- Meta-entrepreneurs claim your smart glasses can see more than you think
- Meta’s privacy policy warns that your glasses share photos and videos with the company
- This follows a growing trend of privacy concerns over smart glasses in public and in courts
When Meta warned us that it could view footage recorded by its AI smart glasses, it turns out it wasn’t kidding. As part of a new investigation, Meta insiders claim to have seen intimate details of our lives, from bank cards to filmed sex scenes.
In a joint investigation published by the Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten (behind a paywall), Meta entrepreneurs told journalists that they see a lot of sensitive data.
This includes “someone going to the bathroom or undressing,” with one contractor noting that they saw a video where “a man puts his glasses on the nightstand and leaves the room.
“Soon after, his wife comes in and changes her clothes.”
While they recognize the sensitive nature of the content they analyze, staff claim they are unable to push back on what’s happening, saying: “You’re not supposed to question it. If you start questioning, you’re out.”
When you agree to use Meta’s AI, you’ll see a warning that, as part of its terms of use, you agree to let the company see and “review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations.” This is buried in the full TOS agreement, but a similar warning flashes on the screen as part of the smart glasses setup process.
The problem is, even if you’d rather not share anything with Meta’s team, you don’t have much of a choice. To use AI, you must allow data sharing, otherwise you will be locked out of the features.
What’s more, given the compact size of the Meta’s specs, there isn’t much room for processing on the device. AI requests and data are sent to a server – meaning that even if you make the information private, it’s nearly impossible to prevent it from being shared with Meta in some capacity.
But Meta may have to find a solution.
The beginning of the setback
I’ve noted in the past that the Meta’s smart specs have so far managed to dodge the privacy fears that plagued Google Glass, but recently that’s changed.
This report is not the only example of a changing attitude towards smart glasses. Earlier this year, the BBC reported on cases of women being secretly filmed and harassed by people wearing smart specs, and the judge in the ongoing social media addiction trial against Meta (and YouTube) threatened Mark Zuckerberg’s entourage with contempt after members wore smart glasses in court despite recording being banned (via Fortune ).
There are also growing concerns about expanded tools that Meta and others want to bring to their AI wearables. Facial recognition, and even something as mundane as remembering where you left your keys, would require your specs to capture a lot of data that many (myself included) aren’t very comfortable with.
There are also growing concerns over what data is and isn’t shared with AI, with smartphone makers making a big deal about on-device AI – models that are small enough to live on your phone, meaning data is never sent to a server.
With Apple and Samsung said to be working on their own smart specs, there’s room to leverage their phones’ on-device AI to win privacy. Their smart glasses could use your phone’s AI for many tasks and only use a server when necessary – giving them improved offline functionality, but also some extra security for your data.
Meta, without its own phone, doesn’t have the same luxury as on-device AI to push back on the privacy argument.
A potential solution to Meta’s problems would be greater control over user privacy. Messages and some specific images taken by the glasses for context should be shared with the Meta, but there should be an option not to share content captured outside of the Look and Ask feature of the Meta glasses.
And since the AI needs to analyze more and more data to make tools work, Meta might want to implement something similar to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which acts as a private server for Apple Intelligence.
Because even if people are okay with their data being shared, let’s be honest, most of them don’t realize what they’re logging into. And when they see stories of Meta contractors apparently seeing them in the bathroom, they understandably get scared and want to switch to another platform.
With Android XR expected to kick into gear this year, these alternatives could be here soon, and if they can crack AI privacy in a way that Meta hasn’t, I can see plenty of people jumping ship. I know I want to.
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