In today’s installment of the AI boom turning privacy into a quaint anachronism cherished by people born before the year 2000, Facebook parent company Meta has confirmed to TechCrunch that pictures taken by its new Ray Ban smart glasses and analyzed by onboard Meta AI tools, as well as recordings of all voice commands given to the glasses (unless you opt out), will be used by the company to train its AI models.
When I first heard “Facebook Ray Ban,” my mind jumped to that old FB Messenger scam—you know, your old college RA or a friend of a friend’s roommate DMing you after three years of silence to hawk 90% off spectacles at a credit card number-scraping website after their account got hacked. But we’re here to discuss something a bit more sinister: Meta’s “then as farce, again” to the farce of Google Glass, a collab with eyewear brand Ray Ban to produce specs with a little camera in the frame, voice activated and sporting various functions powered by Meta’s proprietary AI models.
When TechCrunch first inquired about how these images would be stored and used by Meta, the company provided a CIA-style “we can neither confirm nor deny,” which strikes me as a bit of a red flag. In a follow up story, Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that any images analyzed by the glasses’ onboard “Meta AI” tool are considered fair game for the company to store and train its AI models on. “In locations where multimodal AI is available (currently US and Canada), images and videos shared with Meta AI may be used to improve it per our privacy policy,” explained a representative for the company.
That makes it sound opt-in, but one of the main selling points of the glasses is their onboard AI capabilities. You’re basically strapping a camera to your face with the power to record everything you see, and saying the wrong thing to it could make some of what you recorded the property of a mega corporation with an demonstrated lack of regard for individual privacy.
Speaking of the things you say to your weird camera glasses, Meta’s privacy policy also outlines that recordings of voice commands given to the tool are stored by Meta and used to train AI models as well, though TechCrunch notes that users can opt out of this when setting up a Meta AI account.
But I find myself feeling resentful of these practices less for customers willingly opting in to this exciting new form of surveillance to the tune of $300 a pop, and more on behalf of friends, family, and those randomly passing by such tech pioneers—people who will have no idea they’re participating in Meta’s grand experiments. We already seem far too comfortable filming strangers and sharing it on social media, and now we’re inventing new, ever more subtle ways for people to record everyone around them for fun and profit. A pair of Harvard students has already jailbroken Meta’s new Ray Bans and empowered them with a search engine that uses facial recognition to produce personal details of anyone the wearer looks at—basically doxing on command.
It’s also already a matter of policy for Meta to train its AI models on all public Facebook and Instagram posts made by Americans, with an opt-out process that requires you to justify your decision to the $1.5 trillion market cap corporation. As for how to opt out of having your likeness used to train AI models without your consent via AI-empowered Ray Bans, some extra scrutiny around people with thick-framed glasses might be in order—I promise I don’t have a camera in mine!