> Meta said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.

Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.

Which is why I'd never touch a person tech device from Meta.

Their entire DNA is written to exploit their users for profit. In my judgement, they literally cannot and will never consider those issues as anything other than something to obscure to keep people unaware of the depth of the exploitation.

Probably this is people asking the glasses something about what they see and the glasses uploading video for classification to generate an answer.

People think it is "just AI" so are not very concerned about privacy.

The thing that really gets me is that internally there are 4 levels of data 1 being public domain shit (the sky is blue) up to 4 which is private user data, or something that is sensitive if leaked or shared.

I was told that by default all user data is level 4, as in if you do anything without decent approval, you're insta fired. There are many stories about at least one person a month during boot camp accessing user data and getting escorted out of the building within hours.

The part where I worked, in visual research, we had to jump through a years worth of legal hoops to get permission to record videos in public. We had to build an anonymisation pipeline, bullet proof audit trail, delete as much data as possible, with auto delete if something went wrong.

We had rigid rule about where that data could be stored and _who_ could access it. We were not allowed to share "wild" footage (ie data that might have the hint of anyone who hadn't signed a contract) for annotation because it would be given to a third party. THe public datasets we released all had traceable people, locations all with legal waivers signed.

Then I hear they just started fucking hosing private data to annotators to _train_ on? without any fucking basic controls at all? Just shows that whenever Zuck or monetsization want something, the rules don't apply.

I look forward to that entire industry collapsing in on it's self.

⸻

1. The first rhyme that came to mind was bow, but I realized there was a problem with that example.

Or they might start scanning for "problematic" behavior, a bit like the Apple CSAM fingerprinting initiative.

So not one part of me would ever buy Meta glasses (or the Snap glasses before that). You simply don't have sufficient control over the recordings and big tech companies can't be trusted, as we've witnessed from outsourced workers sharing explicit images. And I bet that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I honestly don't understand why anyone would get these and trust Meta to manage the risks.

At this scale, this sound like some insider joke contract made up only to make some hustle on the side capitalizing with stock options on the possibility of adhoc news trading bots glitching out on the keyword, here "x.com/sama" signals.

So it doesn’t surprise me that Meta didnt renew/cancelled a contract that is a net negative for them. Arguing over the reason seems fruitless as no reason is needed per the terms of the contract (I assume since breach of contract wasn’t brought up by the sub).

Meta isn’t lying, you should assume other companies are doing it too, Tesla did it with their cameras, and assume others like any company has access to your camera, I would even assume CCTV cameras too. It’s why for anything sensitive, try to use open source stacks, you might lose some of the features, but it’s a needed compromise.

Because nobody knows how to put a dot of nail polish on an led they don't want seen, right?

“Yes, we all know it, and we keep those app installed regardless“.

Maybe a company with those standards should not get our business. Oops, no wait, maybe they mean the Friedman Doctrine standards? In that case they are entitled to do any and every thing to make a profit. No matter what the harm.

[edit: add last two sentences]

1. Meta AFAIR paid/compensated people — contractors or recruited via ads — to have them submit their data. There are strict privacy protocol and reviews in place to distinguish data use in these cases vs gen public. This is not to say the process is perfect, but if these users are gen public, I would be very shocked.

2. Hiring contractors to submit data is a more controlled environment VS recruitment of gen pub via ads to submit data, but the former has more well understood privacy disclosures than the latter. This means in practice asking contractors to wear glasses and "move around their surroundings naturally and do things" goes well with basically the privacy practice "the data your are submitting we can view and use all of it for purpose X and nothing but X". BUT this framing is with ad based recruited people — which are general users who willingly submit data — is much much harder. My suspicion is they are running ad based recruiting in general public and while those users may have signed a privacy statement it is very surprising that they did not tighten the privacy practices around the use of the data and who has access.