They sue Meta for misleading advertising with the privacy of their smart glasses

A class action lawsuit accuses Meta to mislead users about privacy smart glasses which it manufactures with EssilorLuxottica, after an investigation by two Swedish media outlets revealed that the videos recorded with them were reviewed by workers from a subcontracted company in Kenya.

The class action lawsuit was filed this Wednesday in a federal court in San Francisco (United States), and it is stated that it “seeks to hold Meta responsible for its false advertising and for not revealing the true nature of the surveillance and its connection to the company’s AI data collection process,” as reported in Engadget and reported by Europa Press.

In its policies, Meta indicates that the user is in control of their data, but also clarifies that voice recordings – necessary to interact with the assistant – can be saved and used to improve AI or other company products.

And although it does not say it clearly, this extends to the use of multimodal AI, which simultaneously processes video, audio and images in functions such as recording – you have to ask Meta AI to record and stop doing so – and in ‘Live AI’, the function by which the AI ​​sees what the user sees to answer the questions they ask about the environment in real time. The latter is not saved on the device, but on Meta servers.

The lawsuit follows the recent publication of an investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, which questioned the privacy of Meta’s smart glasses after speaking with employees of companies subcontracted by the technology firm in Kenya.

These workers, who have remained anonymous to avoid reprisals, are data annotators andThey train artificial intelligence manuallyso that you learn to recognize and interpret what surrounds people.

They also review videos recorded by the glasses themselves. In them, they have seen people in the bathroom, stripping to change clothes, having sex and watching pornography. They have entered people’s homes and their daily lives, where they have even been able to see the number of their bank cards.

As a Meta spokesperson shared with Engadget, the technology company has acknowledged that, in some cases, data from its smart glasses may be shared with human contractors.

According to the spokesperson, “Ray-Ban Meta glasses allow you to use hands-free AI to answer questions about the world around you. Unless users choose to share captured media with Meta or others, it remains on their device. When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data in order to improve the user experience, as many other companies do. “We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and prevent information that identifies them from being reviewed.”

The lawsuit understands that “the undisclosed human review process makes the privacy features of the Meta AI glasses materially misleading, transforms the product from a personal device into a surveillance conduit, and exposes consumers to unreasonable risks of harm to dignity, emotional distress, harassment, extortion, identity theft and damage to reputation“.