If you needed another reason to be skeptical of Meta’s smart glasses, congratulations—you can add “may record without my knowledge” to the seemingly never-ending list. As noted by Android Authority, people who own Meta’s smart glasses have noticed that, after a recent firmware update, their smart glasses have been keeping records of some conversations even if they didn’t wake up the smart glasses’ voice assistant first.
In some cases, according to a Reddit thread with people who own Meta’s smart glasses, Meta AI didn’t even respond despite apparently being triggered. Some accounts also suggest the “respond without Hey Meta” feature had been turned off prior to the conversations being captured. The Reddit user who started the thread reports noticing the white light (the capture LED) on the front of the smart glasses turning on while they’re speaking normally, without saying “Hey Meta,” suggesting that the microphone is active.
Since Android Authority reported the phenomenon, Meta says that the problem has been fixed, but it didn’t offer much information outside of that. Gizmodo has reached out to Meta independently and will update this article with any further information.
Accident or not, it’s not exactly a good look. People are already skeptical of Meta’s smart glasses for plenty of reasons. There’s the fact that smart glasses in general have been used for icky stuff like recording people without their knowledge, which is a problem with smart glasses across the board, but there are also Meta-specific issues, too. In a report earlier this year, contractors for Meta said they were tasked with watching private videos collected by Meta’s smart glasses as part of its AI training program. Those videos, they say, contained nude imagery, people using the bathroom, people having sex, and even some bank credentials. Some of them may have been captured accidentally by users.
For context, voice assistants have long been the subject of privacy concerns, dating all the way back to 2019 when companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google all got embroiled in separate scandals regarding their collection of user audio recordings. Some of those recordings, like the ones above, contained sensitive information, and those companies have since allowed users to opt out of having that information collected.
Still, novel or not, with how sensitive the general climate is around smart glasses right now, it’s probably not advantageous from a brand perspective to log and store conversations of people who have no reason to think their conversation is being recorded. If you wanted ammunition against using or liking smart glasses, you just got a few more bullets at your disposal.
