Meta promised it wouldn’t spy on you with its AI smart glasses. A lawsuit says humans are watching you, actually

Source Domain: fortune.com

When Meta made its Ray-Ban smart glasses available for preorder, it made clear one thing: Your privacy will be secure. “Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are built with privacy at their core,” read a statement at the time, released in September 2023. The marketing was unambiguous about your privacy, and as a result, you might have seen people wearing them around town, in a Super Bowl ad, or even at a court proceeding about child safety on Meta’s own platforms. ICE agents were even reportedly wearing them in the field.

What you might not have seen is, well, yourself caught in the crosshairs of the glasses’ camera. Now, a new report—and a federal lawsuit that quickly followed—alleges the company is even less transparent than those thick lenses, claiming the company is quietly routing users’ footage to human workers overseas instead of its AI models. These workers have seen everything from people undressing to sensitive financial documents, and it’s thanks to users who opt into data sharing for AI training purposes.

“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording,” a worker noted, having seen video from the glasses.

In late February, Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten published an investigation into Meta’s AI training pipeline, finding Meta contractors in Kenya help train the artificial intelligence powering the glasses (comprising the Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer (Gen 2), the Ray-Ban Display, and the Oakley Meta HSTN models). What they saw was startling.

“We see everything, from living rooms to naked bodies,” a worker said in the report. “Meta has that type of content in its databases.”

Any user who opts into sharing data for AI training purposes effectively allows all parts of their life to be recorded, and then as a result, reviewed, either by the AIs it’s supposed to train or by the humans…

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