Meta AI smart glasses reportedly send intimate videos to human moderators

Meta markets its Ray-Ban AI glasses as a product “built with your privacy in mind.” But a new investigation suggests the gap between that promise and reality may be wider than most users realize.

A joint investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, published last week, spoke to more than 30 employees at Sama, a data services company Meta uses as a subcontractor in Nairobi, Kenya. Workers there say they have watched people undress, use the toilet, and engage in sexual activity through video footage routed from the glasses. Bank card details and other sensitive financial data reportedly show up in those same video streams.

Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses come with an AI assistant feature. When a user activates it to ask questions or get information about what they’re looking at, the glasses capture that footage and send it to Meta’s servers for processing. That processing can, according to Meta’s own terms of service, include review by human workers.

The catch is that finding this disclosure is not easy. Engadget noted that Svenska Dagbladet’s reporters had to navigate multiple layers of Meta’s privacy policy to even locate it. Once found, the policy puts the responsibility on users not to capture sensitive content. You cannot use the AI feature without agreeing to these terms.

The workers at Sama earn roughly $2 per hour, operate under strict NDAs, and work in offices under constant camera surveillance, according to The Decoder. “In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know,” one employee told investigators.

Meta does apply face-blurring to footage before it gets reviewed. But workers and former Meta employees told the paper that the anonymization breaks down in poor lighting, leaving identifiable faces visible.

This is where GDPR comes in. Kenya currently has no EU adequacy decision, meaning Meta needs strong contractual protections in place for data transfers from European users. The Irish Data Protection Commission has been contacted with questions about whether Meta is compliant. Privacy group NOYB flagged an additional issue: many users may not even realize the camera is recording during an AI interaction.

Meta declined to comment directly on the story, saying it handles media “according to the Meta AI Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.”

Sama is no stranger to controversy. It previously handled traumatic content moderation for Meta and OpenAI before ending those contracts in 2023, following reports of worker trauma and alleged union-busting. The company then shifted to AI annotation work, which is exactly how it ended up at the center of this story.

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