An investigation into Meta’s AI Smart Glasses by two of Sweden’s most established newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten took them to Kenya where Meta’s data annotation partner Sama employs human data annotators. These workers help make the glasses “smart” by annotate/label the various images users see.
As part of this job, the annotators get a window into the lives of the wearers – except sometimes the window is much more revealing than the glass wearer might realize.
“I saw a video where a man puts the glasses on the bedside table and leaves the room. Shortly afterwards his wife comes in and changes her clothes”, one of them says.
“Someone may have been walking around with the glasses, or happened to be wearing them, and then the person’s partner was in the bathroom, or they had just come out naked”, an employee says.
“There are also sex scenes filmed with the smart glasses – someone is wearing them having sex. That is why this is so extremely sensitive. There are cameras everywhere in our office, and you are not allowed to bring your own phones or any device that can record”, an employee says.
One annotator sums it up: “You think that if they knew about the extent of the data collection, no one would dare to use the glasses”.
There’s a cost to smart glasses getting smarter. It helps to be thoughtful as to when we’re comfortable for our data to be training data.
A Learning a Day 