- Meta entrepreneurs claim your smart glasses can see more than you think
- Meta’s privacy policy warns that your glasses share images and videos with the company
- This follows a growing trend of privacy concerns about smart glasses in public and in courts.
When Meta warned us that he could see images captured by his AI smart glasses, it turned out it wasn’t a joke. 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 entrepreneurs told journalists that they were seeing a lot of sensitive data.
This includes “someone going to the bathroom or undressing,” with one entrepreneur reporting seeing a video in which “a man puts the glasses on the bedside table and leaves the room.”
“Shortly after, his wife comes in and changes her clothes.”
Even though they are aware of the sensitive nature of the content they analyze, employees say they are not able to react to what is happening: “You are not supposed to question it. If you start asking questions, you are no longer here.”
When you agree to use Meta’s AI, you’ll see a warning that, as part of its terms of service, you agree to let the company see and “review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations.” This is buried in the full TOS agreement, but a similar warning flashes on 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 really have a choice. To use AI, you must allow data sharing, otherwise you will not be able to access the features.
Additionally, given the compact size of Meta’s specifications, there isn’t much room for processing on the device. The AI’s queries and data are sent to a server, which means that even if you make the information private, it’s almost impossible to prevent it from being shared with Meta to some extent.
But Meta may have to find a solution.
The beginning of the flashback
I’ve previously noted that Meta’s smart specs have so far managed to avoid the privacy fears that plagued Google Glass, but that’s recently changed.
This report is not the only example of a shift in opinion towards smart glasses. Earlier this year, the BBC reported on cases of women being 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 contempt after members wore smart glasses in the courtroom despite the recording being banned (via Fortune).
There are also growing concerns about the expanded tools Meta and others want to bring to their AI wearables. Facial recognition, and even something mundane like remembering where you left your keys, would require your specs to capture a lot of data that many (myself included) aren’t very comfortable with.
There are also growing concerns about what data is and isn’t shared with AI, with smartphone makers placing a big emphasis on on-device AI – models that are small enough to live on your phone, meaning the data is never sent to a server.
As Apple and Samsung work on their own smart specs, it’s possible to leverage their phone’s in-device AI to gain privacy. Their 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 added security for your data.
Meta, without its own phone, doesn’t have the same luxury of on-device AI to push back on the privacy argument.
One potential solution to Meta’s woes would be better control over user privacy. Messages and some specific images taken by the glasses for contextual purposes will need to be shared with Meta, but there should be an option to not share captured content outside of the Look and Ask feature of the Meta glasses.
And as AI needs to analyze more and more data to make the tools 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 entrepreneurs apparently seeing them in the bathroom, they will naturally be scared and want to move to another platform.
With Android I know I will.
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