Remember the film Anon, or that unsettling Black Mirror episode where ocular implants let you see everything through someone else’s eyes? Well, I hate to break it to you: that’s not science fiction anymore. Reality has already lapped it.
According to an investigation by Svenska Dagbladet (an excellent long-form piece — link in the first comment, go read it) Meta’s new AI smart glasses aren’t just futuristic eyewear. They’re devices that capture sensitive audio and video — largely without the user’s full awareness — and ship it off to human annotators in countries like Kenya to train artificial intelligence.
Read the article and you’ll discover how recorded images — including intimate or private ones — end up in Meta’s databases, where they’re analysed and labelled by third-party contractors.
And if you’re wondering what happened to the right to privacy: Zuckerberg, the world’s most well-funded voyeur, wipes his hands of the whole concept. The fact that people thousands of kilometres away are watching what should be private? Not his problem. All of it sacrificed on the altar of the next AI model upgrade.
Strip away the glitter: enrolment in the service is effectively mandatory, the terms of service are vague and subject to change at Mark’s next mood swing, and transparency about who sees what — and for how long — is conveniently limited.
I can’t help but notice how technology advances at a speed that seems to belong to an entirely different universe from our social and cultural norms.
On one side: tools that could genuinely augment reality and expand our creative and operational capabilities through AI. On the other: a fundamental human need for personal space, control, autonomy, and privacy.
Do we really believe that when we use AR glasses, voice assistants, or LLMs, there’s no one watching — perhaps an annotator in Kenya or elsewhere — interpreting data that should be ours alone?
Do we genuinely think that every layer of automated inference is just machine and not machine + human eyes for moderation and oversight, possibly in countries operating under entirely different rules from our own?
I’d be curious to know whether Antonino Polimeni has any interest in reading this piece and sharing his perspective on the regulatory side.