News Briefs The next model of Meta's smart AI glasses will reportedly activate the onboard camera for AI features without notifying anyone via the camera indicator LED.
This comes just days after Meta released an update addressing people blocking or destroying the camera indicator light to get around it, enabling them to creepily film people without their knowledge or consent.
Meta explains how the light works in a press release: There’s a light on the front of every pair of our AI glasses that we call a capture LED. Whenever content is being captured for your gallery, this white light blinks to let people know you’re capturing content. For a photo, it blinks briefly, while for a video,it continues to blink for as long as you are recording. The capture LED has no off switch.
Apparently, some people go to great lengths to try and block the light from working: everything from covering it will tape to destroying it to even offering paid services to try and tamper with it to make it not visible, which Meta tries to combat:
In addition to disabling the camera on devices when tampering is detected, we work across Meta to remove ads, posts, and Marketplace listings that advertise these kinds of tampering services and we will take action, up to banning accounts that do this. We also take legal action against people or businesses that sell services designed for tampering with the capture LED — both on and off our own platforms.
Despite so much effort to prevent people from disabling the light, Meta themselves will be disabling the light for their "supersensing" feature, previously reported by 9to5Google. The feature was planned to use the camera for "extended periods of time" and would allow the AI to constantly analyze your surroundings.
Supposedly, Meta wouldn't have access to this data, but they were caught sending people's video recordings off to workers to be annotated for use in AI training.
Many laptops wire their camera indicators so that the camera can't be turned on without the light also being turned on. However, if the camera on Meta's glasses can be enabled without the light turning on, it means an attacker could possibly find a way to record without the light turning on as well. With so many people apparently dedicated to defeating the indicator light, it seems ill-advised to give any possible route toward doing that.
According to a new report:
[E]xecutives are currently planning not to activate the LED when the super-sensing features are being used, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. That would make it harder for bystanders to know when they were being recorded, potentially intensifying the privacy concerns surrounding the technology. Those plans could still change, however, several people said.