Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are quickly earning a far less flattering nickname: “pervert glasses.”
A new investigation has exposed how highly personal videos captured by users — including people undressing or using the bathroom — are being sent to contractors in Kenya for AI training, often without the subjects’ knowledge. The revelations have sparked widespread outrage online, with many accusing the devices of turning everyday wearers into unwitting voyeurs and reigniting deep concerns about privacy in the age of always-on AI surveillance.
Victor Tangermann for Futurism:
Automated systems designed to blur faces often failed, the contractors claimed, effectively giving them a front row seat of somebody’s most intimate moments.
“I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording,” one contractor said.
Many have quickly embraced a term for the devices that’s presumably sending Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg into paroxysms of fury: “pervert glasses.”
“Glad people are settling on the term ‘pervert glasses,’” another agreed. “Bonus points if you also say it while posting a picture of Mark Zuckerberg or call them Mark Zuckerberg’s pervert glasses.”
“Not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg’s pervert glasses,” wrote yet another. “I would prefer technology to make it more difficult to skeez, creep or perv on the world. I would like tech to protect me from creeps, not smooth the runway for them.”
The threat of simple smart glasses being used for surveillance isn’t some dystopian vision of a far future. Researchers have already shown that Meta’s smart glasses can be used to instantly reveal the identities of strangers in public — tech that Meta has reportedly been working on itself.
All told, smart glasses are a product category rife with uncomfortable connotations, especially when worn in the presence of others who may not know they may be recorded.
MacDailyNews Take: Unless their goal was to trash their reputation as quickly as possible, we bet Ray-Ban is rethinking its poor decision to tie up with an outfit like Meta.
Meta is to privacy as Chernobyl is to nuclear power. – MacDailyNews, December 19, 2024
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