The privacy debate around smart glasses has reached Washington. On October 29, US Senators Ron Wyden and Edward Markey wrote to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about what they called “serious privacy and safety risks” from Meta’s AI glasses, and gave the company until Thanksgiving, November 26, to respond.
Their letter doesn’t hold back. “Meta’s smart glasses have increasingly been implicated in disturbing invasions of users’ and bystanders’ privacy,” the senators wrote, adding that Meta’s “professed commitment to privacy and preventing intimate image abuse rings hollow.”
What prompted the letter
The senators point to a string of reports over the past year. These include accounts, reported by 404 Media and the BBC, of men secretly filming women with the glasses while harassing them and then posting the videos online. They also cite reports and a lawsuit alleging that contractors reviewing footage for Meta’s AI saw intimate images captured by the glasses.
They also raise this month’s reports that a firmware update caused some Ray-Ban Meta glasses to save conversations without anyone saying the wake phrase. Meta says that’s fixed, but it hasn’t explained the cause.
What the senators want to know
The letter asks Meta a series of specific questions:
- Whether it carried out human rights due diligence and safety testing before release, given that, according to the senators, Meta identified risks to bystanders before launching its glasses in 2021.
- How the glasses guard against accidental recording, and against people tampering with the recording light.
- Whether faces and number plates are blurred in some AI features, as Meta does on Facebook and Instagram.
- Who can access the images the glasses capture, and whether that footage is used to train AI models.
Meta’s position
None of the coverage so far includes a response from Meta to the letter. The company has taken some steps this year: banning users who post harassment videos, disabling recording when the indicator light is covered, and launching the camera-free Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses. The senators clearly don’t think that’s enough.
A letter from two senators isn’t a law, and it doesn’t force Meta to change anything. But it puts Meta’s answers on the record, and it’s often the first step toward hearings or legislation.
Our take
This month has been full of signs that smart glasses are going mainstream: shipments forecast to double, Meta’s glasses sales growing fast, celebrities lining up to sell them. This is the other side of that story. The more people wear cameras on their faces, the more pressure there will be to set rules for how they’re used.
We’ve already seen it in Australia, where Victoria is banning smart glasses in every school, and in South Korea, where exam authorities are scrambling to catch AI-glasses cheating. Now US lawmakers are asking questions. It’s notable that Samsung, launching its own camera glasses next month, has made privacy a headline feature, with recording lights for bystanders and automatic shut-off if the light is covered.
We think that’s the right instinct. The companies that treat privacy as part of the product, rather than something to fix after the headlines, are the ones most likely to win public trust, and probably to avoid tougher regulation later. Meta has until November 26 to make its case. We’ll be reading closely.