When Eyewear Becomes Spyware

People aren’t just watching X-rated stuff in their Ray-Bans; they’re *wearing them while doing X-rated stuff *and then unwittingly sharing these intimate moments with the Metaverse. And somewhere in Nairobi, contractors are dutifully labeling footage like: “two humans… interacting.”

The sad part is, nobody who’s been awake for more than five or six minutes is even a tiny bit surprised by this. And yet, there are people out there who honestly believe these new-fashioned specs are just quietly capturing every nanosecond of their life and then respectfully deleting it like a polite digital butler.

Annotators explain they’re expected to watch and tag the footage without asking questions. If they push back, they risk losing their job. “You understand that it is someone’s private life you’re looking at,” one said. “But at the same time you’re just expected to carry out the work. If you start asking questions, you’re gone.” Which is how the shiny futuristic promise of AI quietly turns into a room full of exhausted workers in another hemisphere labeling strangers’ private lives for a tech company worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

“If people knew about the extent of the data collection,” one of the footage-viewers said, “no one would dare to use the glasses”.