Meta at the center of a scandal. Intimate recordings from Ray-Ban glasses fell into the wrong hands

It was supposed to be a breakthrough in technology, but it turned out to be a gigantic moral and legal scandal. Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, advertised as “designed with privacy in mind,” have become a tool of mass surveillance. A class action lawsuit has just been filed in court, which shows that intimate moments from users' lives were viewed en masse by contract workers in Kenya.

It started with an investigation by Swedish journalists from “Svenska Dagbladet” and ended with a tough legal battle in the USA. Users who trusted Mark Zuckerberg's assurances about data security may feel cheated. According to the procedural documents, recordings from the glasses were sent to external companies, where thousands of employees manually “labeled” video materials to train Meta AI artificial intelligence algorithms.

“You are watching someone else's life and you have to remain silent.”

The accounts of employees of the Kenyan company Sama, which is a subcontractor of the giant, are chilling. Anonymous informants admit that their screens regularly featured recordings from bedrooms, bathrooms, and even sex scenes or people changing clothes in their homes.

– You understand that what you are viewing is someone's private life, but you are expected to do your duty. If you start asking questions, you're fired, said one of the moderators. Systems that were supposed to automatically blur faces and sensitive data (such as payment card numbers visible in the recordings) fail in every fifth case, according to witnesses.

A trap in the regulations

Meta defends itself by pointing to provisions in the regulations that say interactions with AI can be reviewed “automatically or manually.” However, lawyers representing the injured parties emphasize that marketing slogans such as “Under your control” were misleading to consumers. Most users were unaware that the AI ​​assistant function required sending the image to servers where it could be viewed by a human.

The problem is huge – only in 2025 Meta has sold over seven million pairs of these glasses. Each of these users could unknowingly become the hero of a “film” that was sent to another continent for analysis.

Experts warn: this is just the beginning

Regulatory authorities in Great Britain and the USA have already become interested in the matter. Cybersecurity experts point out that the era of “wearables” carries risks that we have not known before. Our AI glasses, watches and necklaces become a window into our most private moments, to which corporations hold the keys.

The class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco demands not only enormous damages, but above all a change in the way Meta informs about data processing. Will this issue hinder the development of smart glasses? For now, one thing is certain: when you take off your Ray-Bans before entering the bathroom, you are doing what their creators did not foresee in the advertising campaign.

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