Meta's 'designed for privacy' glasses shipped users' intimate footage to Kenya reviewers

Meta sells Ray-Ban smart glasses, marketed with the promise 'Designed for privacy, controlled by you'. In February 2026 an investigation by Swedish outlets Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, with Kenyan journalists, reported that footage captured by the glasses was being reviewed by subcontracted workers in Nairobi, Kenya, employed through the outsourcing firm Sama. The workers said they saw people using the toilet, undressing, having sex, watching pornography and handling credit-card numbers, facial images and private messages.

The revelations landed while Meta was selling roughly 7 million pairs of the glasses. On 4 March 2026 the UK Information Commissioner's Office said it was writing to Meta to request information on how it was meeting its duties under UK data protection law, calling the claims 'concerning'. The same day, a class action was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California (case 3:26-cv-01897) against Meta and manufacturing partner Luxottica of America, alleging the 'designed for privacy' marketing was materially misleading given the hidden human-review pipeline.

Meta first paused its work with Sama while it looked into the concerns and later ended the contract, a move reported to have affected more than 1,000 workers. Meta said the contract ended because Sama 'did not meet its standards', which Sama disputed. Meta maintained that footage stays on device unless users share it, and that content is first filtered to protect privacy — safeguards the plaintiffs and the reporting said sometimes failed.

Meta cut Sama's contract, affecting over 1,000 workers, after an ICO inquiry and US class action over the privacy promise.

Meta's privacy marketing promised total user control while its AI-training pipeline routed footage to human reviewers in a different continent

Anonymisation safeguards such as face-blurring were reported to fail, letting intimate and identifying content through

The AI assistant could not be used without sending video to Meta's servers, where it could reach human reviewers — contradicting the on-device privacy claim

The gap between the advertised promise and the actual data flow handed regulators and plaintiffs a ready-made false-advertising case

Marketing a product as 'designed for privacy' while routing users' footage through human reviewers is a promise the engineering cannot back — the false-advertising case writes itself

The UK ICO wrote to Meta on 4 March 2026 requesting information on its data-protection obligations, and a US class action was filed the same day over the 'designed for privacy' claims. Meta ended its contract with Sama, affecting more than 1,000 Nairobi-based workers, and said the termination was over Sama 'not meeting its standards'. The reputation damage hit Meta smart glasses just as they were scaling, with roughly 7 million pairs on the market.