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Who's Really Watching What Smartglasses See?
Featured Story: Think Twice Before Buying or Using Meta’s Ray-Bans- By Thorin Klosowski, Electronic Frontier Foundation, March 10, 2026
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/think-twice-buying-or-using-metas-ray-bans
Over the last decade or so, the tech industry has tried, and mostly failed, to make “smart glasses”—tech-infused glasses with cameras, AI, maps, displays, and more—a thing. But in the past year, products like Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses and Oakley’s Meta Glasses have gone from a curious niche to the mainstream.
Before you strap a dashcam to your face and sprint out into the world filming everything and everyone in your life, there are some civil liberties and privacy concerns to consider before buying or using a pair.
-- SNIP --
Before you strap a dashcam to your face and sprint out into the world filming everything and everyone in your life, there are some civil liberties and privacy concerns to consider before buying or using a pair.
If You’re Thinking About Buying Smart Glasses
You’re likely not the only one who can see (and hear) your footage
The photos and videos you record with most smartglasses will likely be stored online at some point in the process. On Meta’s offerings, unless you are livestreaming, media you capture when you press the camera button is kept on the glasses until you import them onto your phone, but media is imported automatically by default into the Meta AI mobile app, which is required to set up the glasses.
You can't use any AI features locally on the glasses. So anytime you use AI features, like when you say, “Hey Meta, start recording,” the footage is fed to Meta. You can use the glasses without the Meta AI app entirely, but considering you can’t easily download footage from the glasses to your phone without it, most people will likely use the app.
Some videos are fed to Meta for AI training, and we know at least in some cases that those videos go through human review. An investigation by Swedish newspapers found that workers were reviewing and annotating camera footage, which includes all sorts of sensitive videos, including nudity, sex, and going to the bathroom. Meta claimed to the BBC that this is in accordance with its terms of use, all in the name of AI training, which 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).
This all means that Meta and their third-party contractors will have access to at least some of what you record, and it’s very hard as a user to know where footage goes, who will have access to it, and what they will do with it. When you save footage to your phone’s camera roll, which is where the Meta AI app stores content, that might also be sent to Apple or Google’s servers, depending on your settings. Employees at these companies can then possibly access that media, and it could be shared with law enforcement.
The recorded audio from conversations with Meta AI are also saved by default, and if you don’t like that, tough luck, unless you go in and manually delete them every time you say something.
You’re likely not the only one who can see (and hear) your footage
The photos and videos you record with most smartglasses will likely be stored online at some point in the process. On Meta’s offerings, unless you are livestreaming, media you capture when you press the camera button is kept on the glasses until you import them onto your phone, but media is imported automatically by default into the Meta AI mobile app, which is required to set up the glasses.
You can't use any AI features locally on the glasses. So anytime you use AI features, like when you say, “Hey Meta, start recording,” the footage is fed to Meta. You can use the glasses without the Meta AI app entirely, but considering you can’t easily download footage from the glasses to your phone without it, most people will likely use the app.
Some videos are fed to Meta for AI training, and we know at least in some cases that those videos go through human review. An investigation by Swedish newspapers found that workers were reviewing and annotating camera footage, which includes all sorts of sensitive videos, including nudity, sex, and going to the bathroom. Meta claimed to the BBC that this is in accordance with its terms of use, all in the name of AI training, which 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).
This all means that Meta and their third-party contractors will have access to at least some of what you record, and it’s very hard as a user to know where footage goes, who will have access to it, and what they will do with it. When you save footage to your phone’s camera roll, which is where the Meta AI app stores content, that might also be sent to Apple or Google’s servers, depending on your settings. Employees at these companies can then possibly access that media, and it could be shared with law enforcement.
The recorded audio from conversations with Meta AI are also saved by default, and if you don’t like that, tough luck, unless you go in and manually delete them every time you say something.
Much more at link: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/think-twice-buying-or-using-metas-ray-bans
Also see: "Meta sued over AI smart glasses’ privacy concerns, after workers reviewed nudity, sex, and other footage" - by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, March 5, 2026: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/05/meta-sued-over-ai-smartglasses-privacy-concerns-after-workers-reviewed-nudity-sex-and-other-footage/
6 replies
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The innovation is that you wear the specs, and he gets to see under people's clothes!
They were in the back of comic books when I was a kid. For when you graduated from toy soldiers.
I had those as a kid in the late 70s! 
