If you needed another reason to be skeptical of Meta’s smart glasses, congratulations: you can add “may record without my knowledge” to the seemingly endless list. As noted by Android Authority, Meta smartglasses owners noticed that, after a recent firmware update, their smartglasses kept recordings of certain conversations even though they hadn’t woken up the smartglasses’ voice assistant first.
In some cases, according to a Reddit thread with people with Meta’s smart glasses, Meta AI didn’t even respond despite apparently being triggered. Some accounts also suggest that the “Reply without Hey Meta” feature was disabled before conversations were captured. The Reddit user who started the thread reports noticing that the white light (the capture LED) on the front of the smart glasses turns on while she speaks normally, without saying “Hey Meta”, suggesting that the microphone is active.
Since Android Authority reported the phenomenon, Meta claims the issue has been fixed, but hasn’t provided much information beyond that. Gizmodo has contacted Meta independently and will update this article with any additional information.
Accident or not, it’s not really a good overview. People are already skeptical of Meta’s smart glasses for many reasons. There’s the fact that smart glasses in general have been used for disgusting things like recording people without their knowledge, which is a problem with smart glasses across the board, but there are also meta-specific problems. In a report released earlier this year, Meta contractors said they were tasked with watching private videos collected by Meta’s smart glasses as part of its AI training program. These videos, they say, contained nude images, people using toilets, people having sex and even banking credentials. Some of them may have been captured accidentally by users.
As a reminder, voice assistants have long been the subject of privacy concerns, dating back to 2019, when companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google were all embroiled in separate scandals regarding their collection of user audio recordings. Some of these records, like the ones above, contained sensitive information, and these companies have since allowed users to opt out of having this information collected.
Regardless, new or not, given the current sensitivity of the general climate around smart glasses, it’s probably not beneficial from a brand perspective to record and store the conversations of people who have no reason to believe their conversation is being recorded. If you wanted ammunition against using or loving smart glasses, you only had a few more bullets at your disposal.
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