Tag Archives: Meta and AI

In Your Bedroom and In Your Bathroom: META’s Glasses

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The META glasses—with chunky frames embedded with cameras and microphones—are the way Zuckerberg imagines AI will be democratized for personal users. Eventually, he wants to offer something akin to god-like superintelligence on demand. The promise of AI is that it will become more and more useful because such devices allow it to see and hear your daily life, gobbling up that information, processing it and using it to inform you about your life. But at what cost to privacy?

In March 2026, Meta was named in a lawsuit that seeks class-action status over concerns that data is being gathered from those glasses in ways that violate users’ privacy. The lawsuit, citing whistleblower complaints, alleges video captured on Meta’s devices are being routed to contractors in Africa to manually view and label the data to train Meta’s AI models. Among the videos in question? “People changing clothes, using the bathroom, engaging in sexual activity, handing financial information, and conducting other private activities inside their homes that no reasonable consumer would ever expect a stranger to watch,” the lawsuit said. 

Excerpt from Tim Higgins, The Backlash Against AI Devices That Are Always Watching, WSJ, Mar. 14, 2026

Can AI Do That? Knowledge Impossible to Copy

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Zuckerberg hasn’t had much success in his efforts to hire the field’s biggest stars, including OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever and its chief research officer, Mark Chen. Many candidates are happy to take a meeting at Zuckerberg’s homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. In private, they are comparing gossip and calculating Meta’s chances of winning the AI race.

The handful of researchers who are smartest about AI have built up what one described as “tribal knowledge” that is almost impossible to replicate. Rival researchers have lived in the same group houses in San Francisco, where they discuss papers that might provide clues for achieving the next great breakthrough. 

Excerpt from Ben Coen et al, It’s Known as ‘The List’—and It’s a Secret File of AI Geniuses, WSJ, June 27, 2025

Like a Lamb to the Slaughter: DeepSeek Collects Personal Data–Nobody Cares

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Amid ongoing fears over TikTok, Chinese generative AI platform DeepSeek says it’s sending heaps of US user data straight to its home country, potentially setting the stage for greater scrutiny. The United States’ recent regulatory action against the Chinese-owned social video platform TikTok prompted mass migration to another Chinese app, the social platform “Rednote.” Now, a generative artificial intelligence platform from the Chinese developer DeepSeek is exploding in popularity, posing a potential threat to US AI dominance and offering the latest evidence that moratoriums like the TikTok ban will not stop Americans from using Chinese-owned digital services…In many ways, DeepSeek is likely sending more data back to China than TikTok has in recent years, since the social media company moved to US cloud hosting to try to deflect US security concerns “It shouldn’t take a panic over Chinese AI to remind people that most companies set the terms for how they use your private data” says John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “And that when you use their services, you’re doing work for them, not the other way around.”To be clear, DeepSeek is sending your data to China. The English-language DeepSeek privacy policy, which lays out how the company handles user data, is unequivocal: “We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

In other words, all the conversations and questions you send to DeepSeek, along with the answers that it generates, are being sent to China or can be. DeepSeek’s privacy policies also outline the information it collects about you, which falls into three sweeping categories: information that you share with DeepSeek, information that it automatically collects, and information that it can get from other source…DeepSeek is largely free… “So what do we pay with? What… do we usually pay with: data, knowledge, content, information.” …

As with all digital platforms—from websites to apps—there can also be a large amount of data that is collected automatically and silently when you use the services. DeepSeek says it will collect information about what device you are using, your operating system, IP address, and information such as crash reports. It can also record your “keystroke patterns or rhythm.”…

Excerpts from John Scott-Railton, DeepSeek’s Popular AI App Is Explicitly Sending US Data to China, Wired, Jan. 27, 2025