Meta’s smart glasses streamed intimate footage to Kenya — without telling you

When Ray-Ban Meta glasses face a room, they record. According to a class action lawsuit filed in California federal court, that recording then traveled to Sama, a Kenya-based content moderation company, where workers reviewed the footage and labeled it for artificial intelligence training. The complaint describes footage that included people visiting the bathroom, undressing, engaging in intimate activity, and children during diaper changes and bathing. Faces in the footage were identifiable, the suit alleges, despite Meta’s stated anonymization effort.

Meta sold those glasses with a specific promise. “Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are built with privacy at their core,” the company wrote in its marketing materials at launch. The class action argues that claim was not accurate. The lawsuit draws on testimony from Sama workers, who described what they had reviewed in interviews with Swedish investigative journalists earlier this year.

An amended complaint filed at the end of August extends the plaintiff class in a legally significant direction: it now includes people who never bought or wore the glasses — bystanders who appeared in recordings made by someone else in a restaurant, a home, a workplace, or a public space. The attorneys estimate the expanded class covers millions of people. The inclusion of bystanders, individuals who had no relationship with the product at all, is the most legally novel element of the case.

There is a distinction worth drawing between what the lawsuit alleges is illegal and what is routine in the AI industry. Human review of AI training data is standard across the sector. Companies including Apple, Google, and Amazon have all used contractors to review voice recordings, images, and other user data to improve their models. Meta invokes exactly this comparison in its response: reviewing data for product improvement “works the same way as many other companies.” The legal theory here is narrower — that users and bystanders were never told this was happening inside a product whose entire marketing rested on privacy.

The allegations remain unproven. The case is in early litigation, Meta has rejected the characterization of what Sama workers reviewed, and courts have historically been cautious about extending standing to bystander plaintiffs who had no direct relationship with a product. Clarkson Law Firm, co-leading the case, has a track record of pushing the legal boundaries of consumer privacy suits — and a track record of losing some of them.

The next threshold is class-action certification, where a judge will decide whether the wearer class and the bystander class can proceed together or separately — or at all. That ruling will determine whether the argument that bystanders hold privacy rights over footage taken by hardware they never chose to own reaches trial. Meta has said it will fight the allegations.

Tags: meta, privacy, wearables, AI training, class action, Ray-Ban Meta