Meta’s push into the smart wearable tech world seemed to be going so well. Though the tech giant hasn’t disclosed sales details, analysts conclude that the company has sold millions of smart glasses since their 2021 release – over seven million last year, alone.
But in recent months, the company has faced a public backlash against its AI-powered wearable devices, threatening Meta’s entire endeavour. This happened for two reasons: Meta’s privacy policy came under question, and a number of creeps hit the headlines because they used the built-in cameras to record unsuspecting victims.
Now reports say Meta has taken dramatic steps in response to this and has disabled the cameras on thousands of already-sold glasses.
Devious glasses owners were disabling the glasses’ tiny recording light; they did so by drilling it out or covering it up so that when they snapped a photo or recorded a video, no one could tell. Privacy activists immediately raised an alarm, and a number of cases hit the headlines.
Meta chose to combat the practice via a recent software update that attempted to detect the sneaky modifications. The company confirmed that the update had been successfully deployed and that thousands of affected devices had been detected, and their camera units had been entirely disabled. In what could be seen as an attempt to downplay the news, Meta’s vice president of wearables Alex Himel told news site Semafor the update had affected less than a tenth of a per cent of all the devices sold.
Since we know seven million were sold last year alone, we can assume that this means thousands – perhaps several tens of thousands – of the glasses had been modified to conceal their recording ability. In a post on Threads, Himel clarified that Meta will “keep rolling out updates like this to make sure the capture LED can reliably alert bystanders when photos or videos are being captured for someone’s gallery.” He also underlined that only a “tiny minority” were circumventing the protections, and noted that “the fact they have to go to these lengths shows our efforts are working. We’ll keep improving and evolving our approach.” (Meta didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on the topic of disabling the cameras.)
While this seems like a decent solution, it’s worth remembering that Meta caused some of the public backlash itself. This includes surreptitiously installing a face detection system on the devices earlier this year, seemingly as part of a plan to launch the system on a broad scale.
The company has long had a poor reputation for respecting users’ privacy and mental health, and since March it’s been facing a class action lawsuit against the AI glasses, which underlines all of this. The suit alleges Meta misrepresented the glasses’ privacy policy, since recorded images are sent not only to Meta’s servers for the company’s own use, but also have been seen by many human reviewers. This includes workers for third-party firms in other nations who’ve seen countless glasses users in private settings or intimate situations.
The suit was expanded to include a new plaintiff class: bystanders. This covers people whose images were captured by the glasses accidentally, without these people giving “informed consent” for their images to be used as part of the AI image analysis features Meta has built-in to the glasses. This data is presumably available for Meta to use as it sees fit, including training future AI models. It’s hard to put a number on how many people may fall into this bystander class, since it by definition includes people who’ve never bought or worn the glasses themselves.
At a time when user awareness of privacy issues and AI training data is rocketing, the expansion of this lawsuit could put Meta in a very complex legal situation or even at risk of a gargantuan fine. The company recently agreed to pay US$18bil (RM72.8bil) to settle a separate US lawsuit that alleged it had contributed to children’s social media addiction. But Meta got away lightly, critics argue, since at one point it was suggested fines could top a trillion dollars.
The take-away from this news for your company is twofold. First, you should have a chat with your staff about the risks of wearable tech, both on a personal and on a corporate level: using different types of consumer wearables in the workplace could expose sensitive worker information or even your company’s intellectual property.
Second, though it may seem that Meta’s efforts to push wearable tech could stumble, this type of device is definitely going to be big. Other big tech names, from Apple to Google and Samsung, are known to be working on smart glasses of their own (and they will presumably lean hard into the privacy angle when they launch to avoid the same mess Meta has gotten itself into).
This means if your company doesn’t already have an official wearables policy, it’s time to craft one – both for personal devices your workers use, and to explain what data you will capture if you buy the devices for business purposes. – Inc./Tribune News Service
