Meta announced its Ray-Ban smart glasses a few days ago and everyone has been excited about owning one for themselves. The experience is like recording everything that you see from your point of view. Undoubtedly, with this news, Meta has brought its metaverse dream back into reality.

But at the same time, things can get a little concerning when it comes to privacy. 

Simply put, the smart glasses would be integrated with microphones, speakers, and a camera. The small camera lenses on the glasses record 1080p videos and take 12-megapixel photos, along with sharing them on social media platforms. Added to that is the fact that you can also livestream to Facebook and Instagram.

Why would Meta be so careless

Imagine you are in a public place and someone is wearing these smart glasses and starts live recording. To mitigate this privacy risk, Meta has introduced a white light that indicates to the people around that it is recording. But is that really enough?

Meta did introduce these glasses with Ray-Ban two years ago and no one really knew what to do with them. This resulted in around 90 percent of the users dropping them. The introduction of cameras and speakers, along with live streaming, may attract a lot of users this time, but it just introduces a lot of concerns for people who are not wearing them. 

As discussions on Hacker News point out, the advent of more and more smart devices always brings up the question of privacy. “Smart” glasses come with a unique set of privacy challenges.

Unlike traditional cameras and cell phones that require conscious effort to capture content, glasses can discreetly stream and record without the knowledge or consent of those around. This inherent invasion of privacy sparks legitimate concerns about how these devices will be used and regulated in various social settings.

In a recent podcast with Lex Fridman, Mark Zuckerberg was confident about the future of Metaverse with such glasses. “I think we’re moving towards a world where we’re gonna have something that looks like normal glasses where you see the physical world, but you’ll see holograms,” said Zuckerberg.

One of the most significant concerns with Meta’s smart glasses is the potential for invasive surveillance. While the white light indicator is intended to signal when recording is taking place, it’s not foolproof, and there may still be situations where people are recorded without their knowledge or consent. This raises legitimate worries about the erosion of personal privacy in public spaces.

Meta goes in for data

Earlier, Meta launched its Threads platform, competing with Elon Musk’s X, to know what we think. Musk has said that it will use the data from the social media platform to train AI models. Possibly, Zuckerberg wanted to do the same thing. Now, with the race towards multimodality, Meta wants real-life data from people to build its model.

The smart glasses are always going to be on our noses and watching everything. It seems as though, instead of onboarding people onto the metaverse, Meta now wants to see what people are doing in their lives, capturing people’s BTS, as Meta put it at the Meta Connect 2023. Anyway, Meta is no stranger to messing with people’s privacy all these years as well. 

When Apple announced Vision Pro, it felt like it was trying to make everyone into a zombie. Apple at least knows a little bit about privacy. Now with Meta smart glasses, the trend continues, and it raises important questions about the intersection of technology and privacy in our everyday lives. 

The question of data ownership and usage looms large. Meta’s appetite for data is well-documented, and it’s reasonable to assume that the company will gather a significant amount of personal information through these smart glasses. What will Meta do with this data, and how will it be protected? These are crucial questions that demand answers as we move further into the age of wearable technology.