Ray-Ban Facebook Stories

Facebook joined with popular sunglasses maker Ray-Ban to make these smart glasses. Ray-Ban doesn’t worry us too much, but Facebook does. Facebook has a long history of betraying users' privacy and trust. They've faced record fines around the world for this and have been caught hiding data breaches from their users. Just as recently as April 2021, it was reported the personal information of more than 500 million Facebook users was shared online in a massive data leak. Couple that with recent Facebook whistleblower testimony to the US Congress that outlined the harms Facebook causes and the dishonest way they approach dealing with these harms and Facebook appears to be one of most immoral companies we review in *Privacy Not Included.

This is the starting point for bringing glasses you put on your face that include cameras and microphones and a way to share everything to social media through the Facebook View app. It is well established that Facebook collects and shares a huge amount of personal data on their users and doesn’t always secure that data properly. That alone makes these smart glasses a huge privacy concern.

Beyond that though, a bigger privacy concern that must be considered. Facebook (now Meta we suppose) and Mark Zuckerberg seem quite obsessed with owning the real estate on our faces for the augmented reality and virtual reality metaverse of the future. But what does it mean when a person puts cameras and microphones on their face and points them out at the world? How do you know if you’re being recorded by these glasses? Facebook says there’s a little LED light that shows they are recording, but some privacy regulators worry that isn’t enough to protect people from unknown recording. And what if you don’t want to be recorded? Or surveilled? How do you opt out of being recorded? We don’t see a way and many others have the same concerns. Facebook has built in some privacy protections, which, yay!, but the question is, are they enough? The answer seems to be no, because Facebook has mostly put the onus on wearers of these glasses to be responsible with them.

What’s the worst that could happen with the smart glasses? Well, we’re afraid a lot. The question comes down to, does Facebook have your best interests at heart when it collects all the data this device is capable of collecting? From Cambridge Analytica to where we are today, the answer to that question is a resounding NO. Couple that with the ethical questions surrounding surveillance and being recorded without consent and we're afraid these glasses comes with *privacy not included.