Ray-Ban Stories

We all love sunglasses, but what if they shared all your data with Meta, Facebook’s parent company? In the past, that was just a beautiful dream. The Ray-Ban Stories sunglasses make it a nightmarish reality.

The Ray-Ban Stories, released last year, are part of a partnership with Meta to develop AR products. The sunglasses have two cameras and three microphones built-in that connect to Meta apps, as well as voice commands you can use to record what you’re seeing and hearing and post it to social media. They also shield your eyes from the sun, I guess.

Cameras: Yes

Microphones: Yes

Location tracking: Yes

What data it collects: Name, email address, password, photo, video and video recordings, contacts, social media usage, purchase information, voice search history, browsing data

Can you delete the data: Mozilla says it’s not clear whether you can delete the data in all locations.

How the company uses the data: Advertising, working with third parties, processing voice data and transcripts, improving algorithms

Mozilla says:

“Beyond all of these very serious privacy concerns, there’s another, perhaps even bigger privacy concern that must be considered. Meta/Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem quite obsessed with owning the real estate on our faces for the augmented reality and virtual reality metaverse of the future. But what does it mean when a person puts cameras and microphones on their face and points them out at the world? How do you know if you’re being recorded by these glasses? Mea says there’s a little LED light that shows they are recording, but some privacy regulators worry that isn’t enough to protect people from unknown recording.”

Mozilla’s review:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/ray-ban-facebook-stories/