Meta is rolling out an early access program for its upcoming AI-integrated smart glasses, opening up a wealth of new functionalities and privacy concerns for users.
The second generation of Meta Ray-Bans will include Meta AI, the company's proprietary multimodal AI assistant.
The data the company collects in order to provide those services is extensive, and its privacy policies leave room for interpretation.
Meta has not yet responded to a request for comment from Dark Reading.
Meta's Troubles with Smart Glasses Meta released its first generation of Ray-Ban Stories in 2021.
For $299, wearers could snap photos, record video, or take phone calls all from their spectacles.
From the beginning, perhaps with some reputational self-awareness, the developers built in a number of features for the privacy-conscious: encryption, data-sharing controls, a physical on-off switch for the camera, a light that shone whenever the camera was in use, and more.
Evidently, those privacy features weren't enough to convince people to actually use the product.
According to a company document obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Ray-Ban Stories fell somewhere around 20% short of sales targets, and even those that were bought started collecting dust.
A year and a half after launch, only 10% were still being actively used.
To zhuzh it up a little, the second generation model will include far more diverse, AI-driven functionality.
That functionality will come at a cost - and in the Meta tradition, it won't be a monetary cost, but a privacy one.
Neither location services, nor usage data, or the media itself is necessarily sent to company servers - though, by the same token, users who want to upload their media or geotag it will need to enable these kinds of sharing.
It isn't that these policies are malicious, she says, but that they leave too much to the imagination.
This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Fri, 15 Dec 2023 22:15:05 +0000