Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses (Ray-Ban Meta) may be sending sensitive user footage to human reviewers in Nairobi, Kenya, according to a recent investigation by Swedish outlets Svenska Dagbladet [The Swedish Daily News] and Göteborgs-Posten [The Gothenburg Post].
The report, published last week, alleges that contractors employed by Meta subcontractor Sama have viewed videos captured through the glasses, including highly private content such as bathroom visits, nudity, sexual activity, and other intimate moments—often without the wearers’ awareness.
The Nairobi-based contractors interviewed by Svenska Dagbladet are AI annotators, meaning they label images, text, or audio, with the goal of helping AI systems make sense of the data they’re training on. “We see everything — from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker says, according to Svenska Dagbladet. “Meta has that type of content in its databases.”
A former Meta employee reportedly tells Svenska Dagbladet that faces in annotation data are blurred automatically, though workers in Kenya say this “does not always work as intended,” and some faces are still visible. Another person reportedly tells the outlet that a wearer’s bank cards are sometimes seen in the footage they review as well.
Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses come with a built-in AI assistant capable of answering questions about what a user can see…
Last year, Meta made some changes to its privacy policy that keep Meta AI with camera use enabled on your glasses “unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta.’” It also stopped allowing wearers to opt out of storing their voice recordings in the cloud.
MacDailyNews Take: Anyone who trusts Mark Zuckerberg’s outfit with their privacy is living in a simulation of their own making.
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Zuck Zuckin like usual
Did we expect anything less?
He was just 9 years old, so his parents shouldn’t have let him watch Sliver.
We are in a World of companies and politicians doing deviant things on a recycle mode, because they are never punished to the level that prevents reoccurrence…and you may actually have a fund that pays court costs that’s paid by the public.