Meta will have sold 7 million of its Ray-Ban smart glasses by 2025 alone – but it probably didn’t anticipate so much criticism when a recent investigation by swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet And goteborg-posten It was revealed that Meta’s sub-contracted data annotators in Nairobi, Kenya, may have been watching users through the cameras of their glasses while they went to the bathroom or had sex.
The devastating revelations have highlighted the AI industry’s reliance on foreign labor for labeling data to train its models, a hidden reality hidden in marketing materials by one of the world’s largest tech companies.
Just days after the investigation was published, Meta was hit with a class action lawsuit, accusing the company of misleading its customers by claiming that it put privacy at the forefront.
“No reasonable consumer would understand that similar promises like ‘designed for privacy, controlled by you’ and ‘built for your privacy’ mean that deeply personal footage from inside their homes will be viewed and cataloged by human workers overseas,” reads the lawsuit, which was obtained by futurism And was filed in San Francisco District Court on Thursday.
“Meta decided to make privacy the centerpiece of its massive marketing campaign while hiding the facts that make those promises false,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit “seeks to hold Meta accountable for its affirmatively false advertising and failure to disclose the true nature of the surveillance and its connection to the company’s AI data collection pipeline.
a meta spokesperson told Engadget Data from its glasses could end up in the hands of human contractors, but it declined to respond to the lawsuit’s claims.
The spokesperson also claimed that “unless users choose to share captured media with Meta or others, that media remains on the user’s device.”
However, Meta fails to explain that it is impossible to use the main AI features of the devices in Kenya without authorizing human contractors to view the resulting footage.
The lawsuit claims that Meta did not adequately disclose that the intimate footage could be reviewed and commented on by a human contractor. In other words, its smart glasses represent a major privacy liability.
“The undisclosed human review pipeline materially circumvents Meta AI Glasses’ privacy features, turns the product from a personal device into a surveillance drain, and exposes consumers to unreasonable risks of reputational damage, emotional distress, stalking, extortion, identity theft, and reputational injury,” the document reads.
“The exposure of such content to thousands of anonymous individuals creates a constant and unreasonable risk of harm, which Meta’s marketing privacy features were intended to represent, but do not prevent,” it continues.
Beyond the lawsuit, the latest revelations have resulted in netizens coining a new term for Meta’s product: “deformed glasses.”
More on glasses: Meta workers say they’re seeing disturbing things through users’ smart glasses
