37 votes

Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns: workers say “we see everything”

Posted by skybrian
Tags: privacy, kenya, devices.smart, wearables, hardware, glasses.smart, business, meta, work, employees, author.naipanoi lepapa, author.ahmed abdigadir, author.julia lindblom, source.svd, long read, paywall
https://www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/metas-ai-smart-glasses-and-data-privacy-concerns-workers-say-we-see-everything

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Title
She Came Out of the Bathroom Naked, Employee Says
Authors
Naipanoi Lepapa
Published
Feb 27 2026
Word count
3416 words

5 comments

  1. [2]
    WrathOfTheHydra
    Link
    How do we go about building safe zones at this point? When the government has failed, the poors are getting strangled into compliant labor, and citizens are mindlessly recording everything... what...

    How do we go about building safe zones at this point? When the government has failed, the poors are getting strangled into compliant labor, and citizens are mindlessly recording everything... what is the gameplan? Because besides turning into a forest gremlin I am really stumped on ways to actionably prevent this invasion right now.

    22 votes
    1. vord
      Link Parent
      I've been contemplating developing a malicious outfit which does its best to disrupt surveilance while remaining relatively undetected to the naked eye. I'm thinking IR strobelights, high and low...

      I've been contemplating developing a malicious outfit which does its best to disrupt surveilance while remaining relatively undetected to the naked eye.

      I'm thinking IR strobelights, high and low pitched sounds, and some very-illegal bluetooth frequency fuzzing.

      Not great in isolation (it's that idiot strobe light guy), but the kind of thing that just needs 5-10 people in a store to disrupt things.

      I don't think safe zones are gonna be much of an option.

      2 votes
  2. skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    In Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten’s investigation, the people behind Meta’s smart glasses testify to the hidden stream of privacy-sensitive data that is fed straight into the tech giant’s systems.

    [...]

    The company they work for is called Sama and is a subcontractor to Meta. Here in Kenya’s capital, thousands of people train AI systems, teaching them to recognise and interpret the world.

    They are called data annotators, and they are the manual labourers of the AI revolution. On the screens they draw boxes around flower pots and traffic signs, follow contours, register pixels and name objects: cars, lamps, people. Every image must be described, labelled and quality assured.

    All to make the next generation of smart glasses a little more intelligent – a little more human.

    [...]

    The employees have signed extensive confidentiality agreements – if they break them they can lose their jobs – and be thrown back into a life without income, often to the slums. Therefore we publish no names.

    [...]

    The workers in Kenya say that it feels uncomfortable to go to work. They tell us about deeply private video clips, which appear to come straight out of Western homes, from people who use the glasses in their everyday lives.

    Several describe video material showing bathroom visits, sex and other intimate moments.

    [...]

    “Someone may have been walking around with the glasses, or happened to be wearing them, and then the person’s partner was in the bathroom, or they had just come out naked”, an employee says.

    [...]

    “We see everything – from living rooms to naked bodies. Meta has that type of content in its databases. People can record themselves in the wrong way and not even know what they are recording. They are real people like you and me”.

    The workers describe videos where people’s bank cards are visible by mistake, and people watching porn while wearing the glasses. Clips that could trigger “enormous scandals” if they were leaked.

    [...]

    “There are also sex scenes filmed with the smart glasses – someone is wearing them having sex. That is why this is so extremely sensitive. There are cameras everywhere in our office, and you are not allowed to bring your own phones or any device that can record”, an employee says.

    [...]

    Together with a system developer at Svenska Dagbladet we try to find out whether what the salesperson said is correct, that we can choose not to share our data with Meta. We try to use the glasses without internet connection turned on.

    [...]

    But that makes it impossible to get help interpreting what we see. The glasses urge us to turn on the connection. When we then analyse the network traffic from the app, we see that the phone has frequent contact with Meta servers in Luleå, Swden, and Denmark.

    17 votes