Meta’s Ray Ban AI glasses have shot up in popularity in recent years, selling over seven million pairs in 2025 in a considerable jump over the two million it sold in 2023 and 2024 combined.
While the smart glasses have scored big with consumers, allowing them to record first-person footage through an integrated camera and microphone array, and analyzing the world around them through Meta’s AI model, the hardware has sparked a heated debate. Critics say enabling facial recognition in the glasses’ software could have dangerous implications, especially considering the militarization of law enforcement and Meta’s abysmal track record when it comes to ensuring the privacy of users.
And regardless of the wearer’s intention, much of the footage being recorded by the glasses is being sent to offshore contractors for data labeling, a widely-used preprocessing step in training new AI models in which human contractors are asked to review and annotate footage. It’s a laborious and highly resource-intensive process that tech companies often gloss over when discussing the prowess of their latest AI models.
The reality can be messy. Meta contractors based in Nairobi, Kenya, told Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten in a recently published joint investigation that they’re being told to review highly sensitive and intimate data.
“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed,” one contractor for a company called Sama said. “I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.”
“I saw a video where a man puts the glasses on the bedside table and leaves the room,” one data annotator told the newspapers. “Shortly afterwards his wife comes in and changes her clothes.”
Other footage included imagery of people’s bank cards, users watching porn, or even filming entire “sex scenes.”
An employee added that they felt forced to watch and annotate or else risk losing their job.
“You understand that it is someone’s private life you are looking at, but at the same time you are just expected to carry out the work,” the employee said. “You are not supposed to question it. If you start asking questions, you are gone.”
Buried in Meta’s AI terms of use, the company reserves the right to have the company “review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations with or messages to AIs, and this review can be automated or manual (human).”
The document also warned that users shouldn’t share information that “you don’t want the AIs to use and retain, such as information about sensitive topics.”
But given the kind of information data annotators are being asked to review, many users don’t appear to be aware of that last piece of advice.
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