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The idea that Meta will automatically see any photo or video captured with its glasses is something I've encountered a lot in my reporting about people's discomfort with the product. You wouldn't expect a photo shared on Instagram or Facebook to stay private, so it's understandable that people might assume the same for anything captured on the company's smart glasses. But that's not the case, according to Meta. "Unless users choose to share media they've captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user's device," a Meta spokesperson confirmed to me. Things get a little more complicat

Using the glasses' AI features comes with some pretty big tradeoffs on privacy. If you use a Meta AI feature that requires use of the camera, like Live AI or simply asking Meta about something you're looking at, your glasses snap a photo for the assistant to analyze. Those captures, which are not saved to your camera roll, are stored and saved by Meta. Meta also employs third-party contractors, who review and label these captures, in order to train their AI systems. "When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people's e

Unfortunately, yes, and there are many, many instances of people behaving badly while doing so. When used as intended, Meta's smart glasses have an LED light that flashes when you take a photo and blinks when you record a video. If you block the light, like with a piece of electrical tape, the glasses have a built-in feature that prevents the camera from being used. However, as I recently reported, there are ways around this. There are a number of companies selling aftermarket accessories meant to block the light without triggering Meta's detection systems. There has also been a thriving marke

As with using camera-based AI features, voice interactions are also less private by default. Whenever you interact with Meta's assistant, your glasses record what you say and create a transcript that's automatically saved by Meta. The company used to allow smart glasses' owners to opt-out of having these recordings stored in its cloud, but that's no longer the case if you live in the United States, (EU-based users can do so, though, thanks to stricter privacy laws in the region.) According to Meta, it uses both machine learning and "trained reviewers" to process these recordings and transcript