Meta Took the Camera Off Its Glasses and Kept the Part That Records You

Removing the camera from smart glasses does not fix privacy when your voice recordings still go to Meta and, in the US, you cannot opt out. It solves one problem by creating another.

Engadget reviewed the Ray-Ban Meta Audio, the $349 version with no camera, and gave it 8.5 out of 10. The praise is for the hardware: light, comfortable, frames that look like normal glasses, and a battery Meta rates at up to 12 hours of mixed use. The complaints are a limited action button and privacy. In Engadget’s words, Meta “stores audio recordings captured from its glasses, and no longer allows US users to opt-out.” Snippets may be heard by trained reviewers. The glasses have six microphones.

This is not new. Meta changed its glasses privacy policy in April 2025: voice recordings are stored by default, for up to a year, to improve its products. Users in the EU kept an opt-out; US users lost it. What is left is deleting recordings by hand in the Meta AI app, or turning off voice control altogether, which removes much of the point of the product.

I do not like being given no option. Meta says it keeps what you say after the glasses are activated, and that it deletes accidental activations within 90 days. I have no way to check that, and neither do you. So what guarantees they are not listening the rest of the time? Only Meta’s word. We have been here before with televisions: in 2017 Vizio paid $2.2 million to the FTC and New Jersey for collecting viewing data from millions of TVs without consent, and in December 2025 Texas sued five TV makers, alleging their sets capture what is on screen, including doorbell camera feeds, behind disclosures the state calls hidden and vague. Those suits are still allegations, not rulings. The pattern is what worries me.

Privacy matters, and recording my conversations without my consent is not something I accept. Even if the option to switch it off existed, it would be backwards. Storage should be off by default, and people who want to help Meta improve its assistant should be the ones who switch it on.

The audio may be good and the battery may be better. With that on the scale, I would not recommend these. A camera-free design was supposed to be the privacy answer, and the microphone that keeps recording is the new question. Read Engadget’s review and Meta’s privacy policy for its glasses, and decide whether you are comfortable with what is in it.