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Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, sold special glasses with built-in cameras that can recognize objects, translate languages, and take videos hands-free. But a new lawsuit says the company secretly sent all that video footage to workers in other countries who labeled and sorted the material to help Meta's AI systems get smarter. The company told people the glasses were "designed for privacy" and that users had full control, but the lawsuit claims that wasn't the whole story.
The problem gets worse: the lawsuit says people who weren't even wearing the glasses—bystanders just going about their day—got recorded without knowing it or agreeing to it. Workers at an outsourcing company in Kenya reportedly reviewed intimate videos, including footage of people changing clothes or using bathrooms, according to investigations by Swedish newspapers. The lawsuit argues that Meta's privacy promises don't actually cover what happens to all this video data, especially when it's sent overseas and used to train AI systems. This comes just after Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion over ten years to settle child-safety concerns.