Meta Pinky-Promises Its Smart Glasses Will Be Private Soon

At its annual Meta Connect event today in Menlo Park, California, the company announced plans to incorporate its siloed AI processing scheme known as Private Processing into its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The feature, designed for WhatsApp last year, allows the glasses’ AI assistant to get to know you and fulfill your requests without Meta accessing any of your data.

“Most of the time, glasses are helping you see well, protecting your eyes and complementing your look, and that’s it,” Meta wrote in its press release, perhaps somewhat underselling the monumental historic significance of vision-correcting lenses as a technology. “But AI glasses have the capacity to provide superpowers like translating a conversation or summarizing notes or a conversation.” So the company says it sought to answer the question: “How do you build a hyper-personalized AI that knows your world deeply with enhanced privacy?”