Imagine buying a pair of sleek, AI-powered Ray-Bans to translate a menu or record a concert, only for a stranger in a Nairobi office park to accidentally catch a glimpse of you stepping out of the shower.
Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror, right? Unfortunately, it’s real life.
A bombshell joint investigation by Swedish papers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten just ripped the lid off Meta’s latest privacy nightmare.
It turns out that deeply intimate, private footage captured by Meta’s AI smart glasses is being funneled right here to Nairobi. The tech giant is using local data annotators to review, label, and categorize the footage to train its AI systems, and the workers are seeing a whole lot more than they bargained for.
“We See Everything”
Meta’s smart glasses are selling like hotcakes globally, marketed as the ultimate everyday AI assistant. But behind the slick Silicon Valley marketing is a manual, gritty data pipeline handled by Sama, the third-party data services company contracted by Meta with offices right here in Nairobi.
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The Kenyan data annotators interviewed in the investigation painted a pretty disturbing picture. They aren’t just looking at footage of people walking their dogs or riding bikes. They are catching users in incredibly vulnerable, private moments.
“We see everything – from living rooms to naked bodies,” one Nairobi-based worker told the Swedish journalists.
Another worker shared a crazy story about a guy who took off his glasses and set them on a nightstand. A few moments later, his wife walked into the frame and started undressing, totally clueless that she was being recorded and watched by a stranger thousands of miles away.
Workers also reported seeing sensitive personal info casually captured on video, like bank cards and private text messages.
Meta claims they use software to automatically blur faces and anonymize people, but according to both former Meta employees and the Kenyan annotators, the tech is notoriously glitchy. If the lighting is bad, the blur fails, leaving faces and bodies completely exposed.
Gag Orders and the “AI Sweatshop”
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For the young Kenyans doing this work, speaking out is incredibly risky. They are locked down by strict non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), the offices are blanketed with security cameras, and phones are strictly banned. For many, the job is a necessary paycheck, trapping them in a cycle of enduring uncomfortable, intrusive content in complete silence.
If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Nairobi has essentially become the global “sweatshop” for the AI boom, and Sama is usually right in the middle of it.
Back in 2021, TIME magazine exposed how OpenAI used Kenyan workers via Sama to clean up ChatGPT. Locals were paid as little as $1.32 an hour to read and filter out highly toxic content-including graphic descriptions of murder, child abuse, and self-harm. Workers called the psychological toll “torture.”
Then came the massive Facebook content moderation scandal. In 2022, former moderator Daniel Motaung sued Meta and Sama, blowing the whistle on the severe lack of mental health support for workers traumatized by watching execution and abuse videos all day.
That landmark case actually resulted in a Kenyan court ruling that Meta could be sued locally as the primary employer – a huge reality check for Mark Zuckerberg’s empire.
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Unsurprisingly, European privacy watchdogs are already circling. EU lawmakers are demanding answers on whether shipping this highly sensitive, unblurred video data to Kenya violates their strict GDPR privacy laws.
Locally, it brings up the same tired, frustrating debate. Yes, big tech brings jobs to Nairobi. But at what cost? Once again, young Kenyans are being tossed onto the frontlines of the AI revolution, forced to clean up the mess and sacrifice their own peace of mind just so the world can have smarter gadgets.
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