Tag Archives: Meta and FBI

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

Unstoppable: How the FBI Mines Personal Information

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s access to a controversial intelligence trove of intercepted emails, texts, and other electronic data should be curtailed following serial missteps that have damaged public and congressional trust in the surveillance tool, a White House panel of intelligence advisers has concluded. in July 2023. The recommendation and others made by the panel come as a challenge to the Biden administration, which has spent months aggressively lobbying lawmakers to preserve the spying program, which is set to expire at the end of 2023. At issue is the FBI’s access to a cache of data collected under what is known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.(FISA)..Top Biden administration officials have said the program—classified details of which were revealed 10 years ago by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden—is among the most vital national security tools in their possession, critical to preventing terrorism, thwarting cyberattacks and understanding the aims of adversaries such as China and Russia. It allows the National Security Agency to siphon streams of electronic data from U.S. technology providers such as Meta and Apple. The data, collected in intelligence repositories, can then be searched without a warrant by spy agencies including the FBI, which has a robust counterintelligence mission.

The board was critical of the FBI’s history of wrongfully plumbing American data in the Section 702 trove, which have included improper searches of George Floyd protesters and sitting lawmakers, and said reforms needed to be adopted and codified in law.

Excerpts from Dustin Volz, FBI Access to Spying Tool Should Be Restricted, Panel Advises, WSJ, July 31, 2023
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