Meta claims their smart glasses are “designed for privacy,” but do Meta’s data practices backup this up ? Many people, particularly women, are being secretly filmed. These recordings are then reportedly passed to overseas companies and used to train further models.
Meta glasses are embedded with technology that enables users to listen to music, make phone calls, and even see map directions in their lenses. Also embedded within their frames, however, are small cameras able to take photos and record videos, raising concerns over surveillance and the right to privacy.
While Meta claims the glasses’ recording feature is easily recognisable due to the white light emitted from the frames once turned on, many are quick to circumvent this, using tools like black nail polish or paying hackers as little as $120 to have the feature deactivated.
Male content creators have used the glasses to create content of themselves “picking up” women, who often look uncomfortable as they are being spoken to, sometimes unknowingly sharing sensitive information.
Moreover, Meta glasses come equipped with an AI assistant that can access the camera feed to identify what the wearer is looking at, translate foreign languages, and start recording with a simple “Hey Meta” command. Every time this happens, however, an image is stored by the company to train their AI models — no matter what the picture is of. A recent report found that Meta outsources the annotation of this data to companies in Kenya, where workers report having to watch people changing clothes, using the bathroom and even engaging in sexual activity.
“I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording” an anonymous annotator said in an interview with Svenska Dagbladet.
Whilst Meta has recently rolled out an option to opt out of sharing this visual data, the onus is on the wearer to do so, offering little to no comfort for those not in control of the glasses.
One community, however, has found real benefit in the glasses. For those who are visually impaired, Meta glasses have been hailed as a life-changing piece of technology, enabling them to more safely navigate a world designed for the fully sighted.
The picture, then, is not black and white. Visually impaired people deserve to access the world and the ability to go about their lives freely, but so do women. The reality remains that we shouldn’t have to choose — technology so advanced as to provide real time translation, live captions, and in-lens map directions, should have the guardrails to stop itself being used as a tool for exploitation. Until tech companies like Meta treat consent as a value worth taking seriously, rather than an afterthought, the question remains: who is this progress really for?
Photo by Tasha Kostyuk on Unsplash
