In February, several workers at the company Meta contracted to perform data annotations for Ray-Ban Meta reported seeing sensitive, embarrassing and apparently private footage recorded by the smart glasses. About two months later, Meta terminated its contract with the company.
According to a BBC report today, “less than two months after” a report by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten and Kenya-based independent journalist Naibanui Lipaba, which featured SMA workers complaining about seeing explicit footage filmed from Ray-Ban Metas, “Meta has terminated its contract with SMA.”
Sama is a company headquartered in Kenya that Meta has contracted to carry out data annotation work, including work with video, image and speech annotations for Meta’s AI systems for Ray-Ban Metas. Sama claims that Meta’s cancellation of the contract affected 1,108 workers.
A Meta spokesman told the BBC that Meta “has decided to end our work with Sama because they do not meet our standards.” Ars Technica reached out to Meta to ask how Sama specifically failed to meet Meta’s expectations, and we will update this article if we hear back. Ars also contacted Sama.
In a statement shared with the BBC, Sama claimed that she was never notified of any failure to meet Meta standards.
The BBC reported that Sama workers believe Meta terminated the contract because workers spoke publicly about seeing Ray-Ban Meta footage of people doing personal actions, such as changing their clothes, having sex, and using the toilet.
Sama said in a joint statement with Ars:
We do not comment on specific client processes or decisions, however, we can confirm that dealing with Meta has ended. Sama has consistently met the required operating, security and quality standards in all our dealings with our customers, and we stand by the integrity of our work. Our focus is on supporting our employees during this transition period while continuing to provide services to our customers.
In a February report, an anonymous Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency employee was quoted as saying, according to machine translation, that “they are just expected to do the work” even when watching private footage.
After Sama’s workers told journalists that they had seen private footage that appeared to have been recorded without the owners of the glasses’ knowledge, Meta responded by stopping work with Sama, a company spokesperson said, according to a BBC report today.
