- Metacontractors Claim Your Smart Glasses Can See More Than You Think
- Meta’s privacy policy does warn that your glasses share images and videos with the company
- This follows a growing trend of privacy concerns regarding smart glasses in public and in court.
When Meta warned us that he could see images captured by his AI smart glasses, it turns out he 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 Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten (behind a paywall), Meta contractors told journalists they are looking at a large amount of sensitive data.
This includes “someone going to the bathroom or undressing,” and one contractor noted that he saw a video in which “a man puts glasses on the nightstand and leaves the room.”
“Shortly after, his wife comes in and changes clothes.”
Although they are aware of the sensitive nature of the content they are analyzing, staff say they are in no position to dismiss what is happening, saying: “You’re not supposed to question it. If you start asking questions, you’re gone.”
When you agree to use Meta AI, you’ll see a warning stating that, as part of your terms of use, you agree to allow the company to view and “review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations.” This is included in the full TOS agreement, but a similar warning appears on the screen as part of the smart glasses setup process.
The problem is that even if you prefer not to share anything with the Meta team, you don’t have many options. To use AI, you must allow data sharing; otherwise you will be excluded from the functions.
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, which means that even if you make the information private, it is almost impossible to prevent it from being shared with Meta in some way.
But Meta may need to find a solution.
The beginning of the retreat
I’ve noted before that Meta’s smart specs have so far managed to sidestep the privacy fears that plagued Google Glass, but recently that’s changed.
This report is not the only example of a change of opinion towards smart glasses. Earlier this year, the BBC reported on cases of women secretly filmed and harassed by people wearing smart glasses, and the judge in the ongoing social media addiction trial against Meta (and YouTube) threatened Mark Zuckerberg’s entourage with scorn after members wore smart glasses in the courtroom despite recording being prohibited (via Fortune).
There is also growing concern about the expanded tools that Meta and others want to incorporate into their wearable AI devices. Facial recognition, and even something mundane like remembering where you left your keys, would require its specs to capture a lot of data that many (myself included) aren’t very comfortable with.
There’s also growing concern about what data is and isn’t shared with AI, and smartphone makers are putting a lot of importance on 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 specifications, there is room to leverage on-device AI in their phones to gain privacy. Your 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 additional security for your data.
Meta, without a phone of his own, doesn’t have the same luxury of having AI on the device to reject the privacy argument.
A possible solution to Meta’s problems would be greater control of user privacy. Messages and some specific images taken with the glasses for context will need to be shared with Meta, but there should be an option to not share content captured outside of the Look and Ask feature of the Meta glasses.
And since AI needs to analyze more and more data for the tools to work, Meta may want to implement something similar to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which serves as a private server for Apple Intelligence.
Because even if people agree to have their data shared, let’s be honest, most of them don’t realize what they’re giving up. And when they see stories about Meta contractors who apparently saw them in the bathroom, they’ll understandably freak out and want to switch to a different platform.
With Android I know I will.
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