Ray-Ban Meta Glasses Recorded Conversations Nobody Started, and I Had Already Assumed Worse

Owners of the second and third generation Ray-Ban Meta glasses, the ones with a camera, found recordings of ordinary conversations sitting in the Meta AI app. Nobody had said “Hey Meta”. Some had the setting that answers without the wake phrase switched off. Meta confirmed the problem, said it is fixed, and has not said what caused it or how many people it happened to. It is also pushing an update that shuts the camera off if the recording light is tampered with.

I should be more shocked than I am. I am not, and I want to be straight about why.

My working assumption with any device that has a microphone is that the microphone is live. Phone, television, speaker, car, the lot. I do not mean that as a conspiracy, I mean it as the setting I start from when I decide what to say near one. So a bug that turns out to have recorded conversations nobody triggered does not change my behaviour. It confirms the behaviour I already had.

That is a miserable place to be and it is worth saying out loud rather than dressing up as caution. The reason I am not shocked is not that the glasses are fine. It is that I stopped expecting the promise to hold.

Here is where I part company with myself. My instinct about that recording light was: good, if I can turn it off, nobody knows I am recording. That is a straight answer and it is the wrong one, so I am leaving it in rather than editing myself into someone wiser. Recording people who do not know they are being recorded is illegal in a lot of places, including plenty of US states, and the light is there for the person in front of you, not for you. Meta forcing the camera off when the light is interfered with is the company doing the right thing for once, and it closes the door I was eyeing.

So, would I buy glasses with a camera and a microphone? The specs and the price are not what decide this one, which is unusual for me. What decides it is that the company cannot tell you why its product recorded people. “We fixed it” is not an explanation, it is a press line. Until there is a cause and a count, every pair out there is a device whose failure mode is recording the room.

I will wait for the explanation. If it never comes, that is the answer.