Dear Meta Smart Wearing Glasses: You’re being watched too



No one likes to be recorded with Meta’s Ray-Bans smart glasses, which have become more popular in the last year or so. Now wearers know how others feel. According to a joint investigation published in Swedish newspapers The Swedish Daily and Post in Gothenburgsensitive and personal footage captured by the devices—including people going to the bathroom, getting dressed, and having sex—is reviewed by contractors who see it all uncensored.

The investigation found that most of the footage captured by Meta’s smart glasses, where more than seven million pairs reportedly sold, checked by contractual workers of a Kenya-based company called Sama. These workers are data annotators tasked with reviewing footage captured from the glasses’ cameras and labeling them to help AI systems better recognize what they see. The process is tedious and labor-intensive, requiring workers to painstakingly mark everything on the screen that can be identified.

The firehose in the footage is meant to serve as valuable training data given to contractors who apparently don’t go through much of the culling process before it lands at their stations, because, according to the investigationmany private, personal, and sometimes intimate images are shared.

Contractors have reported seeing things like a person’s credit card when they go to complete a transaction at a store or text messages they send and receive when they look at their phone. Those are things one would think could be accidentally caught on camera if someone forgot to turn off the record feature, but some contractors have reported seeing more people than they expected.

“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or undressing,” a Sama contractor told Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten. “I don’t think they know, because if they did, they wouldn’t record.” Another contractor said they reviewed the footage where the man wearing the glasses placed them on a bedside table, but his wife entered the room and undressed, possibly unaware she was being watched. Other footage reportedly shows the wearer watching pornography or even recording themselves having sex (It’s likely that they knew they were recording at the time, since the smart glasses have real caught up in the world of adult content lately.)

The wearers of these glasses may not want the footage to be seen by third parties. And the contractors sure don’t seem to care about it—even if they risk losing their jobs if they decide not to install something. “You understand that you’re looking into someone’s private life, but at the same time you’re expected to do the job,” one employee told the papers. “You don’t have to ask this. If you start asking, you don’t have anything.”

Focused on futurism that Meta’s terms of service for its AI productscovering its smart glasses products, includes a line that says the company may “review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations or messages to AIs, and this review may be automated or manual (human).” It also noted that content from its users may be reviewed “through automatic or manual (ie human) review and through third-party vendors in some instances,” to, among other things, “provide, maintain, and improve Meta’s services and features,” and to “monitor your use of AIs for compliance with these Terms and applicable laws and to report violations of applicable laws or regulations.”

The only solution the company offers for users who don’t want their trip to the dressing room scrutinized by a set of eyes they didn’t intend to send the footage to? “Don’t share information you don’t want AIs to use and maintain, such as information about sensitive topics.” Basically, don’t record it if you don’t want a stranger to see it.

That is far from an ideal solution, even for the wearer of the glasses, but it is not a solution for other people caught in the camera view. The owner of the glasses can turn it off to avoid capturing something they don’t want on camera. Everyone just had to hope they weren’t being filmed by a stranger, only for that footage to be scrutinized by other strangers. It is unfortunate that we live in a state of surveillance. This is exacerbated by the fact that corporations convince people to pay for products to participate in their development.

Gizmodo reached out to Meta for comment but did not receive a response at the time of publication.



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