Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

Source: Hacker News

Contract termination and worker allegations

Meta is under pressure to explain why it cancelled a major contract with a company it was using to train AI, shortly after some of its Kenya‑based workers alleged they had to view graphic content captured by Meta smart glasses. Less than two months later, Meta ended its contract with Sama, which said the move would make 1,108 workers redundant.

Meta stated the decision was because Sama “did not meet our standards”, a criticism the firm rejects. A Kenyan workers’ organisation alleges the termination was caused by staff speaking out. Meta has not addressed that allegation but told BBC News in a statement it had “decided to end our work with Sama because they don’t meet our standards”.

Sama’s defence

“Sama has consistently met the operational, security and quality standards required across our client engagements, including with Meta,” the company said.
“At no point were we notified of any failure to meet those standards, and we stand firmly behind the quality and integrity of our work.”

‘Naked bodies’

In late February, Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) and Göteborgs‑Posten (GP) published an investigation that included accounts of unnamed workers who had been asked to review videos filmed by Meta’s glasses.

“We see everything – from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker reportedly said.

At the time of the publication, Meta admitted subcontracted workers might sometimes review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI. The company said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience and was a common practice among other firms.

The revelations prompted regulators to act. Shortly after the Swedish investigation, the UK data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), wrote to Meta about what it called a “concerning” report. Kenya’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner also announced it was commencing an investigation into privacy concerns raised by the glasses.

In a statement responding to news of the redundancies, a Meta spokesperson told the BBC:

“Last month, we paused our work with Sama while we looked into these claims. We take them seriously. Photos and videos are private to users. Humans review AI content to improve product performance, for which we get clear user consent.”

‘Standards of secrecy’

Features of the glasses can include translating text or responding to questions about what the user is looking at – particularly useful for people who are blind or partially sighted. As the devices have grown in popularity, concerns about misuse have also increased.

The workers the Swedish newspapers spoke to were data annotators, teaching Meta’s AI to interpret images by manually labelling content. They also reviewed transcripts of interactions with the AI to check that it answered questions adequately.

In one instance, a worker told the newspapers that a man’s glasses were left recording in a bedroom where they later filmed a woman, apparently the man’s wife, undressing. Meta’s glasses have a light in the corner of the frames that turns on when the built‑in camera is recording.

Sama, a U.S.-headquartered outsourcing business that began as a non‑profit aimed at increasing employment through tech jobs, is now an “ethical” B‑corp. This is not the first time a contract with Meta has soured; an earlier deal to moderate Facebook posts attracted criticism and legal action by former employees who described exposure to graphic, traumatising content.

Naftali Wambalo of the Africa Tech Workers Movement, a petitioner in the continuing legal action around that case, told the BBC he had also spoken with workers involved in the smart‑glasses contract. He believed the reason for Meta ending the work was that it didn’t want workers speaking out about human review of content captured by the glasses.

“What I think are the standards they are talking about here are standards of secrecy,” he told BBC News.

The BBC has asked Meta to respond to this point. The tech giant has previously said that users were made aware of the possibility of human review in its terms of service.

Reactions from Kenyan advocates

Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer representing the petitioners and executive director of the campaign group the Oversight Lab, said Meta’s statement should be a warning to the Kenyan government:

“We’ve been told that this is our entry route into the AI ecosystem,” she told the BBC. “This is a very flimsy foundation to build your entire industry on.”