A recent software update tackles a creepy problem: people who have tampered with their Meta smart glasses to record inconspicuously.
Meta’s push into the smart wearable tech world seemed to be going so well. Though the tech giant hasn’t disclosed sales details, analysts conclude that the company has sold millions of smart glasses since their 2021 release—over seven million last year, alone.
But in recent months the company has faced a public backlash against its AI-powered wearables devices, threatening Meta’s entire endeavor. This happened for two reasons: Meta’s privacy policy came under question, and a number of creeps hit the headlines because they used the in-built cameras to record unsuspecting victims.
Now reports say Meta has taken dramatic steps
Now reports say Meta has taken dramatic steps in response to this and has disabled the cameras on thousands of already-sold glasses.
Devious glasses owners were disabling the glasses’ tiny recording light; they did so by drilling it out or covering it up so that when they snapped a photo or recorded a video, no one could tell. Privacy activists immediately raised an alarm, and a number of cases hit the headlines.
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Meta chose to combat the practice via a recent software update that attempted to detect the sneaky modifications. Yesterday the company confirmed that the update had been successfully deployed and that thousands of affected devices had been detected, and their camera units had been entirely disabled. In what could be seen as an attempt to downplay the news, Meta’s vice president of wearables Alex Himel told news site Semafor the update had affected less than a tenth of a percent of all the devices sold.
Since we know seven million were sold last
Since we know seven million were sold last year alone, we can assume that this means thousands—perhaps several tens of thousands—of the glasses had been modified to conceal their recording ability. In a post on Threads, Himel clarified that Meta will “keep rolling out updates like this to make sure the capture LED can reliably alert bystanders when photos or videos are being captured for someone’s gallery.” He also underlined that only a “tiny minority” were circumventing the protections, and noted that “the fact they have to go to these lengths shows our efforts are working. We’ll keep improving and evolving our approach.” (Meta didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on the topic of disabling the cameras.)
While this seems like a decent solution, it’s worth remembering that Meta caused some of the public backlash itself. This includes surreptitiously installing a face detection system on the devices earlier this year, seemingly as part of a plan to launch the system on a broad scale.
Source: www.inc.com
