Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, built with EssilorLuxottica, have drawn a privacy backlash over wearers photographing and filming strangers, and anthropologist S.A. Applin argues in Fast Company that the cameras are one piece of a decade-long effort to gather the behavioral data Zuckerberg’s personal AI agents would run on. Applin traces a line from Facebook’s 2013 AI lab and its hire of Yann LeCun, through the 2019 decision to merge the plumbing behind Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, to Project Aria, Ray-Ban Stories, LLaMA, and this year’s Muse release. She reads the metaverse as relocated rather than abandoned, with the interface now the world itself. Anyone who has never touched a Meta product still becomes a data point when someone else records them, and there’s no opting out of that.
