Meta is facing a class action lawsuit over its AI smart glasses, with plaintiffs alleging that the company misled consumers about how footage captured by the devices may be reviewed.
The lawsuit was filed March 4 in a federal court in San Francisco and centers on claims that the company’s marketing overstated the privacy protections built into its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
The legal action follows reporting by Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, which says that footage taken on Meta’s AI smart glasses is being watched by workers in Kenya who review footage used to train the company’s AI systems.
According to the report, contractors tasked with labeling objects in video clips have encountered private and sensitive scenes recorded by users. Workers said they had viewed intimate material, including bathroom visits, sexual encounters, and other personal moments.
The lawsuit argues that Meta failed to disclose the role of human reviewers in its AI training process.
“This nationwide class action seeks to hold Meta responsible for its affirmatively false advertising and failure to disclose the true nature of surveillance and its connection to the company’s AI data collection pipeline,” the complaint states, per Engadget.
The case was filed by Clarkson Law Firm and names two plaintiffs: Gina Bartone of New Jersey and Mateo Canu of California. Both purchased the glasses after seeing marketing that described the devices as “designed for privacy.” According to the complaint, they relied on those claims and say they would not have bought the product if they had known that some captured footage could be reviewed by contractors.
The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and injunctive relief. It also argues that the review process undermines the product’s privacy claims.
“The undisclosed human review pipeline renders the Meta AI Glasses’ privacy features materially misleading, transforms the product from a personal device into a surveillance conduit, and exposes consumers to unreasonable risks of dignitary harm, emotional distress, stalking, extortion, identity theft, and reputational injury,” the lawsuit says.
The complaint further alleges that workers reviewing the material have seen sensitive details in recordings. “Indeed, Meta employees and contractors have described viewing credit card numbers, nudity, sexual activity, and identifiable faces in the footage they reviewed, and reported that Meta’s purported anonymization safeguards do not reliably function.”
Meta has not commented directly on the lawsuit but acknowledged that human reviewers may be involved in some cases.
“Ray-Ban Meta glasses help you use AI, hands free, to answer questions about the world around you. Unless users choose to share media they’ve captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user’s device,” a Meta spokesperson tells Engadget.
“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. We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed.”
However, workers involved in the review process have said those filtering systems do not always prevent private content from appearing in the material they assess.
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