I don’t miss the camera on the Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses

A Ray-Ban Meta owner has disclosed a startling incident where three pairs of smart glasses reportedly recorded conversations without the user invoking the "Hey Meta" wake phrase. Additional reports from other Meta AI wearers suggest similar unexplained activations of the AI assistant. However, such occurrences remain scarce thus far.

These revelations are reigniting debates around privacy as AI-integrated wearables edge closer to the realm of recording without explicit consent. Traditionally, smart glasses have necessitated users to trust a faint light as an indicator of their device's attentiveness. Recently, Meta has reinforced this trust indicator on Ray-Ban glasses, including the feature to disable camera capture when the capture LED is tampered with.

Yet, a select group of users is now raising a distinct concern: their glasses might be covertly listening in even when they were never explicitly commanded to do so. Two threads on Reddit reveal that a Ray-Ban Meta owner experienced this issue with three distinct models, spanning both second- and third-generation devices. These instances captured ordinary dialogues without the "Hey Meta" trigger being activated.

The recordings and transcriptions surfaced in the Meta AI app, raising concerns about the device's behavior even after the "Respond without Hey Meta" setting was turned off. Moreover, the user reported that the internal notification light on the glasses occasionally illuminated during ordinary conversations. This behavior reportedly emerged following a recent firmware update.