Meta was one of the first tech giants to bring smart glasses to the mainstream market, thanks to a partnership with Ray-Ban. Unfortunately, Meta’s reputation for spying on users just landed a vicious blow to its hardware ambitions. According to a former business partner, Meta is secretly recording and saving everything its users see through its Meta Ray-Ban glasses, from simple outings to much more intimate encounters.
Sama says Meta is watching
The claim comes from Sama, a Kenyan-based AI company that partnered with Meta starting in 2017. According to its website, Sama helps train AI and machine learning models by annotating, validating, and evaluating large swaths of data. It’s also part of the Everest Group, an organization recognized by former President Clinton and the Clinton Foundation for outsourcing jobs to “underserved communities.” During their partnership, Sama provided moderation services to Meta that are no longer part of its business portfolio.
Privacy is more at risk now than ever.
In 2022, Sama filed a lawsuit against Meta over poor working conditions, unreasonable pay, poor mental health support for employees, and infringement on employee privacy. As part of their moderation partnership, some employees were forced to view and flag distressing content on Meta’s platforms, including murder and sex crimes involving minors. However, the companies continued to work together for many years, leading up to this year.
In April 2026, Sama employees filed new complaints expressing that they reviewed intimate footage captured by customers’ Meta Ray-Ban glasses. While not as graphic as the scenes from 2022, content included users visiting the bathroom, undressing in their bedrooms, and even engaging in private adult relations.
Weeks after these details emerged, Meta severed its contract with Sama, forcing its former partner to fire more than 1,000 staff members to account for the financial loss.
The worst part
It’s honestly hard to pick out the worst part of this story. Is it Meta’s alleged negligence of Sama’s employees? Is it the illegal content that requires human moderation on Meta’s platforms? Is it the fact that Sama continued to work with Meta, despite the poor conditions?
It’s all terrible. But looking at the story from a tech angle, it’s particularly disturbing that Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses captured footage and uploaded it directly to Meta’s servers to be saved and reviewed, especially when users weren’t aware this was happening. The news is a clear violation of user privacy, and it highlights Meta’s blatant lie that “you’re in control of your data and content.”
Clearly not.
RELATED: Trump phones begin shipping as liberal media melts down: ‘You got scammed’
Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Meta’s privacy policies
The marketing drivel Meta pushes on a webpage is one thing though. What do its legally binding privacy policies say? Several times, the original policy mentions that humans may review user content for various purposes, especially to “combat harmful or unlawful behavior,” including scenes deemed to be troubling until a person reviews it and decides otherwise. The page reads:
The Meta products are designed to research and help ensure the safety, integrity, and security of those services and those people who enjoy them, on and off Meta products. We process information we have associated with you and apply automated processing techniques and, in some instances, conduct manual (human) review.
A second policy specifically for “supplemental Meta platforms” includes AI-powered smart glasses like Meta Ray-Ban. Under the photos, videos, and audio section, it states:
You can use the AI Glasses to take photos and video recordings with audio. … We will process your Media when you turn on cloud processing on your AI Glasses, interact with the Meta AI service on your AI Glasses, or upload your Media to certain services provided by Meta (i.e., Facebook or Instagram). You can change your choices about cloud processing of your Media at any time in Settings.
In other words, Meta Ray-Bans may process footage on Meta’s servers when cloud services are turned on, and this feature can be disabled in settings. Unfortunately, the only thing that mentions human review in the policy references audio processing for Meta VR products, like the Meta Quest. That means, as far as the supplemental privacy policy is concerned, Meta employees should not have the right to review footage captured on Meta Ray-Ban glasses.
Yet, Sama says it does.
Maybe don’t trust that camera on your face
Smart glasses are a niche product that haven’t fully caught on with the general public, and no one’s exactly sure how to feel about them. On one hand, smart glasses can be used for noble causes, like making the streets safer from illegal aliens and criminals. On the other, it opens Pandora’s box for mass surveillance of the American people. Clearly, Meta is choosing the latter, even if it doesn’t say it out loud.
The moral of the story is that Meta Ray-Ban glasses can’t be trusted, whether you wear a pair yourself or you know someone who does. These devices can record everything they see, with that footage accessible to third-party contractors and Meta employees.
Of course, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with Meta’s business practices. The company has found itself in plenty of privacy-related legal trouble over the years, from WhatsApp’s questionable encryption to its now-defunct Onavo Protect VPN data-tracking scandal, and more.
At their core, Meta Ray-Bans are intrusive with huge privacy implications for their users and the people around them. This is the same problem Google Glass faced more than a decade ago, and now that extended reality glasses are on the rise again, privacy is more at risk now than ever.
Meta, Ray-ban, Surveillance, Privacy, Tech
