A Meta glasses setting decides whether humans review your Meta AI photos
Ask Meta AI about something you are looking at, and the image your glasses send can be stored and used to train Meta's models, with people as well as software doing the reviewing. One setting governs all of it, and Meta's help page for its AI glasses calls it "Store visual data from AI experiences".
Meta's AI glasses answer questions about what you are looking at, and that is the data the setting covers. Image: Meta
Meta says training and improving its models "may be automated or manual (human)", and that turning the setting off means "your visual data will not be available for human review". Visual data, in Meta's definition, means the images and videos from AI experiences on the glasses, such as live AI and other multimodal AI features.
The photos you deliberately shoot are a separate thing.
Meta draws a line at the capture LED
Pressing the capture button or saying "Hey Meta, take a picture" does not feed this pipeline. Meta says those photos and videos "are stored privately on your glasses" and that you choose when to import them to your phone, after which they sit in the phone's gallery like any other shot.
What does count is the frame your glasses grab when you ask Meta AI a question about the world in front of you. Meta says it stores that and may use it "to power glasses features and improve Meta products", and that before anything is used for product improvement its systems take steps "like removing personal or identifiable information when detected".
Switching it off costs you some features
Turn the setting off and Meta says your visual data will not be available for human review, that it "will not be used for training or other product improvement, and it will not be stored", and that "some AI features, like visual reminders, may be limited or unavailable".
Visual reminders are the only feature Meta names. Anyone who uses the glasses mainly for translation, music or calls gives up very little.
The toggle is in the Meta AI app on your phone: open your glasses settings, tap Meta AI under Experiences, then switch "Store visual data from AI experiences" off or on. Meta says you can also set it during initial glasses setup or when an in-app notice prompts you, and that you can change the preference at any time.
The change applies from the moment you flip it
Meta is specific about timing. When you turn visual data storage off, visual data created from that point forward will not be stored or used for product improvement, and "this change doesn't apply to visual data that was already processed".
Several things sit outside the setting either way. Meta says it does not cover voice interactions with Meta AI, images and videos shared with Meta AI on other surfaces such as Messenger or Instagram, content that may violate Meta's terms and policies, or metadata attached to visual data, which Meta describes as things like AI-generated textual descriptions of an image and camera exposure settings.
By Meta's own description, that means switching storage off stops the picture being kept but not the machine-written description of what was in it.
Most of the privacy argument around camera glasses is about everyone else in the frame, which is where Meta's CTO has been making the company's case. The wearer's own side of it is this one toggle, and it is the setting to find in the app before a $449 Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 comes out of the box.
