GoKawiilUsing the glasses' AI features comes with some pretty big tradeoffs on privacy. If you use a Meta AI feature that requires use of the camera, like Live AI or simply asking Meta about something you're looking at, your glasses snap a photo for the assistant to analyze. Those captures, which are not saved to your camera roll, are stored and saved by Meta.
Meta also employs third-party contractors, who review and label these captures, in order to train their AI systems. "When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people's experience, as many other companies do," a Meta spokesperson told Engadget. "We take steps to filter this data to protect people's privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed."
Of course, Meta doesn't exactly make this clear when you use one of its AI features. But it's important to remember that any time you are asking Meta AI to "see" what you're seeing, that image can be seen by an unknown number of third-parties. And even though Meta says it attempts to safeguard personal details, there are reports that third-party contractors have been tasked with reviewing extremely sensitive footage captured from users' glasses.
This is particularly relevant for people who use the company's smart glasses for accessibility, a use case Meta has heavily promoted. Multimodal features like Live AI can be especially helpful for people who are blind or have low vision. But people who rely on these features more often should also be aware of how their recordings are captured and processed by the company. It's probably a good idea to avoid using AI features when dealing with documents that contain personal details, or in environments when you'd otherwise be uncomfortable being recorded.