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In February 2026, Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) and Goteborgs-Posten (GP) published an investigative report that revealed disturbing facts about the practices underpinning what is being called the “next Big Tech revolution.” Data workers in Kenya employed by a company called Sama, a subcontractor of Meta, anonymously shared how they were exposed to deeply private video clips from people using Meta’s hyped AI smart glasses, which recorded everything from bathroom visits and intimate moments between partners to bank card details.

As legal responses to the revelations emerged, Meta terminated its contract with Sama for “not meeting its standards.” One of the petitioners in the continuing legal action against the case, Naftali Wambalo, told BBC that the said “standards” were likely “standards of secrecy,” rather than parameters pertaining to privacy and accountability. Wambalo added that Meta did not want workers speaking out about the content they had to review during data annotation and labelling process.

The development follows an unfortunately recurring pattern of ‘Big Tech’ companies quietly building their ‘exciting’ AI-powered products by exploiting the labour and pain of underprivileged workers in Africa, Asia and South America. Workers are being made to wear cameras on their heads to record themselves for AI datasets. Dismal political and economic conditions perpetuate such ‘work,’ which involves performing a variety of hand movements like folding and lifting for robots to replicate, essentially training automated machines that are guaranteed to replace them once fully trained. Some agree because the state of the job market leaves them with little choice, while others participate to simply earn more money by recording mundane tasks like household chores. 

The exploitative power dynamics, furthered by either desperation or ignorance on part of the workers, contributing to these systems therefore persist. In context of the Meta smart glasses controversy, workers pointed out that the users were probably not even aware of being watched, another common feature of Big Tech’s global digital surveillance infrastructure.

Smart glasses did not have the best of debuts when they were first released by Google a decade ago; Google Glasses (un)fortunately failed society’s aesthetic and moral sense. Since then, Meta has apparently solved this issue by partnering with brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley to ensure their glasses feel like a normal pair first and a sophisticated AI gadget second. However, this clever play of aesthetics and branding must not distract us from the problematic nature of this technology.

As other companies like Google, Samsung and Apple plan to roll out their own versions in this space, questions surrounding morality and accountability need to be at the forefront of this discourse.

Cognitive........

© The Wire