Australia Considers Smart Glasses Ban in Government Workplaces, While 70 People Sue Meta Over Unknowing Data Collection (yahoo.com) 64
"Australia is considering barring the use of camera-equipped smart glasses in government workplaces..." reports Reuters, "in what it said could be the first ban of its kind."
But meanwhile "more than 70 people who bought, used or were recorded with Meta's smart glasses have sued the social media giant," reports the Los Angeles Times, "claiming their intimate and sensitive images were exposed to workers abroad who are paid to review and label photos and videos." The contractors in Kenya work for companies that help train Meta's artificial intelligence, according to a proposed class-action lawsuit amended in late August. The smart glasses users, some in California, allege the gadget captured footage of themselves and family members undressing, going to the bathroom, having sex and entering passwords. In some cases, the people said they weren't aware the camera-equipped glasses were recording. One California user, referred to as PL18 in the lawsuit, alleges his glasses were unknowingly recording after he placed the smart glasses on the bathroom counter. "He noticed that at times photos of his family members using the bathroom and bathing began appearing in his gallery — footage no one in his household intended to take," the lawsuit said....
The 230-page lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Northern California, accuses Meta of fraud and false advertising, along with violating other consumer protection laws in various states. Tina Wolfson, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said the case also centers on Meta's surveillance of people's lives without their consent and the exploitation of their image and likeness. "People who bought these glasses and thought that they were cool gadgets weren't aware that every time they activated AI, video was sent to train Meta's AI," said Wolfson, a principal at law firm Ahdoot & Wolfson in Burbank. Meta disagrees with the allegations and intends to fight them.
"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. We take steps to filter this data to help remove identifying information and to protect people's privacy," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement...
The lawsuit alleges people wearing the smart glasses were unwittingly transmitting data to Meta whenever they used Meta AI by saying "Hey Meta," or sometimes accidentally when adjusting the glasses. "Every activation of the AI features, intentional or accidental, captures video and audio that is transmitted to Meta's servers, routed overseas, and reviewed by low-paid human workers who watch, label, and embed these moments into Meta's AI models," the lawsuit said...
The lawsuit also seeks to block Meta from deploying biometric tools through its glasses. The company has been exploring a controversial feature called "NameTag" that would allow people to identify others... A separate lawsuit, filed in September in a federal court in Illinois, alleges Meta has been using images of people's faces uploaded to their public Facebook and Instagram accounts to train AI that powers NameTag and other AI tools.
But meanwhile "more than 70 people who bought, used or were recorded with Meta's smart glasses have sued the social media giant," reports the Los Angeles Times, "claiming their intimate and sensitive images were exposed to workers abroad who are paid to review and label photos and videos." The contractors in Kenya work for companies that help train Meta's artificial intelligence, according to a proposed class-action lawsuit amended in late August. The smart glasses users, some in California, allege the gadget captured footage of themselves and family members undressing, going to the bathroom, having sex and entering passwords. In some cases, the people said they weren't aware the camera-equipped glasses were recording. One California user, referred to as PL18 in the lawsuit, alleges his glasses were unknowingly recording after he placed the smart glasses on the bathroom counter. "He noticed that at times photos of his family members using the bathroom and bathing began appearing in his gallery — footage no one in his household intended to take," the lawsuit said....
The 230-page lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Northern California, accuses Meta of fraud and false advertising, along with violating other consumer protection laws in various states. Tina Wolfson, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said the case also centers on Meta's surveillance of people's lives without their consent and the exploitation of their image and likeness. "People who bought these glasses and thought that they were cool gadgets weren't aware that every time they activated AI, video was sent to train Meta's AI," said Wolfson, a principal at law firm Ahdoot & Wolfson in Burbank. Meta disagrees with the allegations and intends to fight them.
"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. We take steps to filter this data to help remove identifying information and to protect people's privacy," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement...
The lawsuit alleges people wearing the smart glasses were unwittingly transmitting data to Meta whenever they used Meta AI by saying "Hey Meta," or sometimes accidentally when adjusting the glasses. "Every activation of the AI features, intentional or accidental, captures video and audio that is transmitted to Meta's servers, routed overseas, and reviewed by low-paid human workers who watch, label, and embed these moments into Meta's AI models," the lawsuit said...
The lawsuit also seeks to block Meta from deploying biometric tools through its glasses. The company has been exploring a controversial feature called "NameTag" that would allow people to identify others... A separate lawsuit, filed in September in a federal court in Illinois, alleges Meta has been using images of people's faces uploaded to their public Facebook and Instagram accounts to train AI that powers NameTag and other AI tools.
Why just there? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why just there? Because that's within control of the government. A device that isn't banned can't be banned from private premises since that is after all under the management of *checks notes* not the government.
As for banning anywhere in public, there is no right or expectation of privacy in public, so banning a device that is capable of being used to record someone would have far reaching unintended results, despite how good of an idea it seems at first.
The Australian government is already an abusive nann
Re:Why just there? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree (UK so different laws, but the principle is the same). However I increasingly feel this needs to be revised somehow. I'll admit up front I don't have all the answers here, but just intuitively it feels to me that this principle predates the era of cheap, automated mass surveillance whether government or private.
In the UK, privacy is protected via the Human Rights Act and UK GDPR. It provides for some level of protection, but it really seems to me that specific rules to address this kind of blanket recording need to start coming in. The definition of 'commercial', for instance. Is it commercial use if I record you on my glasses and then post it to Youtube? Arguably yes, since YouTube is a company and derives revenue from that. Same for Meta. But it's very, very far from clear to me if that claim has enough weight to prevail. A specific set of rules to address what is essentially a new phenomenon needs to be brought in.
Recording is not new. Photographing is not new. But the ease and scale via which it can be achieved, manipulated, tracked...that is new.
Re:Why just there? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Meta customer or user, the person with the glasses has had to agree to Meta's terms and conditions, including their data processing. For me though, an innocent bystander in the street, I haven't agreed to have information processed about me by Meta. Meta has a long suspected problem with shadow profiles [wikipedia.org], and I don't want their massive processing capabilities to be able to reference me wherever I am, even if it's in a public place. They have no system for me to make a GDPR request about the data they're holding on me. Based on Meta's behaviour over many years and statements from Zuck about privacy, they simply cannot be trusted with people's personal data.
Re:Why just there? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to add: if the government, including the police, started mass video surveillance, there would be justified outrage. Meta has more data processing than at least the UK government and consequently should be given less leeway.
Re:Why just there? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just to add: if the government, including the police, started mass video surveillance, there would be justified outrage.
Would there? How many people even know about e.g. Five Eyes? There already is mass coordinated international surveillance and... crickets.
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How many people even know about e.g. Five Eyes?
Five Eyes is not home baked mass surveillance of citizens. It's a sharing program of specific surveillance between states. The UK does not give Australia or the USA access to it's 10s of thousands of cameras just because they are in Five Eyes. Australia is in Five Eyes and doesn't have a public mass surveillance program in the streets either, though does share data from specific ongoing investigations as part of it.
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Five Eyes is not home baked mass surveillance of citizens. It's a sharing program of specific surveillance between states. The UK does not give Australia or the USA access to it's 10s of thousands of cameras just because they are in Five Eyes.
Five eyes is specifically a spying program where allies spy on your citizens and then give you the data in order to get around citizen surveillance restrictions. You're going to have to know that in order to understand the argument.
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Just to add: if the government, including the police, started mass video surveillance, there would be justified outrage.
You mean, "WHEN the government started (past tense) mass video surveillance," with the conclusion that, sadly, the expected outrage was almost nowhere to be found.
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No, the actual worst thing Meta can do is give the data about you to the government, but this takes us back to the previous issue.
But that's the rebuttal to the beginning of your own paragraph! You cancelled out your own comment! That's exactly the reason why The People would be outraged at it if they were smart, which in turn is the reason why the Republicans began to attack public education in the Reagan era.
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Just to add: if the government, including the police, started mass video surveillance, there would be justified outrage.
Would there be outrage? From who? We already have Flock and the only people pissed off are the hundreds of millions of citizens. The tens of thousands that we "elect" to lead all seem pretty happy with it and are willing to suppress stories of outrage by the vast majority of people.
What is public? (Score:3)
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The employee may be violating company policy if they record you, possibly for wearing them at all, or maybe the bank gave them the glasses. I couldn't say.
Re: What is public? (Score:2)
The law decides who can record what and in some states the bank can record video but not audio.
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I went to my bank and one of the employees that talked to me was wearing them. Was the bank public? What was my expectation of privacy inside the bank?
That's frightening. What did the bank have to say about it?
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That's easy to fix around here: if the employee was working at the time, they represent the bank, so ask the bank about their GDPR policy and information about the recordings the employee made and how they're being handled.
I'd think the bank would want to stamp that practice out anyway because they don't control the recordings, which could lead to a security issue for them.
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The real problem isn't being recorded, it's what's being done with the recordings.
If you're going to legislate something, it should be what can be done with recordings more than stopping people from recording, because there are legitimate purposes for the latter.
We already have numerous laws where we criminalize doing something only for criminal purposes, so it's reasonable for the laws against recording to continue to exist, but also for them to apply only to recording with criminal intent. Then you can ta
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There's no inconsistency here. Privacy is a protected right anywhere an expectation of privacy exists. A public space isn't that place. One would argue in the UK they've breached the point, but only in terms of government tracking. You have no right to simply not be recorded in public, but there is a genera expectation that the result of this recording shouldn't be a database with your specific movements that can be called up at a whim.
And as for photographing being something of ease, the fundamental princi
re: No right or expectation of privacy in public (Score:2)
I think the real shift began when computer processing power became great enough to make it feasible to analyze public video footage and index it for long-term storage. The idea you don't have an expectation of privacy in public always made sense to me. But it was intended to protect the rights of photographers and videographers, primarily. (You should be able to take a photo of your friend or family member in public, while random strangers mill about behind them, and not risk them filing a lawsuit against y
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Hahahhahahaha. I love it!
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Points and laughs in not-getting-shot-at.
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Points and laughs in not-getting-shot-at.
Errr I'm not talking about guns. I'm talking about the fact that there are an insane number of tiny rules that are extremely onerous. E.g. not just do pools need to be fenced, but in our house we were forced to move the fence 1m from the property because our balcony balustrading was horizontal. The law assumes that a child could climb over the balustrading fall 4m and then crawl his broken self into the pool and drown. In parts of Australia you can't buy alcohol after 10pm from a bottle shop. Australia is n
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You wouldn't happen to be a Ranger driver, by any chance?
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I like the part where you take something that is decided on a local council or state level and make out like the whole country is operating under those laws.
Because there's fundamentally no difference. Firstly none of this on a local level. Secondly the governments which run states are the same fundamental parties with the same principles and same legal applications that run the federal government. The differences is that separation of powers still make most things state issues.
Just because I quoted state laws doesn't mean the federal government is off scotts free. E.g. the recent laws to require age verification for pornography online is just the latest in a l
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Yes Australia is a nanny state because the government *check's notes* bans something in its own offices?
You're not wrong in general. But choosing this story to make your point makes you look like a ranting anti-government conspiracy truth seeking lunatic.
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No free speech in Australia. Too bad.
Actually it strikes a great balance. What is bad is the level free speech is applied in America actively hindering and making society worse. See the thing is, most of the western world doesn't have constitutional free speech, and they are all fantastic places to live in.
But I'm sorry you can't be a nazi cunt out in public. The place isn't for everyone,. *shrugs*
How can anyone buy a Meta product (Score:2, Informative)
and expect any privacy at all? Even their VR headsets are subsidized by your data.
GLWT (Score:2, Insightful)
The privacy suits might be successful but:
A separate lawsuit, filed in September in a federal court in Illinois, alleges Meta has been using images of people's faces uploaded to their public Facebook and Instagram accounts to train AI that powers NameTag and other AI tools.
Yeah that's gonna fail. Users definitely consented to that.
Ban them everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
What comes next? The nonconsensual AI-constructed nudes, the stalking, the harassment, the extortion, the exploitation, everything that inevitably follows when some of the very worst people in the world are handed a powerful tool that they can readily use for whatever purpose they wish. To Zuck, these outcomes aren't problems to be solved; they're valid use cases to be supported and encouraged. They're the entire reason why he did this: he doesn't have to go out and be the creep if he has a willing army of creeps ready to do it for him.
These can be banned if "someone" gives it A Ok. (Score:2, Interesting)
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What Google and Apple mean (Score:2)
/p. ... steal that data to increase corporate profits by letting visitors perve on your images and video. If you have images of naked people we may report you to state police because we don't want to be blamed for our part in spreading kiddie 'porn'.
Expecting privacy in public (Score:1)
I hear the argument constantly that one does not have any expectation of privacy in public. That certainly used to be true in the days before mass surveillance by governments or private organizations, indiscriminate and ubiquitous data collection, AI processing thereof, monetization of it, and the near-impossibility for the individual to know exactly what was collected. Despite having laws, like in many other countries, regarding the protection of private data, I have to wonder how well they are enforced. I
What about blind people? (Score:2)
Meta (and other similar) glasses are of great help to them.
Are blind people collateral damage here?
Re:What about blind people? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a fix for that. Specify a color scheme for assistive devices, and make it illegal to misuse it. Specify that such devices or services must not retain data, it must not be used for AI training or similar, yada yada.
Re: What about blind people? (Score:2)
In my country, arms purchase and any form of safe carry is allowed but strictly to licence holders; getting a licence is a PITA, having one costs time and money (mandatory periodic training); buying every weapon requires justi
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Rules will not work when the governing body does not respect rules for itself.
They should already be blocked (Score:1)
Aren't they blocked by default from government workplaces by violating policies and other requirements?
Recording by whom in government workspaces? (Score:3)
Knock knock (Score:2)
Say it isn't so! (Score:2)
... claiming their intimate and sensitive images were exposed to workers abroad who are paid to review and label photos and videos ...
But, but, but... I thought AI was supposed to be doing all those things!
Re: Say it isn't so! (Score:1)
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Government Workplaces (Score:1)
Everything that happens in a government workplace should be FULLY public information. That's the last place recording equipment should be banned...unless you hate freedom.
Meta's Started Damage Control (Score:2)
smart glases & cigarettes (Score:2)
I wonder if smart glases will be treated much like cigarettes in the future.
Problem will solve itself. (Score:3)
The current generation of these smartglasses devices will fail and disappear.
Let me show my work:
1. women cannot use these smart glasses to take selfies.
2. therefore, women will not wear them.
3. therefore, the only people who wear them will be men
4. anything that men do but which women do not do is probably criminal, but certainly creepy, a red flag, or a cause of the ick
5. therefore, men will be shamed (or arrested) into not wearing them either
QED.
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Counterpoint:
The smart glasses users, some in California, allege the gadget captured footage of themselves ... having sex ...
So apparently there's at least some portion of the population able to convince another person to have sex with them while they were actively wearing smart glasses. This was actually the most surprising part of the article.