Technology

Meta’s approach to user privacy is under renewed scrutiny following a Swedish report that employees of a Meta subcontractor have watched footage captured by Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses showing sensitive user content.

The workers reportedly work for Kenya-headquartered Sama and provide data annotation for Ray-Ban Metas.

The February report, a collaboration from Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, and Kenya-based freelance journalist Naipanoi Lepapa, is, per a machine translation, based on interviews with over 30 employees at various levels of Sama, including several people who work with video, image, and speech annotation for Meta’s AI systems. Some of the people interviewed have worked on projects other than Meta’s smart glasses. The report’s authors said they did not gain access to the materials that Sama workers handle or the area where workers perform data annotation. The report is also based on interviews with former US Meta employees who have reportedly witnessed live data annotation for several Meta projects.

The report pointed to, per the translation, a “stream of privacy-sensitive data that is fed straight into the tech giant’s systems,” and that makes Sama workers uncomfortable. The authors said that several people interviewed for the report said they have seen footage shot with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that shows people having sex and using the bathroom.