A new awareness campaign called BanRay.eu wants you to think twice before that person in Ray-Bans walks into your bathroom. Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten found that footage from Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses gets sent to Sama, a subcontractor in Nairobi, where workers review everything from people undressing to entering credit card numbers. "We see everything," one worker told journalists. The AI features cannot be turned off. Use the voice assistant, and your video hits Meta's servers where it may be forwarded for human review.
The campaign also exposes Meta's internal plans for "Name Tag," a facial recognition feature that would identify strangers in real time. Internal documents show Meta planned to debut it at a conference for blind users, building goodwill before wider release. Another memo suggested launching when "civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns." Two Harvard students already demonstrated the danger by connecting Ray-Ban Meta glasses to PimEyes, a commercial facial recognition engine, and pulling names, addresses, and social security numbers from random strangers on the Boston subway.
Meta paid $650 million to settle an Illinois lawsuit over facial recognition and shut down its Facebook facial recognition system in 2021. But they kept the training data. Now they want cameras on millions of faces with that same database underneath. The EFF and EPIC have warned against the glasses, and regulators in Sweden, the UK, and the US are demanding answers. But Meta factors fines into its business model and keeps going. Apple, Google, and Samsung are all converging on the same product category. The BanRay campaign has a blunt ask: make these glasses unwelcome everywhere they appear.