Meta Sued Following Allegations That Its AI-Powered Glasses Are Secretly Sending Intimate Videos of Users to Workers in Kenya

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is facing a class action lawsuit over its AI-powered Meta Ray-Ban Glasses and allegations that they are recording wearers’ intimate moments, without their knowledge, and sending the content to employees in Kenya.Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cast the Meta Ray-Bans as an all-in-one assistant to help people stay off their phones and live in the moment. However, the tech giant is facing new scrutiny and a class action lawsuit after two Swedish newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet and Goteborgs-Posten, reported that individuals were being unknowingly recorded by the glasses while in the bathroom, getting undressed, or having sex. In other cases, workers said they were able to view bank cards and private texts. A class action lawsuit filed in California notes that Meta sold the glasses while promising that they are “designed for privacy, controlled by you.”“In reality, users of Meta AI Glasses cannot control what happens to their data, or the data they capture of the people around them. Defendants are certainly not keeping this data ‘safe,’ the lawsuit says. “Instead, Meta feeds consumer data — captured by consumers through their Meta AI Glasses — to a subcontractor called Sama.”The filing notes that “thousands” of workers review “this sensitive user data, annotating it with labels like ‘cars,’ ‘lamps,’ and ‘people’ in order to train artificial intelligence used in Meta products.”“Despite marketing the Meta AI Glasses as ‘designed for privacy’ and equipped with ‘robust measures to protect user data,’ Meta failed to disclose that intimate videos, images, and audio are routinely captured by the Glasses, transmitted to Meta’s servers, and reviewed by Defendants’ employees and contractors,” the complaint says. One data analyst told the journalists behind the explosive report, “In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know [they’re being recorded].”The lawsuit notes that there are concerns that the data analysts who review the content could make a copy of it and use it to harass or blackmail the owners of the glasses.A spokesman for Meta did not comment on the lawsuit, but responded to reporting on the privacy concerns, telling the Sun, “Unless users choose to share media they’ve captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user’s device.”“When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do. We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed,” the spokesman said. However, data analysts told Swedish papers that the attempts to blur individuals’ faces to protect their privacy do “not always work as intended.”Meta told the BBC that its terms of service inform users that when they share content with MetaAI, it may use contractors to review the data in an effort to improve users’ experience. The terms of service in America state, “In some cases, Meta will review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations with or messages to AIs, and this review may be automated or manual (human).”Meta is also facing scrutiny from the United Kingdom’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, which told the BBC that it is seeking “information on how [Meta] is meeting its obligations under UK data protection laws” following the “concerning” report from Svenska Dagbladet and Goteborgs-Posten.

Meta Sued Following Allegations That Its AI-Powered Glasses Are Secretly Sending Intimate Videos of Users to Workers in Kenya

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