Meta has ended its contract with Sama, the Kenya-headquartered data annotation firm whose workers told journalists in February they had reviewed private footage recorded by Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Sama says the cancellation affects 1,108 workers and arrived less than two months after the initial reports in Svenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, and a parallel account from Kenya-based freelance journalist Naipanoi Lepapa. A Meta spokesperson told the BBC the company decided to end the relationship because Sama did not 'meet our standards.'
Sama disputes that framing. In a statement, the firm said it 'was never notified of any failure to meet Meta's standards' and that it had 'consistently met the operational, security, and quality standards required across all of our client engagements.' Sama added that its focus is on 'supporting our employees during this transition.'
The February reports described annotators in Kenya watching footage that appeared to be recorded without subjects' knowledge, including people changing clothes, using the toilet, and having sex. One Sama employee, quoted anonymously via machine translation, said workers 'are just expected to carry out the work' regardless of what the footage contained. Another said, 'People can record themselves in the wrong way and not even know what they are recording.'
Key facts
- 01Meta ended its contract with Kenya-based annotation firm Sama, a move Sama says affects 1,108 workers.
- 02The cancellation came less than two months after a February 2026 report in which Sama employees described reviewing explicit Ray-Ban Meta footage.
- 03A class-action complaint was filed in March 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta and Luxottica of America.
- 04The UK Information Commissioner's Office and Kenya's Data Protection Commissioner both opened inquiries in March 2026.
- 05Meta told the BBC it cut ties because Sama did not 'meet our standards'; Sama says it was never notified of any failure.
Meta confirmed at the time that it routes some content users share with Meta AI to contractors for review, framing the work as quality improvement. The company said that data 'is first filtered to protect people's privacy,' including by blurring faces, and that 'humans review AI content to improve product performance, for which we get clear user consent.' Meta added that it had paused work with Sama while it looked into the claims.
“Sama says Meta's cancellation cut 1,108 jobs, less than two months after its annotators told reporters they had reviewed footage of people changing, using the toilet, and having sex.”— Jaeden Schafer
BBC reported that Sama workers believe Meta cut the contract because they spoke publicly about what they were seeing. Meta has not responded to that specific allegation. The gap between the February disclosures and the contract termination — roughly two months — is the central point of friction.
The fallout has spread beyond the contractor relationship. In March, a class-action complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, against Meta and Luxottica of America, a subsidiary of EssilorLuxottica, which owns Ray-Ban. The complaint alleges violations of state consumer protection laws and seeks damages, punitive penalties, and an injunction requiring Meta to change how the glasses operate.
Regulators followed in the same month. The UK Information Commissioner's Office said it would write to Meta about the 'concerning' reports, telling the BBC that 'devices processing personal data, including smart glasses, should put users in control and provide appropriate transparency.' The office of Kenya's Data Protection Commissioner said it was investigating 'privacy concerns raised in relation to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and the processing of personally identifiable information for the training of Meta AI.'
Ray-Ban Meta glasses display a light when capturing photos or video, but the Sama workers' accounts suggested that indicator is not always understood, or noticed, by the people being recorded. That gap — between technical disclosure and meaningful consent — is what the California complaint and the UK and Kenyan regulators are now probing.
The Sama story sits alongside other recent contractor turbulence in Meta's AI supply chain. Last week we reported that Covalen, another Meta contractor, told more than 700 Dublin-based AI trainers their jobs were at risk. Annotation work, long the unglamorous backbone of consumer AI products, is becoming both more sensitive and more politically exposed as the products themselves move onto people's faces.
What's unresolved is whether 'didn't meet our standards' is a substantive quality finding or a convenient exit. Sama says it received no such notice. Meta has not detailed a single specific failure. Without that detail, the cancellation reads less like a quality intervention and more like distance-creation from a contractor whose workers became the public face of a privacy problem.
Smart glasses raise a question the rest of the AI stack has mostly avoided: when training data is recorded by one consumer of a product about another non-consenting person, who is responsible for the harm. Meta is now being asked that question by a US court, a UK regulator, and a Kenyan data authority simultaneously, while severing the contractor that surfaced the issue. The Ray-Ban Meta franchise is one of the few clear consumer hits in the current AI cycle, and the legal and regulatory bills attached to that success are starting to come due.
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