(CN) - Two purchasers of Meta AI smart glasses filed a lawsuit on Thursday claiming they were duped by the company's claims that the glasses are "designed for privacy."

The plaintiffs said in their complaint in San Francisco federal court that, when using the AI features of the spectacles, the captured footage is routed to Meta servers and sent to a subcontractor in Kenya where thousands of workers manually view and label the footage to train Meta's AI models.

The consumers' claims are based on a report published last month in a Swedish newspaper.

"By affirmatively claiming that the glasses were designed to protect privacy, Meta assumed a duty to disclose material facts that would inform a reasonable consumer's decision to purchase the product," the plaintiffs argue. "Instead, Meta hid the alarming reality: that use of the AI features results in a stranger halfway around the world watching the most private moments of a person's life."

The two purchasers, one from California and one from New Jersey, seek to represent all people who bought the glasses in the U.S. in a class action.

The glasses, sold as Ray-Ban and Oakley models, have a built-in AI assistant that responds to spoken prompts and allows wearers to translate foreign-language text in real time, identify objects and landmarks, get directions, send messages and make phone calls.

Users can also take hands-free photos and videos, record up to three minutes of continuous footage and livestream first-person video directly to Facebook and Instagram.

For these features to work, the plaintiffs say, the glasses transmit what the wearer sees to Meta's cloud servers, where it is analyzed using visual recognition, location data and other contextual inputs, then stored and used to train Meta's AI models.

The plaintiffs argue that, in order to reassure the public and drive consumer adoption, Meta has engaged in a marketing campaign that portrays the glasses as a product "designed for privacy, controlled by you."

That, the two consumers claim, is not correct based on the reported use of an overseas contractor to review and label the footage captured by the glasses.

"A reasonable consumer would not expect that the footage captured by Meta AI Glasses worn in everyday life would be transmitted to third-party human contractors for review and analysis of the most intimate and private moments," they say in their complaint.

A Meta spokesperson said the company was analyzing the lawsuit and couldn't yet comment on it.

"Ray-Ban Meta glasses help you use AI, hands free, to answer questions about the world around you," the spokesperson said. "Unless users choose to share media they've captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user's device. When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people's experience, as many other companies do. We take steps to filter this data to protect people's privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed."

The plaintiffs accuse Meta of violating three different California consumer protection laws, and they seek unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

They are represented by attorneys with Clarkson Law Firm in Malibu, California.

Source: Courthouse News Service