If you own a pair of Meta’s Ray-Bans smart glasses, you might want to double-check your privacy settings.
On Tuesday, the company began emailing users that AI features will now be enabled on their glasses by default. Which in-turn means that Meta AI will analyze the photos and videos taken with the glasses, while certain AI features are switched on. And it will also store customers’ voice recordings to improve its products. Sadly, there’s no option to opt out.
This isn’t as scary as it sounds
Meta’s smart glasses are not constantly recording and storing everything while being worn. If that were the case, the battery would not even last an hour – though, the battery life isn’t that great as it is currently, anyway. The device only stores speech that the user says after the “Hey Meta” wake word.
Previously, you could opt out of having Meta store your voice recordings. But that is no longer the case. However, there is still a way that you can keep Meta from collecting your own voice recordings. Meta says that “If a customer doesn’t want Meta to train its AI on their voice, they will have to manually delete each recording from the Ray-Ban Meta companion app,” which was just rebranded as Meta AI this week.
This is actually fairly easy to do. Here’s how you can delete all of your voice recordings:
- Open the Meta AI app (formerly Meta View).
- Tap on the gear icon next to your glasses.
- Once you’re in the Settings, tap on “Glasses Privacy”.
- Now tap on “Voice Activity Log”.
- Now tap the big blue “Delete all” button at the top. This will delete all of your voice recordings.
Now, unfortunately, there is no way to have these recordings be auto-deleted from your glasses and the Meta AI app. So you will want to remember to go in here periodically and delete all of your voice recordings.
Meta does say that these recordings are “stored for up to one year to help improve Meta’s products.” Essentially, they are being used to help train its AI products.
