On the Privacy Risks of Meta’s ‘AI Glasses’ — Virtual Reconstructions of the World and Contextual AI
Written by Noelle Martin - Lawyer, PhD Candidate at UWA Law School
A. Introduction(1)
This submission to the Australian Government’s latest tranche of privacy reforms relates to some relatively under-discussed privacy risks(2) of emerging technologies, specifically ‘smart glasses,’ ‘artificial intelligence (‘AI’) glasses,’ and/or ‘augmented reality glasses.’ In particular, the potential risks for these emerging technologies to collect, use, and/or infer contextual information (personal, sensitive or otherwise) about (or as it relates to) a person and their interactions, behaviours, and movements in public and private spaces, and everything within these spaces. Meta’s ambitions and research developments for its ‘smart glasses’ serve as a case study to comment on the effectiveness of the proposed reforms to respond to the privacy risks of ‘smart glasses’.
B. Meta’s Integrated Ambitions for Smart Glasses to Map Public and Private Spaces and Develop Contextual AI
To understand some under-discussed privacy risks of so-called ‘smart glasses,’ it is useful to set out Meta’s integrated ambitions for its smart glasses. In 2021, Meta launched its ‘first-generation smart glasses(3). Since then, the trillion-dollar technology company has released a series of more technologically advanced ‘smart glasses’(4). Putting to the side what these ‘smart glasses’ can technically/functionally do in these current iterations, such as take pictures (because the technology is rapidly advancing); what we need to pay attention to are the privacy risks of Meta’s integrated ambitions for these glasses — if the Australian Government is serious about ensuring the country’s privacy reforms are robust to respond to the risks of emerging technologies.
Meta’s ambitions for its ‘smart glasses’ are profoundly broader than what is reflected in the company’s current iterations of its ‘smart glasses’. The company is actively carrying out research and development under the project name ‘Project Aria’(5) to help develop its ‘smart glasses’. Project Aria is also a critical step on the path to developing LiveMaps(6), and contextual AI(7).
i. Project Aria/LiveMaps
Meta’s LiveMaps aims to reconstruct the planet and everything in it — virtual, multi-layer, 3D reconstructions of the world’s private and public spaces(8), such as the interiors of homes, workplaces, objects, landmarks, and natural scenery(9). The promise is that virtual, hyperrealistic renderings of places would ‘enhanc[e] the way we interact with each other and our surroundings’(10). To fulfil this promise, in 2020, Meta (formerly Facebook) launched ‘Project Aria’, a ‘research project’ to develop the software to build LiveMaps(11), along with the hardware, specifically AR glasses(12), to support people moving through space and time (13).
The company envisages that people wearing AR glasses will see 3D virtual information superimposed onto the physical world, assisting navigation through virtual directions, hazard identification, and foreign language translations(14); providing geo-localised information, such as showtimes at a cinema; facilitating personalised pop-ups, such as notifications when you forget your keys(15); and supporting ‘how we vote, and how we make progress in science’(16).
Though there is less public information on Meta’s LiveMaps efforts, the company’s acquisitions are revealing. In 2020, Facebook acquired computer vision start-up, Scape Technologies, developers of a ‘cloud-based visual engine’ that allows cameras to ‘understand’ their environment’17 with ‘far greater precision than GPS’(18). In 2020, Facebook also acquired Mapillary, a crowd-sourced, global street-level imagery platform(19).
ii. Contextual AI
Meta’s ‘Project Aria’ research on smart glasses also aims to advance ‘contextual AI’, which just last year was described by Meta as a tool to understand ‘the physical world and our place within it’(20) — where AI glasses can ‘see what you see and hear what you hear … understand what you’re doing and how you work with others’(21). Meta’s vision is to know ‘your preferences’, ‘understand the [3D] world around you’, ‘help with calorie counting while on the go’ and ‘proactively surface relevant notes during a meeting,’ among other things(22). Meta describes contextual AI as having the ‘potential to create a personalized knowledge base, enabling your AI to tailor your interactions … this could help [Meta] understand not just isolated events, but also causal patterns’(23).
C. (Some of) the Vast Global Implications
Meta’s LiveMaps efforts effectively lays virtual claim to the planet’s private and public spaces. Treating the world as free digital real estate, an extractable resource for the company to digitise and potentially monetise, track, advertise, commodify, and commercialise. Scholars Sally Applin and Catherine Flick have characterised Project Aria as ‘a technological and social colonization of the Commons’(24). Digital colonisation is an effective frame for the company’s integrated ambitions.
Contextual AI profoundly increases the stakes because it represents the non-static, dynamic collection, use, and/or inference of an unprecedented constellation of contextual and relational information about people and their interactions, behaviours, and movements with themselves, others, objects, and with the technology itself in public and private spaces.
Taking Meta’s integrated ambitions for its smart glasses together with the company’s other wearable wrist-based technologies, haptics, and suite of digital products and services, the consolidation of power, privacy risks, and other implications are even more significant.
D. Privacy Risks
The privacy risks of these emerging technologies represent the unprecedented collection, use, and/or inference of information about people and places that could profoundly impact people’s privacy, agency, autonomy, individual rights(25), as well as facilitate ‘mass surveillance’(26), and increase the risk of opportunities ‘to influence individual and group behaviour(27)’ particularly for Meta as the manager of this corporate ecosystem. It might also increase the risk of ‘hackers … and criminal organisations’(28) accessing this information, which in turn could increase the risk of personal information being used for criminal activity(29) and other nefarious purposes(30).
E. Do the Proposed Reforms Address the Risks of Emerging Technologies?
At first, it seemed that an amended definition of personal information that ‘relates to’ a person (as opposed to information ‘about’) was more suitable to capture the privacy risks of ‘smart glasses’. Upon further reflection, ‘relates to’ could possibly blur, not clarify, the lines of what is personal information when it comes to smart glasses. This is because there would be a seemingly endless and unprecedented amount of information that would/could ‘relate to’ a person — and to that person’s interactions, movements, and behaviours within public and private spaces.
It is therefore arguable — for the functionality of Australia’s privacy laws — that a distinct category of ‘contextual information’ might have to be developed to account for how this information is to be treated.
Suggested Citation:
Noelle Martin, ‘On the Privacy Risks of Emerging Technologies: ‘Smart Glasses’ — Virtual Reconstructions of the World and Contextual AI’, Submission to the Australian Government’s Privacy Reform — Consultation on Exposure Draft legislation (18 September 2026).
Footnotes:
1 Noelle Martin completed her Master of Laws dissertation on the legal-, social-, individual-, and platform-level implications of Meta’s select programme of emerging technologies. Throughout this submission, Noelle Martin has drawn directly from parts of her dissertation, which was supervised by Professor Julia Powles, and is available in full online at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/414380605_Unravelling_the_Implications_of_Facebook's_ARVR_and_Metaverse_Future_3D_Hy per-Realistic_Human_Avatars_LiveMaps_and_AR_Glasses.
2 In public discourse.
5 Facebook, ‘Announcing Project Aria: a Research Project on the Future of Wearable AR’ https://tech.facebook.com/realitylabs/2020/9/announcing-project-aria-a-research-project-on-the-future-of-wearable-ar/; https://www.projectaria.com/.
6 CNET Highlights, ‘Watch Facebook’s Full Live Demo of Project Aria’s AR Glasses’ (YouTube, 17 September 2020) 0:24–0:30 .
7 https://www.projectaria.com/; elements of which are already integrated in Meta’s publicly released smart glasses https://www.meta.com/au/ai-glasses/learn/multimodal/?srsltid=AU7gw4XOjiQ8FhDaWhgl7juYMaNj5beZgjs4z6S3D71IrGifWMIwt7_
8 Facebook, ‘Announcing Project Aria: a Research Project on the Future of Wearable AR’ https://tech.facebook.com/realitylabs/2020/9/announcing-project-aria-a-research-project-on-the-future-of-wearable-ar/.
9 Oculus, ‘Facebook Reality Labs: LiveMaps | Oculus Connect 6’ (YouTube, 26 September 2019) .
10 Ibid 0.07–0.14.
11 Facebook, ‘Announcing Project Aria: a Research Project on the Future of Wearable AR’ https://tech.facebook.com/realitylabs/2020/9/announcing-project-aria-a-research-project-on-the-future-of-wearable-ar/.
12 Facebook, ‘Announcing Project Aria: a Research Project on the Future of Wearable AR’ https://tech.facebook.com/realitylabs/2020/9/announcing-project-aria-a-research-project-on-the-future-of-wearable-ar/.
13 Facebook Developers, ‘Facebook Connect 2020 | Full Keynote with Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth + more’ (YouTube, 15 October 2020) 27:11–27:30 .
14 Spark AR Creators, ‘Facebook Connect | Keynote — Responsible Innovation at Facebook Reality Labs’ (YouTube, 25 September 2020).
15 Facebook, ‘Inside Facebook Reality Labs: Research Updates and the Future of Social Connection’ https://tech.facebook.com/realitylabs/2019/9/inside-facebook-reality-labs-research-updates-and-the-future-of-social-connection/
16 Bloomberg Technology, ‘Facebook Reality Labs VP: We Won’t Have Phones in 15 Years’ (YouTube, 30 March 2021) 5:39–5:43 .
17 Scape Technologies (LinkedIn).
18 Scott Hayden, ‘Facebook Acquires Computer Vision Startup Scape Technologies’, Road to VR (Web Page, 10 February 2020) ; Steve O’Hear, ‘Facebook has Acquired Scape Technologies, the London-Based Computer Vision Startup’, TechCrunch (Web Page, 8 February 2020) .
19 Jan Erik Solem, ‘Mapillary Joins Facebook on the Journey of Improving Maps Everywhere’, (Blog Post, 18 June 2020) .
24 Applin, Sally A. and Catherine Flick, ‘Facebook’s Project Aria indicates problems for responsible innovation when broadly deploying AR and other pervasive technology in the Commons’ (2021) 5 Journal of Responsible Technology 100010
25 Fiachra O’Brolcháin et al, ‘The Convergence of Virtual Reality and Social Networks:hreats to Privacy and Autonomy’ (2016) 22(1) Science and Engineering Ethics 1–29.
26Nwaneri, Crystal, ‘Ready Lawyer One: Legal Issues in the Innovation of Virtual Reality’ (2017) 30(2) Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 601
27 Fiachra O’Brolcháin et al, ‘The Convergence of Virtual Reality and Social Networks: Threats to Privacy and Autonomy’ (2016) 22(1) Science and Engineering Ethics 1–29.
28 Fiachra O’Brolcháin et al, ‘The Convergence of Virtual Reality and Social Networks: Threats to Privacy and Autonomy’ (2016) 22(1) Science and Engineering Ethics 1–29.
29 Christie Franks and Russell G Smith, ‘Identity crime and misuse in Australian 2019’ (Statistical Report Australian Institute of Criminolgy, 2020) p 20 .
30 More risks are discussed in Noelle Martin’s Master of Laws dissertation (fn 1).
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