“Privacy is not lost all at once. It is surrendered frame by frame when convenience is allowed to outrun consent.” – MJ Martin
Introduction
Joining the world of artificial intelligence seems so very important these days. No one wants to be left behind. There is a perceived pressure on every business manager to engage right now. It feels urgent. But, water, gas, and electric utilities are cautious by design. So, it is vital for utility operators to tread very carefully. Even the biggest industry players, the trusted companies, are deep in serious AI risks. Sometimes, the smartest action is to stay on the sidelines until the AI world stabilizes to becomes safer and more predictable. Read the following paper to gain some insights into these risks.
A Privacy Promise That Failed
Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses were marketed as wearable artificial intelligence, convenient, stylish, and controlled by the user. That promise now looks deeply compromised. Investigations by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten reported that workers at Sama, a Kenya-based data annotation subcontractor, reviewed footage captured through Meta’s AI smart glasses. The footage reportedly included highly personal scenes from homes, bathrooms, private conversations, children, sensitive documents, and financial information. In plain language, people believed they were using a consumer device, but parts of their private lives may have entered an industrial AI training pipeline.
The issue is not simply that human review exists. Human annotation is common in artificial intelligence development. The deeper problem is the type of data involved. Smart glasses are not a keyboard, a search box, or a customer service recording. They are worn on the face. They see what the wearer sees. They can capture homes, bedrooms, bathrooms, children, documents, bank cards, computer screens, and people nearby who never consented to being recorded.
What the Workers Saw
Reports described Sama workers in Nairobi reviewing and describing video content so Meta’s AI systems could learn to interpret the world. During long shifts, workers allegedly saw private and intimate moments, nudity, bathroom use, sensitive financial information, children, and other personal scenes. This is an extraordinary breach of reasonable expectations. A person buying smart glasses may understand that the device has a camera. That does not mean they expect overseas contractors to review sensitive footage for AI training or quality improvement.
The Kenyan workers were also placed in an unethical position. They were paid to watch material that many people would find disturbing, embarrassing, or invasive. They were not the people who created the privacy risk, yet they were placed at the point of exposure. When the story became public, Meta ended the Sama contract, and Sama then laid off more than 1,100 workers. That outcome raises another ethical concern: the workers who performed the uncomfortable labour of AI development became disposable once the reputational risk became visible.
The Risks to Customers
The risks are serious and practical.
First, there is personal privacy risk. Footage from a wearable camera can reveal habits, health issues, family relationships, home layouts, children’s identities, and private conversations.
Second, there is financial risk. Credit cards, bank documents, passwords, invoices, and computer screens can appear in the field of view.
Third, there is consent risk. A bystander, child, visitor, spouse, patient, customer, or employee may be recorded without knowing that footage could later be reviewed by strangers.
Finally, there is also institutional risk. If smart glasses enter workplaces, hospitals, schools, utilities, municipal offices, courts, control rooms, or construction sites, they may capture confidential records, infrastructure details, security procedures, customer data, confidential legal information, and commercially sensitive information. A small camera on a face can become an unregulated data collection tool.
Recklessness and Responsibility
Meta’s conduct appears reckless because the company should have known the nature of wearable video. A smart glasses camera will inevitably capture accidental, private, and non-consensual material. Privacy protection should therefore have been designed around strict minimization, local processing, explicit consent, strong filtering, narrow retention, and clear opt-outs. Instead, the reported system relied on users understanding complex data practices and on workers manually reviewing sensitive material after capture.
The ethical failure is rooted in imbalance. Meta gained product improvement and AI training value. Users carried the privacy risk. Bystanders lost consent. Sama workers absorbed the psychological burden. When public scrutiny arrived, the outsourced workforce paid the immediate price.
The Larger Lesson
This controversy is bigger than Meta, Sama, or one model of smart glasses. It shows how artificial intelligence can convert ordinary life into training data. The more personal the device, the higher the duty of care. Smart glasses need a privacy standard closer to medical devices or surveillance systems than ordinary consumer electronics.
The central issue is trust. If a company says a device is private and user-controlled, that must be true in practical terms, not merely hidden in legal language. Privacy cannot be a slogan while human reviewers examine the most personal moments of a customer’s life. Meta’s smart glasses controversy is a warning that innovation without restraint is not progress. It is surveillance dressed up as convenience.
About the Author:
Michael Martin is the Vice President of Technology with Metercor Inc., a Smart Meter, IoT, and Smart City systems integrator based in Canada. He has more than 40 years of experience in systems design for applications that use broadband networks, optical fibre, wireless, and digital communications technologies. He is a business and technology consultant. He was a senior executive consultant for 15 years with IBM, where he worked in the GBS Global Center of Competency for Energy and Utilities and the GTS Global Center of Excellence for Energy and Utilities. He is a founding partner and President of MICAN Communications and before that was President of Comlink Systems Limited and Ensat Broadcast Services, Inc., both divisions of Cygnal Technologies Corporation (CYN: TSX).
Martin served on the Board of Directors for TeraGo Inc (TGO: TSX) and on the Board of Directors for Avante Logixx Inc. (XX: TSX.V). He has served as a Member, SCC ISO-IEC JTC 1/SC-41 – Internet of Things and related technologies, ISO – International Organization for Standardization, and as a member of the NIST SP 500-325 Fog Computing Conceptual Model, National Institute of Standards and Technology. He served on the Board of Governors of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) [now Ontario Tech University] and on the Board of Advisers of five different Colleges in Ontario – Centennial College, Humber College, George Brown College, Durham College, Ryerson Polytechnic University [now Toronto Metropolitan University]. For 16 years he served on the Board of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), Toronto Section.
He holds three master’s degrees – in business (MBA), communication (MA), and education (MEd). As well, he has three undergraduate diplomas and seven major certifications in business, computer programming, internetworking, project management, media, photography, and communication technology. He has completed over 80 next generation MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) [aka Micro Learning] continuous education programs in a wide variety of topics, including: Economics, Python Programming, Internet of Things, Cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive systems, Blockchain, Agile, Power BI, Big Data, Design Thinking, Security, Indigenous Canada awareness, and more.
Martin in a volunteer, a photographer, a learner, a technologist, a philosophizer, and a romantic optimist.