Meta AI glasses lawsuit alleges private footage secretly sent to overseas workers

A newly filed class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California accuses Meta Platforms Inc. and Luxottica of America Inc. of deceiving consumers about the privacy protections built into their AI-powered smart glasses.

Plaintiffs Gina Bartone of New Jersey and Mateo Canu of California filed the complaint March 4, 2026, alleging that while Meta promoted its glasses as private and consumer-controlled, video footage captured through the glasses was secretly routed to overseas workers for manual review.

The glasses are developed through a partnership between Meta and EssilorLuxottica, the parent company of Luxottica of America Inc., which is the manufacturer behind popular eyewear brands including Ray-Ban and Oakley.

Which glasses are named in the suit?

The complaint focuses on two product lines, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Oakley Meta smart glasses:

• Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1 (Skyler and Headliner)
• Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 (Wayfarer, Skyler and Headliner)
• Oakley Meta HSTN
• Oakley Meta Vanguard
• Meta Ray-Ban Display (Wayfarer)

Prices for these products range from $299 to $799 depending on the model.

These devices look like ordinary sunglasses from the outside. But according to the complaint, each pair includes ultra-wide cameras, microphone arrays and AI assistant capabilities.

When a wearer activates the glasses' AI features, what the camera sees is transmitted to Meta's cloud servers for analysis, storage and AI model training.

Why does the complaint allege privacy issues?

According to the complaint, the AI Glasses were marketed as "designed for privacy, controlled by you" and "built for your privacy and others' too." Meta also allegedly promised customers it would take steps to protect people's privacy, including removing key identifiable information when the glasses' camera was used for AI features.

The complaint says the plaintiffs relied on Meta's privacy representations when making their purchases and neither knew at the time of purchase that those representations were allegedly false.

The lawsuit argues that Meta's privacy marketing was not just vague language buried in fine print. According to the allegations, these promises were front and center in how Meta promoted the product, especially to consumers who were weighing the privacy trade-offs of wearing a camera on their face every day.

The lawyers contend that for many buyers, those assurances likely made the difference between purchasing and walking away.

What the lawsuit says was really happening

According to the lawsuit, when customers used the AI features on their glasses, the video footage was not processed privately or locally on the device itself. Instead, the footage was transmitted to Meta's servers and then routed to a third-party subcontractor called Sama.

Sama is a data annotation company headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. The complaint states that thousands of workers at Sama serve as "data annotators." Their job is to manually watch footage captured through the glasses and label what they see with descriptive tags like "cars," "lamps" and "people."

That labeled data is then used to train Meta's AI models. According to the complaint, this is how Meta feeds its AI systems with fresh, real-world data without paying the enormous market prices that proprietary training datasets typically cost.

The allegations in the lawsuit draw heavily from whistleblower accounts that emerged from a Feb. 27, 2026, investigative report published by Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

For example, a data annotator allegedly recalled a video in which a man placed his Meta AI Glasses on a bedside table and then left the room. His wife then entered and, not knowing the glasses were still recording, changed her clothes in front of the camera.

That footage was subsequently sent to workers in Kenya to view and label, the complaint alleges, all without the woman's knowledge or consent.

Reporting by 9to5Mac following the Swedish investigation noted that data protection advocates raised serious concerns about how this footage was being handled and stored.

Beyond the footage, the complaint also challenges one of Meta's most-touted privacy features: face anonymization. Meta told consumers that the glasses would blur or remove identifiable faces from footage when the AI features were in use.

According to the lawsuit, this feature does not work reliably. Workers at Sama reported that faces that should have been blurred were sometimes still clearly visible in the footage they were required to review.

The complaint further alleges that workers who raised concerns about the sensitive content they were being asked to watch and label were fired for doing so. According to the lawsuit, this created a system where consumers' most private moments could be exploited with little internal pushback.

The complaint argues that a clear financial motive explains this arrangement. New training data is essential to developing advanced AI systems, and acquiring proprietary data on the open market can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the lawsuit, Meta found a way to sidestep that cost by using its own paying customers as an unwitting source of data.

Which laws were allegedly violated?

The lawsuit asserts 10 causes of action. On the consumer protection side, the complaint claims violations of California's Unfair Competition Law under all three of its legal prongs, meaning the conduct is alleged to be unfair, fraudulent and unlawful.

The complaint also claims violations of California's False Advertising Law and California's Consumers Legal Remedies Act. Because Plaintiff Bartone is a New Jersey resident, the lawsuit includes a claim under the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act as well.

Additional claims include fraud by misrepresentation, fraud by concealment or omission and negligent misrepresentation. The complaint also alleges breach of contract, breach of implied warranty of merchantability and quasi-contract or unjust enrichment.

The plaintiffs are seeking class certification so that all U.S. purchasers of Meta AI Glasses can participate in any outcome. They are also asking the court for declaratory relief, which would be a formal court declaration that Meta's conduct violates the law.

In addition, they are seeking injunctive relief, meaning a court order requiring Meta to change how it handles user data and to run corrective advertising that accurately describes how the product works.

In terms of money, the plaintiffs are seeking compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement of profits, punitive damages and attorneys' fees and costs.