move through cities, though we are seldom aware of it. The LED on the Ray-Ban frame is one such signal. The problem is that nobody really understands what it means.
Recently, Swedish journalists broke news that should have brought the news cycle to a screeching halt. Meta pays subcontractor Sama, based in Nairobi, Kenya, to manually label videos taken by Ray-Ban smart glasses. A user says “Hey Meta” to the artificial intelligence on the glasses in asking it to examine what it’s seeing. That then sends the video to Meta’s servers, then it goes on to workers who label what they see on the video: objects, faces, locations, etc. These workers, the journalists found, see people undressing, using the bathroom and recording their own bank cards by accident. One annotator described the work as: “We see everything.”
Seven million pairs of these glasses were sold in 2025. Each pair generates training data. Each “Hey Meta” command routes footage through human eyes on two continents, where they work for low wages under nondisclosure agreements, surveillance cameras and a strict no-questions policy. Workers who raised concerns about what they were seeing were fired.
This is the same Sama that Time magazine exposed in 2023 for paying Kenyan workers less than $2 an hour to label graphic violence and abuse content for OpenAI. Workers described the experience as psychologically devastating, while contracts stated that OpenAI would pay an hourly rate of $12.50 per worker per…
