PrivacyHigh
Meta AI Smart Glasses Reportedly Routed Intimate Imagery to Reviewers at Kenyan Contractor Sama Before Meta Ended Contract
- Occurred
- Feb 27, 2026
- Published
- Mar 3, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Meta AI smart glasses reportedly sent media and transcripts from AI interactions to Sama contractors in Kenya for human review. Workers said they saw nudity, bathroom use, sex, bank cards, and other private activity, sometimes involving people unaware they were recorded or faces left visible despite filtering. The reports prompted lawsuits and regulatory inquiries before Meta paused the work and ended its Sama contract, affecting 1,108 workers.
Developers
- Meta
- AI-enabled smart glasses developers
Deployers
- Sama
- Meta
Harmed parties
- Meta users
- Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses users
- People recorded by Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses
- Bystanders recorded by smart glasses
- Sama data annotators in Kenya
- Data annotators
- Sama workers affected by Meta contract termination
- Sama
- Privacy
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: Unauthorized collection and exposure of intimate user imagery to human reviewers constitutes a severe privacy violation.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8