A class action against Meta has now been expanded to include people who never bought its AI glasses.
The amended complaint, filed recently, adds bystanders as plaintiffs who allege that they were recorded without consent when someone nearby used the glasses’ AI features, with the resulting footage routed toward training Meta’s AI models. Some of these plaintiffs are minors.
The original suit, which landed in March, was fueled by an investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten that uncovered how Meta was storing footage captured by Meta AI Glasses and routing it to contractors working for Sama, a content moderation outsourcer and longtime Meta partner in Kenya.
What these Kenyan contractors turned whistleblowers told reporters forms the core of the case. “In some videos, you can see someone going to the toilet or getting undressed,” one whistleblower told the Swedish journalists. “I don’t think they know, because if they knew, they wouldn’t be recording,” the whistleblower added.
Other contractors said they watched people having sex and viewed documents containing personally identifying information.
Meta, however, markets the glasses as “designed for privacy” and tells buyers that they are in control of their data and content. But the complaint argues that no reasonable consumer would read either phrase to mean strangers overseas could watch their intimate moments and feed them into an AI model.
Expanding the lens to the unwitting
The complaint takes a blunt approach to scale, stating that Millions of consumers may have been affected. The filing states that “no bystanders anywhere had any opportunity to, much less in fact did, consent to having their faces, bodies, voices, and personal information captured, reviewed, labeled, and embedded into Meta’s AI systems.”
Unsurprisingly, Meta is contesting the allegations. The tech giant maintains that its data processing practices for AI improvement are consistent with industry standards and include measures to filter sensitive information. This defense comes as the company reported selling more than seven million pairs of smart glasses in 2025.
With the digital eyewear market itself getting crowded, what with Google building smart glasses with Warby Parker and Apple reportedly working on putting cameras and AI into AirPods, Meta is certainly not operating in a vacuum.
Sources: Svenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, Heise, UploadVR, Meta, The Next Web, Futurism