If you own Ray-Ban Metagrass, you will need to double check your privacy settings

Meta has updated its privacy policy for AI glasses, Ray-Ban Meta, giving the high-tech giant more power over the data that can be stored and used to train AI models.

The company sent an email to owners of the Ray-Ban Meta on Tuesday, notifying Verge that AI features will be enabled by default. This means that Meta’s AI analyzes photos and videos taken with glasses, and certain AI features are turned on. Meta also stores customer audio recordings to improve the product without the option to opt out.

To be clear, Ray-Ban Metaglasses do not keep everything recorded and stored around the wearer at all times. This device only stores speeches that users say after the “Hey Meta” wake word.

According to Meta’s privacy notice regarding wearable voice services, audio transcripts and recordings can be “stored for up to one year to improve Meta’s products.” If a customer doesn’t want Meta to train AI with their own voice, they will need to manually delete each recording from the Ray-Ban Meta companion app.

The terminology changes follow the line of recent Amazon policy changes affecting echo users. As of last month, Amazon has run all Echo commands through the cloud, removing more privacy-friendly options and processing audio data locally.

Companies like Meta and Amazon want to stockpile these audio recordings as they are useful training data for generated AI products. With a wide range of audio recordings, Meta’s AI can do a suitable job to handle a variety of accents, dialects and speech patterns.

However, AI improvements come at the expense of user privacy. Users may not understand that if they use Ray-Ban metame out of the box to photograph their loved ones, their faces may be in the meta training data. The AI ​​models behind these products require an obscene amount of content, and training AI with data that users already produce will benefit businesses.

Meta’s user data hoarding is nothing new. Already, the company is training the Lama AI model with public posts that American users share on Facebook and Instagram.