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Meta is facing a new lawsuit over privacy concerns related to its AI smart glasses.
It follows the Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten (GP) recent report that employees at a Kenya-based subcontractor had been reviewing private footage recorded through customers’ smart glasses.
This included sensitive content such as nudity, using the toilet, sex, bank card information, private messages and chats.
The United Kingdom’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, decided to investigate the matter, which then led to a US lawsuit by plaintiffs Mateo Canu of California and Gina Bartone of New Jersey, who are being represented by Clarkson Law Firm, which specialises in public interest cases.
The US lawsuit claims that Meta has promoted false advertising and disregarded privacy laws.
It alleges that Meta’s AI smart glasses use phrases such as “designed for privacy, controlled by you” in their advertising, which may reassure users to believe that their private moments and data are safe from public view.
It also alleges that Meta has not included any disclaimer to the contrary. Similarly, the glasses manufacturing partner, Luxottica of America, has also been named by the lawsuit for conduct that goes against consumer protection laws.
However, Meta’s UK AI terms of service has a mention of human review.
A version of that policy also applies to the US and states: “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).
The subcontractor in question is Sama, a Nairobi-based data annotation company, where workers train AI systems manually by describing, labelling, and quality assessing images.
Euronews Next has contacted Meta for comment but did not receive a reply at the time of publication.
Privacy concerns around sensitive footage and data
Although Meta claims that faces are usually blurred in images, sources who spoke to Svenska Dagbladet have highlighted that it does not consistently work.
“We see everything- from living rooms to naked bodies,” one of the subcontractor’s workers said.
According to Meta, subcontracted workers sometimes need to review customer content, including images and videos, to improve the smart glasses’ experience.
However, the tech giant maintained that it took customer privacy very seriously.
“Ray-Ban Meta glasses help you use AI, hands-free, to answer questions about the world around you,” Meta said in a statement published by TechCrunch.
“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.”
Concerns over “luxury surveillance” tech have been increasing significantly over the last few years.