Privacy

The reality can be messy. Meta contractors based in Nairobi, Kenya, told Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten in a recently published joint investigation that they’re being told to review highly sensitive and intimate data.

“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed,” one contractor for a company called Sama said. “I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.”

“I saw a video where a man puts the glasses on the bedside table and leaves the room,” one data annotator told the newspapers. “Shortly afterwards his wife comes in and changes her clothes.”

Other footage included imagery of people’s bank cards, users watching porn, or even filming entire “sex scenes.”

An employee added that they felt forced to watch and annotate or else risk losing their job.

“You understand that it is someone’s private life you are looking at, but at the same time you are just expected to carry out the work,” the employee said. “You are not supposed to question it. If you start asking questions, you are gone.”

Buried in Meta’s AI terms of use, the company reserves the right to have the company “review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations with or messages to AIs, and this review can be automated or manual (human).”

The document also warned that users shouldn’t share information that “you don’t want the AIs to use and retain, such as information about sensitive topics.”

But given the kind of information data annotators are being asked to review, many users don’t appear to be aware of that last piece of advice.

Worst of all, owners of Meta’s AI glasses simply don’t have the option of making use of the AI features without agreeing to share data shared with Meta’s remote servers. And once the data is sent, it’s already often too late.