Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns

I'll confess that I like my Meta Ray Ban glasses: I love using them to listen to podcasts at the pool/beach, while riding my bike, and it's cool to snap a quick picture of my kids without pulling out my phone.

I wish this article (or Meta) were a bit clearer about the specific connection between the device settings and use and when humans get access to the images.

My settings are:

- [OFF] "Share additional data" - Share data about your Meta devices to help improve Meta products.

- [OFF] "Cloud media" - Allow your photos and videos to be sent to Meta's cloud for processing and temporary storage.

I'm not sure whether my settings would prevent my media from being used as described in the article.

Also, it's not clear which data is being used for training:

- random photos / videos taken

- only use of "Meta AI" (e.g., "Hey Meta, can you translate this sign")

As much as I've liked my Meta Ray Ban's I'm going to need clarity here before I continue using them.

TBH, if it were only use of Meta AI, I'd "get it" but probably turn that feature off (I barely use it as-is).

I do think it's completely unacceptable if Meta makes the glasses unable to be used for routine functions without (a) other humans reviewing your private content and (b) AI training on your content. There needs to be total transparency to people when this is happening - these are absolutes.

But I'm a bit confused by the article because it describes things that seem really unlikely given how the glasses work. They shine a bright light whenever recording. Are people really going into bathrooms, having sex, sharing rooms with people undressed while this light is on? Or is this deliberate tampering, malfunctioning, or Meta capturing footage without activating the light (hard to believe even Meta would do this intentionally).

To a technical person, this is obvious. AI doesn't happen on the glasses, it doesn't happen on your crappy phone, it happens online. Live streaming, which is also a feature, by definition sends everything it captures to someone else's computer (ahem, the cloud).

Yesterday I saw a Instagram reel of a guy asking "what am I looking at" while between his girlfriend's legs. Congrats, some Indian guy saw her too.

The core piece of information that is missing or unclear is whether this collection happens also when not actively and knowingly sending data to the cloud.

The glasses let me record videos locally, can Facebook see any frames of them? This is the question that needs to be answered. Everything is else is nonsense like "omg Amazon hears what I tell Alexa"

Is anyone here actually surprised Meta is recording and reviewing their content?

Vote with your dollars people.

  Meta aims to introduce facial recognition to its smart glasses while its biggest critics are distracted, according to a report from The New York Times. In an internal document reviewed by The Times, Meta says it will launch the feature “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

I was in engineering school back in ~2012 when Google Glass came out. One of my classmates got hold of a pair when they were still quite uncommon and wore them to an extracurricular club meeting. Within minutes someone made a comment about him wearing the "creeper" glasses and asked if he was filming. He never wore them to the club again.

I just don't see a world where that doesn't happen with Meta glasses.

My concern was whether the glasses might record or transmit data while switched off or in standby mode. From what I can tell, they don’t do this intentionally. So the risk is broadly similar to other modern electronic devices.

The creepiness concern is real, but I think people misplace where the actual surveillance happens. The most consequential stores of personal data aren’t ad networks they’re things like banks, hospitals, insurers, and telecoms. These institutions hold information about your health, finances, movements, and relationships, indexed and searchable by employees you’ve never met, governed by policies you’ve never read.

Realistically, there’s very little an individual can do to completely opt out.

My take is: if the main outcomes are that I get shown ads for things I don’t need and my facecomputer knows the difference between a fork and a spoon… I… I can live with that.

I do not care about the privacy of people who buy these glasses nor their families.

I care about the innocent people whose privacy is invaded by people who buy these glasses.

I am so far removed from the type of person who might consider buying something like that. You'd have to be exceptionally impervious to social cues to even think of wearing that in public.

If you're blind, it's of course understandable but that's pretty much it in terms of cases in which I would consider the glasses acceptable to wear in public.

Privacy policies and usage terms are like the magic wand of the industry. Whatever totally bad they want to do and however they want to abuse of you and of your data, they just have to add a few unreadable lines in a 40 pages document and that's it.

No one will read it, but even if you do, most of the time the FOMO or sunk cost fallacy effect will make you go on anyway. And then it is a free pass for them.

I got a pair as a gift and didn't look much into them but I have to be honest, I assumed any data I captured - voice, video, etc. - would be sent to their servers (to use their models) and they'd be using it for training with humans in the loop.

Tbh the only thing I really use the glasses for are listening to music or talking on the phone - so basically how you'd use airpods. I don't use airpods because I had an ear injury that prevents me from using them on my left ear, so these glasses were kinda nice for that. I really wish they didn't have a camera though because I do always feel compelled to remove them if I interact with people.

I also have to add that the quality is mediocre. They're a month old and the case has problems charging sometimes, and one of the screws is always coming loose at a hinge no matter how often I retighten that side.

At a friend's party recently, I met someone who told me that they had worked in data for Meta's glasses division and warned me never to get Meta glasses for this very reason—that the workers can see everything. They told me of a comical case where a guy pulled down his pants to look at his penis, asked "Meta, what is this?", and the AI responded that it was a thumb. XD

I won't even walk into a house with Alexa devices around, there is no way I'm going to let Meta glasses be in the same room as me.

I would really love to use smart glasses for DevOps, especially Grafana dashboards

I sincerely hope someone in Japan or Korea get caught using those to peek under trousers on the train so it get the forced camera sound treatment of smartphones over there.

So the world can label them as Hentai glasses and move on

Workers can see everything" means this isn't an AI privacy problem. It's a surveillance-as-a-service problem with extra steps.

Despite the historical misadventures of Meta, if people still use their products with an expectation of privacy, it's on the people.

Of course! Glasses with cameras are a classic secret spy gadget :)

The whole project is a Creepy privacy nightmare.

Ah yes, while everyone was focused on Flock cameras...

For many more reasons than pervert behaviour, I agree that this kind of tool cannot coexist with healthy society. "Glassholes" was a delightful portmanteau, but I suspect normalising a term like "pedo glasses" will probably put people off them way sooner and faster. At the very least it identifies the product and not the person as the problem.

How does this not fall afoul of states with two party consent laws around recording conversations? Particularly since California is one of the strictest states.

While it may be legal for an individual to film something, it is certainly not permissible to process video data of this sort at scale.

I don't agree that responsibility to comply with Swedish law is on the wearer. This should motivate prosecutors to immediately order raids to secure any data relating to the processing of the data.

I also think the Swedish camera surveillance law is also applicable and there's a deceptive element since the cameras are disguised as glasses.

Crazy to have 1 trillion invested in data centers, underpinned by dollar-a-day human turk ops

What the hell? I thought the videos went to the phone directly, they're all getting uploaded to Meta? I don't know why I let my guard down against that company for one second.

EDIT: Wait, is this when you use the "ask Meta" feature? I do expect that to send all the clips to a server for an LLM to process, it's not done on-device. It's not clear to me whether it's that or just all videos/photos you record with the glasses.

Everything else in this article is horrific, but this stuck out to me:

> “The algorithms sometimes miss. Especially in difficult lighting conditions, certain faces and bodies become visible”.

Right, “difficult lighting conditions,” not sure when we’d run into those in situations where we might be concerned with privacy. A 97% success rate looks good on paper.

I'm not sure if there is any use case that could convince me to mount an internet connected device to my head at all times.

"my spying glasses are spying on me"

Is it paranoid to assume every device with a camera/mic can see/hear everything?

That's my default assumption.

Of course they can, why would one expect anything else? However if you look through their processes I am sure they are covered by some legal jargon to do the bare minimum in terms of security. They will have every knob available to debug to the lowest level possible and view everything

Hopefully this causes Meta to be more transparent about what data is sent to their annotators. It seems like even the annotators didn't know whether the person explicitly hit recorded (whether accidentally or not) or if it's samples from a constant stream. This kind of makes it impossible for anyone to consent to the purchase agreements.

Fun fact: all advertiser chat support agents at Meta used to (still might) have full super-read on FB. When you read "workers" in this headline, don't think "devs", think "legions of contracted-out T1 support staff"

Surely this is already happening with our other devices? Not that it isn't a problem but that the game is already lost...?

This simply needs to be criminalized.

Basicially it is a peeping tom.

Beside the privacy part, I fail to see what value these glasses bring that a smartphone with a camera can't do already ?

And you're still forced to carry a smartphone anyway with these glasses since they require internet connection.

Is this fashion, or something I'm not aware of ? They look horrendous to me.

Meta needs to make a find-your-lost-dog commercial for their smart glasses ASAP.

I think they're dumb but my wife loves them. The video quality is surprisingly good.

There must be a special place reserved for Mark Zuckerberg in hell

Oh look a flock competitor

I'm against surveillance in general and I see many people being against these glasses, yet not caring at all about surveillance cameras. Flock in the USA is a bit of an outlier in that it got some people riled up, but where I live in Europe there are private cameras looking out of at least half of the buildings, maybe more. So if you're walking down the street for 15 minutes, you'd be caught by tens or hundreds of cameras from various manufacturers, installed by various business and homes. Who knows how many have microphones, which server they store their feed in, what security each cam has and so on.

I asked 2 cops in a patrol car if I could install cameras on my own and how I should go about it. They said they don't mind them. Officially it's illegal unless you have a permit, but it's so widespread and the law is so unenforced that it's practically 99.99% legal.

I can point a few cameras to the street and record everything 24/7. When I'm on a bus I'm being recorded by a few cameras. On most bus/tram/subway stops there are cameras. In stores and public buildings there are cameras. Most cars have cameras for insurance or general safety concerns. Self-driving cars would have to have cameras, as well as delivery robots.

If we accept this shitty reality, why shouldn't I wear a camera and a mic, too?

Too funny that the subcontractor working for meta is “sama”

The annoying thing is that even if you yourself don't use these glasses, as long as people around you do, you are still affected by it. We really need laws to limit always-on recording devices in places where we have an expectation of privacy.

this should be known by everyone

You would have to have been hiding under an extremely large rock not to assume this given the technology involved and Meta's overtly and consistently anti-privacy stances and history.

Why was the title changed from "The workers behind Meta’s smart glasses can see everything" to "A hidden workforce behind Meta’s new smart glasses"? It doesn't go against any guidelines:

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

> If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.

> If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

The literal URL slug is

> metas-ai-smart-glasses-and-data-privacy-concerns-workers-say-we-see-everything

The page title is

> Meta’s AI Smart Glasses and Data Privacy Concerns: Workers Say “We See Everything”

The new title goes against the guidelines by editorializing. I've never seen HN do this before, what's going on here?

I really hope these flop and don’t become mainstream.

It would be a surveillance and privacy dystopian nightmare.

I already personally refuse to be around anyone who wears them. And I think establishments should just outright ban them.

Good reporting, but this has always been Meta's M.O. so I'm really not surprised.

The sooner we collectively stop trusting them (and maybe even actively campaign to have the U.S. government meaningfully regulate them), the better.

Personally, I would like to see the company stop existing and its executive board destitute.

FTA > "I saw a video where a man puts the glasses on the bedside table and leaves the room. Shortly afterwards his wife comes in and changes her clothes." "The workers describe videos where people’s bank cards are visible by mistake."

This is hugely concerning. We need more details. Why are the glasses recording when not being worn? Is the light on when it's recording?

Are the Meta employees able to turn on the streaming without people knowing? Are these videos only when someone says "Hey Meta..."? Are the Meta employees looking at every "Hey Meta..." video where someone asks AI a question?

These glasses are considered a luxury item and are worn by executives in office environments. They are worn by people in family situations. Someone could be a confidential or private moment and randomly ask AI a question; one of the primary purposes of the glasses. Are all of these being seen by Meta employees?

"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

-Mark Zuckerberg, 2004