Summary:
- A joint investigation reveals Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses send footage to Kenya, where workers see intimate and sensitive content.
- Workers view private moments, explicit acts, and sensitive data – raising serious privacy concerns and legal questions.
- Meta’s defense is filtered data and disclosure, but European legal standards regarding consent and control are not met.
A bombshell joint investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten has exposed what may be the biggest wearable tech privacy scandal to date. When users activate the AI assistant on Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses by saying “Hey Meta,” footage is routed to Sama, a data annotation company in Nairobi, Kenya, where human contractors review and label the video to train Meta’s AI systems.
What those workers are seeing is alarming.
“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed,” one Sama contractor told the Swedish journalists. “I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.”
Workers described reviewing footage of people’s bank cards, explicit sex acts, users watching pornography, and one case where a wearer placed the glasses on a bedside table only for his wife to walk in and undress — completely unaware she was being filmed and that her image would land in a dataset in Kenya.
“We see everything — from living rooms to naked bodies,” one annotator said. “Meta has that type of content in its databases.”
Meta says it automatically blurs faces in footage sent for annotation. Former Meta employees confirmed the system exists, but workers and former employees told investigators it fails regularly. “The algorithms sometimes miss,” one said. “Especially in difficult lighting conditions, certain faces and bodies become visible.”
Workers added that their personal phones are banned inside the office — almost certainly to prevent the footage from leaking.
Meta’s terms of service state that the company may use human reviewers to assess AI interactions. That clause is buried deep and governs only the wearer’s agreement with Meta.
If someone wearing these glasses walks into your home, your bedroom, or your doctor’s office, you never signed anything. You are not a party to the contract. You are the person being annotated.
Meta’s defense, per a spokesperson quoted in The Telegraph: the data is filtered, the practice is disclosed in the privacy policy, and it is consistent with industry standards.
For European users, this raises a legal wall. GDPR requires consent from data subjects — meaning every person whose image or personal information is captured. Bystanders never consented. Data protection lawyer Kleanthi Sardeli of the nonprofit None Of Your Business called it “a clear transparency problem,” warning that once footage enters Meta’s training pipeline, users lose practical control over how it is used.
Petter Flink, a security specialist at Sweden’s data privacy authority, was blunter: “The user really has no idea what is happening behind the scenes.”
Kenya has no EU adequacy decision, meaning its data protection framework is not recognized as equivalent to GDPR standards. That alone raises serious questions about the legality of cross-border transfers for European users.
7 Million Units and Accelerating
Meta sold just 2 million Ray-Ban AI glasses combined in 2023 and 2024. Sales tripled to 7 million in 2025 alone. The glasses look like ordinary sunglasses, which is precisely what makes them different from Google Glass, which died partly because wearers were visually identifiable and socially stigmatized. Meta solved the optics problem. The privacy problem never got solved — it got hidden.
The company has also reportedly been moving toward enabling live facial recognition features on the same devices, according to internal documents cited in previous reporting.
Meta declined interview requests from the Swedish newspapers over two months, ultimately responding with a statement referencing its terms of service.
“You think that if they knew about the extent of the data collection, no one would dare to use the glasses,” one Kenyan annotator told investigators.
Seven million people are wearing them anyway.
Originally written by: Keisha Oleaga
Source: What’s Trending
Published on: 4 March 2026
Link to original article: Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Are Sending Footage of People Having Sex, Undressing, and Using the Bathroom to Workers in Kenya
