Meta's Smart Glasses Lawsuit Exposes the Kenyan Workers Behind Its AI

Meta is facing an expanded class-action lawsuit alleging its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses fed a global pipeline of human reviewers, some working from Kenya, who watched and labeled footage captured from unsuspecting bystanders around the world, according to Fortune's Joshua Hong. The case, originally filed in federal court in California in March, argues Meta marketed the glasses as "designed for privacy, controlled by you" while routing recordings to third-party contractors who could view and label the material for AI training. An amended complaint filed Aug. 31 widened the case to cover people who never bought or wore the glasses at all, but were recorded by them without ever knowing it.

"Even if a bystander notices the Glasses and agrees to be recorded, he or she cannot have consented to the mass amalgamation of their data when the Glasses are in AI mode," the amended complaint reads, "including visual recordings that are collected, stored, exploited, and visually inspected by persons overseas, because Defendants have made no effort to disclose these practices to bystanders or to seek their consent." Ryan Clarkson, founder of Clarkson Law Firm and co-lead counsel in the litigation, frames the case as part of a much larger industry pattern: "I think there is a huge push to improve AI tools by every corporation, especially the largest corporations in the world. And the way that they believe is the best way to improve their AI is to find more signal, to find more content, more recordings that they can feed into this machine, feeding the beast."

Meta's glasses combine cameras and microphones with the wearer's own perception, letting users ask questions about what they're looking at, identify objects and landmarks, translate text, and capture hands-free photos and video. Meta's product materials say a capture LED lights up while recording and that users can manage or delete their own photos, videos, and voice interactions. Clarkson argues that framing misses what the hardware and software combine to build: a "surveillance economy," in which, he said, "the largest technology companies are barreling ahead with that as their dual focus, even if it means totally changing the way society functions and who gets hurt as collateral damage along the way."

The lawsuit traces its origins to a February 2026 investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, built partly on interviews with workers at Sama, a Kenya-based outsourcing firm that performed data-annotation work for Meta. Workers described reviewing footage captured through Ray-Ban Meta glasses that included, according to the reports, people changing clothes, using bathrooms, and engaging in intimate activity, along with visible financial and other personal information, footage that gave rise to the term "perv glasses" cited in the complaint. Clarkson said many of the people affected are what the amended complaint calls bystanders: "people just navigating their way normally through life, who are being confronted with being recorded by users of these glasses." The original complaint alleged the recordings were routed to Sama workers in Kenya and that some workers saw identifiable faces despite Meta's stated anonymization measures.

A Meta spokesperson told Fortune the company disagrees with the allegations and will fight them: "Our glasses help you use AI hands free to answer questions about the world around you. If you use Meta AI, we may review that data to help improve our products and people's experiences, this works the same way as many other companies." The spokesperson added that Meta takes "steps to filter this data to help remove identifying information and to protect people's privacy." The case remains in litigation, and none of the allegations have been proven in court, but it lands as a test of how far AI training pipelines that route recordings through low-cost overseas labor can go before running into the same consent and privacy laws that already govern the devices' point of capture.