Meta Is Turning Its Ray-Bans Into a Surveillance Machine for AI

What you see is what Meta AI sees while wearing the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and your opt-out options are getting narrower and narrower. In a recent update to the privacy policy for the device, received by most owners in an email sent April 29, according to The Verge, Meta opened up the ability to collect more data for use to train its artificial intelligence models.

Under the new policies, Meta explains that “Meta AI with camera use is always enabled on your glasses unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta,’” the activation phrase used to communicate with the company’s AI assistant. Wake words or phrases like this are common for AI devices, with the trade-off being that they are technically always on and waiting to be activated.

Having the assistant always waiting to hear you give it a task removes some of the friction to functionality, but it also opens up the uncomfortable reality that these devices may be collecting information even when you aren’t thinking about it. In this case, if you keep the “Hey Meta” feature active, Meta can use any images it captures through the lens of the built-in camera. Meta says the camera is not always recording, so this only applies to photos or videos the user captures with the device.

Additionally, Meta’s latest update removes the ability for users to keep their voice recordings from being stored on Meta’s servers. Instead, users will have to manually delete every recording if they would like to cut off Meta’s access before the recordings expire. “The option to disable voice recordings storage is no longer available, but you can delete recordings anytime in settings,” the company’s policy now reads. Per Meta’s voice privacy notice, the company will store voice transcripts and audio recordings “for up to one year to help improve Meta’s products.” Accidental voice interactions are kept for 90 days.

Gizmodo has reached out to Meta for comment on these changes, but we did not hear back at the time of publication.

The motivation for all of this is pretty clear: more data to feed the AI machine. Meta just rolled out its live translation feature on the Ray-Ban smartglasses that provide real-time translations between several supported languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, and English. It also just recently launched a standalone Meta AI app. It’s clear the company is all-in on AI right now, and that means it needs all the data it can get to keep fine-tuning things, especially after it got caught allegedly fudging the numbers on benchmark tests.

This is the inevitable direction that devices with mics and cameras installed will go. At some point, the companies that make the devices will decide that what they can capture is more valuable than any semblance of privacy. They’ll flip the switch, and the glasses on your face or the speaker in your home will turn into a surveillance device.