Meta AI Glasses Privacy Class Action Lawsuit

A new class-action lawsuit against Meta over privacy concerns related to the firm's AI smart glasses. This comes after an investigative report by two Swedish newspapers saying that images and videos captured with the glasses are routinely reviewed by contractors in Kenya. NTD's Jean Marshall has more details. Meta has another lawsuit on its hands over their AI smart glasses. The nationwide class-action lawsuit claims Meta made a reassuring promise. The glasses were designed for privacy, controlled by you. But the suit claims this promise is false. Many people don't know that the AI that is captured in Meta as part of their EULA is often sent for human labelers to review. And those people are often outside this country. So you may have personal data or private information or even personal images of you and your loved ones What gave this case some legs to move was a recent Swedish whistleblower investigation. They revealed that when consumers use the Meta AI glasses' AI features, the footage is not processed privately or locally. Instead, videos captured through the glasses, including highly sensitive moments inside homes and other private spaces, are transmitted to Meta servers and then routed to a subcontractor in Kenya, where human workers manually view and label the footage to train Meta's AI models. We're discovering just how invasive this tech can be and really the negative impacts of this tech when it goes unregulated. So hopefully we can have case law now lead to an outcome that will allow judges to really determine how wearables should be regulated, how we should protect the users of these wearables and their privacy as well. And hopefully this pushes for some statutory regulation as well. Meta has shown time and time again that they are ill-equipped to deal with privacy of individuals at scale. And so this encroachment into an incredibly suspect world of facial recognition should be viewed with a lot of skepticism because they don't have a great track record at both privacy and equitable use of this kind of technology. According to the complaints filed by a Clarkson law firm, Gina Bartoni of New Jersey and Mateo of California relied on Meta's privacy claims and say they would not have bought the product if they had known that some captured footage could be reviewed by contractors. What's interesting too is we expect AI to review all this footage, but these were actual workers reviewing it, which adds another layer of feeling your privacy is extremely violated because you're not consenting to that individual seeing that recording either. So this is very interesting. There was some potential deception obviously put forth to the public on how safe this product is and how you can control the privacy that might be violated or protected with this product and your choice to report or not record. And I'm really excited to see how this will lead to a push for safer measures to be put in place as wearables become more and more popular. The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and injunctive relief. It also argues that the review process undermines the product's privacy claims. We reached out to Meta for a statement, but did not receive any reply by the time of this story. Sean Marshall, NTD News.