What you see is what Meta AI sees when wearing Leilanyuan smart glasses, and your opt-out option is getting narrower. According to The Verge, in the latest update to the privacy policy for devices received by most owners in the email sent on April 29, Meta has opened up the ability to collect more data to train its AI models.
Under the new policy, Meta explains: “Unless you turn off “Hey Me”, your glasses always enable meta-AI used by the camera,” the activation phrase is used to communicate with the company’s AI assistant. Wake-up words or phrases like this are common to AI devices, and the trade-off is that they are technically always waiting and waiting to be activated.
Having the assistant always waits to hear your task can remove some friction to the features, but it also opens up the disturbing reality that these devices may be collecting information even if you don’t consider them. In this case, if the “Hey Meta” function is kept active, the Meta can use any image it captures through the built-in camera lens. Meta says the camera is not always recording, so this only applies to photos or videos that users capture using their devices.
Additionally, META’s latest update removes the ability of users to prevent their voice recordings from being stored on the Meta server. Instead, if the user wants to cut off access to the Meta before the recording expires, all recordings must be deleted manually. The company’s policy now reads: “The option to disable voice recording storage is no longer available, but you can delete recordings in your settings at any time.” According to Meta’s voice privacy notice, the company will store voice transcripts and recordings “a product that helps improve Meta for up to a year.” “The unexpected sound interaction was saved for 90 days.
Gizmodo has contacted Meta to comment on these changes, but we did not hear back at the time of publication.
The motivation for all this is very obvious: more data is provided to the AI machine. Meta just launched live translation features on Ray-Ban Smartglass, which provide real-time translation between several supported languages, including French, Italian, Spanish and English. It has also just launched a standalone meta-AI application. It’s clear that the company currently has full power to introduce AI, which means it needs to keep all the data fine-tuned, especially after the numbers allegedly captured in the benchmark.
This is an inevitable direction with a microphone and camera device. At some point, companies that make equipment will decide what they can capture is more valuable than any privacy look. They will flip the switch, the glasses on your face or the speakers in your home will become surveillance devices.
