Some Ray-Ban Meta glasses saved ordinary conversations even though nobody said "Hey Meta," the phrase that wakes the built-in assistant. The clips showed up in the Meta AI app as audio files and text transcripts. Asked about it by Android Authority on October 13, Meta replied that "this issue has been resolved" and pointed owners to the settings page where they can review and delete their voice logs.
Meta hasn't explained the cause, how many pairs were affected or whether a software update fixed it. Android Authority also asked what happens to audio captured by mistake and got no answer.
What the owner found
The report came from a Reddit user who posted warnings in r/MetaGlasses and r/RaybanMeta. They said it happened on three separate pairs, Gen 2 and Gen 3, after a firmware update. The "Respond without Hey Meta" setting was off, so the glasses should only have reacted to the wake phrase. Instead, the app's log filled up with snippets of conversations with other people. A screenshot they shared shows entries from October 12, some with stray sentences and some marked as having no transcript.
The owner also said the inner notification light, which only the wearer sees, sometimes switched on during normal conversation. Other commenters described similar activations. Android Authority couldn't reproduce the problem, and there's no evidence it was widespread.
Before Meta's public statement, its support team told the owner to revoke the app's microphone and camera permissions, turn off wear detection, delete their voice history and disable automatic updates, TechSpot reported. That strips out most of what the glasses do and says nothing about what went wrong.
How a wake word is supposed to work
"Hey Meta" is a wake word. The microphones listen for that one phrase, and recording should only start once the glasses recognize it. Whatever you say next is sent to Meta's servers, which work out the request and send back an answer. We cover the difference between on-device and server-side processing in our guide to local AI versus cloud AI.
Detectors like this can mistake a similar sound for the phrase, and Meta's privacy notice for its glasses already allows for accidental activations. The Reddit report describes something else: repeated recordings of conversations on three pairs at once, with no wake phrase in any of them.
Where those recordings end up in the US
In the US, Meta stores voice recordings and transcripts from its glasses by default. It removed the option to turn that off in April 2025, as TechCrunch reported at the time. According to VR.org's reading of the US privacy notice, recordings flagged as false activations are deleted within 90 days, while others can be kept for up to a year and may be checked by trained reviewers. The UK, Irish and German versions let owners switch storage off, in which case recordings are deleted after processing.
Other services that reuse what people record at least offer a way out. Twitch, for example, lets streamers opt out of Amazon training AI on their broadcasts. US owners of these glasses get no equivalent switch for voice storage, only the option to delete recordings after the fact.
The light covers the camera, not the microphones
Ray-Ban Meta glasses have a white capture light on the front that blinks whenever the camera takes a photo or records video. Meta says the light can't be switched off and that the camera stops working if someone covers or tampers with it. It exists so people nearby know they're being filmed. Meta doesn't describe it as a signal that the microphones are capturing a request, and the light the owner noticed was the inner one.
So the people most exposed by this bug were the ones not wearing the glasses. Anyone chatting with the owner had no way of knowing their voice was being saved to a Meta account.
What you can check now
Open the Meta AI app, go to your glasses' device settings, then the glasses privacy section, and look for the voice activity log, following the path TechRadar lays out. You can play, read and delete recordings one by one or all at once. If you spot clips you never asked for, the timestamp on each entry shows when the glasses woke up.
Deleting old clips won't stop new ones. If you'd rather not take the chance, you can turn off voice activation in the same settings and press a button on the glasses whenever you want the assistant.
The conversation starts here
Sign in with a supporter account to comment. Sign in
Nobody has commented yet. Want to go first?