Meta is testing arguably its most controversial wearable idea, it seems. According to a report by Financial Times, the social media giant currently has “super sensing” AI glasses at work in its test labs. The core premise behind these AI glasses is that they want to record all the visuals and audio recordings in the world around you. The idea behind these super-sensing AI glasses is not turning them into an always-hearing, always-listening machine that definitely sounds like a privacy nightmare.
Meta apparently wants all that data recorded by its next-gen smart glasses to serve as a base of knowledge and eventually turn into a personal agent or assistant. Mark Zuckerberg has previously hinted that this personal agent should be with you around the clock and be able to assist you with anything you need. Instead of just acting like a generic AI agent that listens to your queries and gives an answer based on its memory or the knowledge it has been trained on.
This smells dangerous
Right now, as soon as a person starts to capture photos or videos using the onboard cameras on Meta’s AI smart glasses, a white ring light activates, making sure that any other person who is appearing in the camera’s field of view can discern whether they are being recorded.
However, those measures haven’t proven to be rock solid. Soon after the launch of Meta’s smart glasses, there were multiple reports showing evidence that you could tamper with the LED indicator light, ensuring that videos could be recorded without alerting any other person in the camera view. Last night, Meta announced that it will entirely disable the camera if the LED indicator light is physically tampered with or it is covered. This feature will be rolled out through a software update on the existing lineup of Meta’s smart glasses.
And that begs the question: if Meta is indeed developing a super-sensing smart wearable, something that keeps recording audio and video constantly, will the LED light forever be on and visible to every person who appears in the camera’s frame?
“Executives are currently planning not to activate the LED when the super-sensing features are being used, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. That would make it harder for bystanders to know when they were being recorded, potentially intensifying the privacy concerns surrounding the technology. Those plans could still change, however, several people said,” says the report.
The plans are ready
Most importantly, it appears that the super sensing feature is already ready for deployment, and it can be activated on Meta’s existing range of smart glasses through a software update. The idea is pretty controversial, but it seems Meta has a solution for that as well.
One of the proposals for implementing this system mentions that all the data and voice recorded by the AI smart glasses will neither be available to the user for download nor will it be shared with Meta. Instead, all the metadata collected from the audio clips and pictures will be extracted and fed to Meta AI so that it can accordingly answer user queries. The company is also mulling the possibility of using this recorded data to train its own AI models, something that is definitely going to raise privacy alarms.
