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A man left his RayBan Meta glasses recording in a bedroom. His wife walked in and undressed. A worker in Kenya watched t

Cheeta · 2026-08-25 · 4 min read · treechat · tx b0d59c…5697 · block 963,777

A man left his Ray-Ban Meta glasses recording in a bedroom. His wife walked in and undressed. A worker in Kenya watched the whole clip. That is not a hack. That is not a leaked file. That is how the product works. Here is the full story. The BBC and Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Goteborgs-Posten investigated a Nairobi outsourcing company called Sama in early 2026. Sama is a Meta subcontractor. Meta paid Sama workers to review video and image data from Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to train Meta AI. One worker's words to the reporters: "We see everything. From living rooms to naked bodies." Workers told the papers they saw glasses users going to the toilet. Having sex. Watching pornography. And that one bedroom clip. Meta says filtering is supposed to blur faces in images. Sources who spoke to the Swedish papers said sometimes the blurring failed and people's faces could be seen. Meta sold 7 million Ray-Ban Meta glasses in 2025. They look like normal Ray-Bans. Wayfarers. Aviators. The camera is in the right corner of the frame. Most people never see it. Here is the part most owners never read. On April 29, 2025, Meta updated its Ray-Ban Meta privacy policy for the United States. Meta's exact wording to US users, reported by The Verge: "The choice to turn off voice recordings storage is no longer an option, but you can remove recordings at any time through settings." Before that update, US owners could turn off cloud storage of their voice recordings. After that update, they cannot. When storage is on, Meta's own Voice Privacy Notice says voice transcripts and recordings are kept for up to one year to help improve Meta's products, including training Meta AI. Unintentional voice activations, the ones where the glasses thought they heard "Hey Meta" but you did not say it, get deleted after 90 days. Everything else stays for a year. There is no auto-delete for the intentional recordings. You have to open the app and delete them one at a time. And when someone says "Hey Meta, what am I looking at," the camera fires and sends the image to Meta's cloud. Some of those images get routed to human contractors like the ones in Nairobi. Meta confirmed this to the BBC. Here is what happened after the Swedish investigation. The UK Information Commissioner's Office wrote to Meta calling the claims "concerning" and asked how Meta is meeting its obligations under UK data protection law. On March 4, 2026, Clarkson Law Firm filed a class action lawsuit against Meta in federal court in San Francisco. The named plaintiffs are Gina Bartone of New Jersey and Mateo Canu of California. Consumers say they believed content recorded by the glasses remained private. Less than two months after the Swedish investigation was published, Meta canceled its contract with Sama. Sama said the cancellation would result in 1,108 Kenyan workers being made redundant. Meta said it ended the work because Sama "don't meet our standards." Sama pushed back publicly: "At no point were we notified of any failure to meet those standards, and we stand firmly behind the quality and integrity of our work." A Kenyan worker organization said the real reason was different. Naftali Wambalo of the Africa Tech Workers Movement told the BBC: "What I think are the standards they are talking about here are standards of secrecy." Now here is the 5-minute action if you own a pair. Every setting below is inside the Meta AI app on your phone. Tap the Glasses icon in the top right, then Device settings. Setting 1: Delete your voice history. Go to Glasses privacy, then Voice activity log. Tap Delete all. Everything you have ever said to your glasses after "Hey Meta" comes out of Meta's stored library the moment you delete it. There is no auto-delete. You have to do this yourself. Setting 2: Turn off Cloud media. Glasses privacy, Cloud media toggle, off. When it is on, every photo and video you capture gets uploaded to Meta's servers for 30 days. When it is off, captures stay on your phone unless you share them. Setting 3: If you are willing to give up hands-free, fully disable "Hey Meta" voice commands. That stops the camera from firing on voice queries and stops new voice data from being stored. Setting 4: Never say "Hey Meta, what am I looking at" in a private space. That specific command sends the image to Meta's cloud and puts it in the queue that human contractors can see. Here is the last thing. You are the product. Your voice is the training data. Your camera roll is the training data. Your bedroom is the training data. Meta took the voice-storage opt-out away from Americans on April 29, 2025, and did not send a push notification about it. The little white light on the front of the glasses tells you when someone else is recording you. Nothing tells you when Meta is recording you.