Meta Smart Glasses Sending Sensitive Recordings to Workers to Annotate

According to a report by SVD, Meta’s Ray-Ban AI Smart Glasses have been sending sensitive recordings of people, including “bank details, sex and naked people,” to outsourced companies to review and annotate.

You’re in control of your data and content.

That’s what’s written in bold text at the top of the Privacy Settings page for the glasses.

However, this statement might be a blatant lie.

SVD interviewed employees at Meta subcontractor Sama, some of whom did data annotation.

When training AI, someone needs to label the mountains of training data so it’s more useful for training. That’s the job of data annotators: the humans working tirelessly behind scenes of the AI revolution.

The data is collected from recordings of Meta Ray-Ban users when they press a physical button on the glasses or when using the “Hey Meta” voice command to activate the AI.

They don’t continuously record, but activate on those two conditions.

Despite offering users a choice not to share data with Meta to help improve their products, the glasses apparently will automatically send video and audio recordings for manual human review and it’s impossible to opt out of it.

Concerningly, when they asked store employees about the data privacy of the glasses, they gave incorrect responses including that data stays “locally in the app.”

However, upon testing, no AI functions worked without networking. When they analyzed the network connections of the app, they saw that it frequently connects to Meta’s servers. It’s completely impossible to interact with Meta’s AI solely locally on the phone.

What this means is your video and audio data are constantly being sent to Meta just in order for it to function normally. This is on top of the mandatory submission of recordings for manual human review.

“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” said one worker they interviewed.

The workers are based in Kenya and risk losing their jobs and being thrown out on the streets for breaching confidentiality agreements.

There are also sex scenes filmed with the smart glasses – someone is wearing them having sex. That is why this is so extremely sensitive. There are cameras everywhere in our office, and you are not allowed to bring your own phones or any device that can record

It’s very obvious that people end up recording things they didn’t mean to record.

Former Meta employees stated that faces are automatically blurred in annotation data sent off to these subcontractors, but the annotators said the blurring doesn’t work very well and sometimes leaves faces unblurred.

It feels somewhat unsurprising to learn how privacy-invasive the glasses really are, especially when even the advertising material shows people being recorded surreptitiously.

One annotator sums everything up well:

“You think that if they knew about the extent of the data collection, no one would dare to use the glasses.”