Meta Ends Contract with Sama After Kenyan Workers Report Seeing Intimate Footage from Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Users
May 1, 2026 – 9:07 am
TL;DR:
Meta ended its contract with Sama after Kenyan data annotation workers told Swedish journalists they had viewed intimate footage captured by Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. The 1,108 workers received six days’ notice. A class action lawsuit, UK and Kenyan regulatory investigations, and an EFF advisory followed.
In February 2026, workers at Sama, a Nairobi-based outsourcing company contracted by Meta, told Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten that they had been reviewing footage captured by users of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. The footage included people having sex, going to the toilet, undressing, and handling bank details. Their job was to label the content so that Meta’s AI systems could learn from it.
Less than two months after the investigation was published, on April 16, Meta ended its contract with Sama, issuing formal redundancy notices to 1,108 employees. Meta stated that Sama " doesn’t meet our standards." Sama rejected this characterization, claiming they received no notification of any failure. Naftali Wambalo, co-founder of the Africa Tech Workers Movement, alleged that Meta was retaliating against workers who spoke out.
The Glasses:
Meta sold over seven million pairs of Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025, tripling its previous year’s sales. These records video, capture photos, stream audio, and query Meta AI for image and voice recognition either on-device or in the cloud. A small LED on the frames signals when the camera is active, designed to alert strangers rather than the wearer that they’re being recorded.
Meta’s privacy policy states that users who share data for AI training allow their footage to be processed by Meta’s systems. However, it omits mention of the human element: people must watch and describe scenes before an algorithm can learn from them. The Swedish investigation revealed this process in detail, involving workers in Kenya annotating intimate content captured by third-party contractors using Meta’s smart glasses.