Transcription
It was bedtime, and David Jones took off his Meta glasses, placing them on his bedside table. His wife, Catherine, walked into the room and began taking off her clothes. What neither of them realized was that Meta’s smart glasses do not automatically go into standby mode when taken off. The glasses continued capturing footage, sending a naked video of Catherine around the world. It’s hard to imagine a worse invasion of privacy. This is how Meta spies on you. Today I’m going to break down five ways Meta watches you, where those videos of Catherine went, and find out how you can fight back.
Meta is a collection of programs and platforms. Some are very famous, like Facebook or Instagram, and some are almost totally unheard of, which is on purpose. I want you to think of it as a switchboard. Whenever you interact with a Meta product, the information they have on you gets richer, and the light gets brighter. The more products you use, the more you light up Meta’s surveillance machine.
Facebook. This is where it all started for Meta. In 2014, Facebook claimed it generated more than four petabytes of data a day. And the situation is getting worse because today Meta is pivoting to AI. And in order to catch up with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, they are feeding almost every public post, every photo, every comment, every interaction across Facebook, Instagram, and threads into its AI models. Let’s plug in the line. You don’t need me to tell you that if you use Facebook, they know who you are, where you are, and who your friends are. And they use all of that to sell ads. Horrible, but basic. Amazingly, even if you’re not on Facebook, it can still spy on you. And not just your online behavior, but much more than that. People’s tax information, heart rates, dating profiles, even menstrual cycles. How’s that possible? A thing called the Facebook software development kit is how. Imagine you’re building an app and you want to know more about your users. You can build it using the software development kit. This will give you access to Facebook’s sophisticated performance analytics and other features. But it also gives Facebook a key to this data. So even if you aren’t on Facebook, Meta knows what websites and apps you’re interested in.
How to protect yourself? Go into settings, privacy and security, and then opening the app privacy report. There you can see which apps contact domains owned by Facebook. Turn off Meta’s off-Meta tracking and clear your history. This doesn’t delete the data or even stop the tracking, but it does tell Meta you don’t want your off-platform activity tied to your Facebook account. Never use the in-app browser. It can see everything you do. Turn off targeted ads and turn off app permissions. And if you must use Facebook, open it in the browser rather than using the app.
Instagram. You might have noticed how Instagram has rearranged its home screen to prioritize messaging. It’s happening at the same time they’re getting rid of end to-end encryption as an option for Instagram messages. This means there’s nothing you can do to prevent it from reading your DMs. Let’s plug that one in, too. Instagram tracking will detect objects, color palettes, even brands and logos, how long you watch a video, and the exact moment you swipe away. Instagram uses this information to infer your emotional state. It then uses that information to market to you. Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams testified Meta targeted teenagers who were feeling depressed. If a teen girl deleted a selfie, the company allegedly reasoned that it would be the perfect time to try to sell her a beauty product. But it goes even further. In 2025, security researchers caught the Instagram app listening in on local ports, basically creating a backdoor on Android devices. If you visit a certain website, the Instagram app would see the data that the website wanted to share, grab it through that backdoor, and forward it on to Meta servers. Meta only stopped doing this when it was exposed publicly. Its explanation? It was all just a potential miscommunication.
How to protect yourself from Instagram. Open Instagram in your browser rather than using the app. Turn off targeted ads. Turn off off-Meta tracking and clear your history. Never use the in-app browser. And if you live in the European Union, UK, or the European Economic Area, you know, places with actual data privacy protections, you can opt out of AI training in Instagram and Facebook. The rest of us are out of luck.
WhatsApp. WhatsApp is private, right? That’s the whole point. Well, sure, but only to a point. In 2018, Natalie Edwards, a Treasury Department official who used WhatsApp to leak documents to a BuzzFeed reporter exposing how dirty money moved through US banks, was arrested. She was eventually sentenced to 6 months in prison. She thought WhatsApp was private, too. Edwards was screwed by metadata. Metadata? It’s everything about your message except the message itself, like who it’s going to, when it was sent, and who sent it. It’s the envelope, not the letter. Now, the bulbs are burning a little brighter. WhatsApp and Messenger closely watch who you message. They both ask you to upload all your contacts so they can recreate your social network. They then link this data to your Facebook and Instagram accounts. There are two other exceptions to the end-to-end encryption claimed by WhatsApp. If you message a business, those messages aren’t always encrypted and can be shared with Meta. Payments on WhatsApp aren’t encrypted either, which means even on its most privacy-focused platform, Meta is finding ways to tap you for advertising information.
How to protect yourself when using WhatsApp. If you live in the EU, UK, or the European Economic Area, you can go in and turn off Meta’s ability to share WhatsApp data with other Meta products to improve them or help them show you personalized ads. Outside of the EU, all you can really do is turn off app permissions so it can’t access your location, microphone, camera, or contacts. For Messenger, turn off targeted ads, turn off all the app permissions, never use the in-app browser, clear your history, and turn off off-Meta tracking. Of course, you can always make your life simple and just switch to Signal.
Three lights shining brightly. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and Messenger. But here’s where things get weird. These two bulbs, well, one is secret, and the other is very, very public.
Chapter 4. Website spying. In 2022, Meta was found tracking highly sensitive health information from dozens of hospital websites, primary-care portals, and even crisis pregnancy clinics. This information included even if people were considering having an abortion. This is known as the Facebook or Meta pixel. The pixel is a snippet of code embedded in websites that allows Meta to see who visits the site. Basically, it’s Meta spyware. When your browser loads a page with the pixel, it makes a request to Facebook’s servers, reporting almost everything you do on the website, like what you put in your cart or even what you type into a form. That’s right. Meta can see what you write into the website. Meta claims it hashes this information and then uses the hash to see if it has any matches in its database. But The Markup ran tests and found that not only was the pixel exposing all types of sensitive information, including names of providers, addresses, and more, its sensitive data filter failed to delete appointments with a crisis pregnancy center from a user’s profile. And the pixel can match you to your Facebook account, even if you’re not logged in or if you block Facebook cookies.
The good news is if you use almost any privacy-focused browser or plugin, you can block the pixel. The bad news is even if you opt out of one tracking, it’s likely that Meta will just replace it with another. In 2021, Apple introduced its app tracking transparency feature. For the first time, if an app wanted to track what you did in other apps or websites, it had to ask. Millions of people opted out of Meta’s tracking, and the company lost $230 billion in market cap in a single day. Then there’s Conversions API. Ever wondered how an ad for the exact thing you were just shopping for follows you around the internet even if you have all your privacy settings maxed out? This is probably the reason Meta began pushing websites to use conversions API to get around app tracking transparency. It’s a tracking system that never touches your device at all. It allows businesses to share the data they see when you visit their sites directly with Meta.
Protect yourself. You can see if websites are using the Meta pixel by using the markups blacklight feature. Enter the URL of the website you want to investigate and it will show you all the trackers it found. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can really do to stop Conversions API from sharing your info other than talking about it and pressuring websites to stop using it.
Meta’s Ray-Bans are the company’s first hardware hit. With the smart glasses, Meta is breaking out into the real world and bringing its spying with it. Remember Catherine’s story from the start of this video? She was spied on naked by her husband’s Meta Glasses. Well, that footage zoomed halfway around the world to a Meta-contracted annotation operation in Kenya. These workers also claimed to see banking information, bathroom visits, and people having sex, all because of a Meta wearable. Meta has made large claims about how voice recordings, images, and videos will be stored on your device and can only be used by Meta to train or improve its other products with your express consent. But for the AI assistant to function, voice, text, image, and sometimes video must be processed and may be shared with Meta servers. This processing is automatic and can’t be turned off without turning off the glasses’ AI features. This data is also then monitored and labeled by workers around the globe. This is how workers in Kenya ended up watching Catherine undress. They then had to label the objects and people in the frame to help train Meta’s AI. And Meta is planning on adding facial recognition services to its glasses, which could make it easy for users to dox or scam bystanders.
And now the final bulb has been lit. Once your public content has been swept into Meta’s AI model, be it footage captured by Meta’s Ray-Bans or by any of its other apps, it’s there forever. You can’t delete it.
How to protect yourself from Meta Glasses. To find out if anyone near you is using Meta Ray-Bans, you can use the Nearby Glasses app. Simply download it onto your Android, and it will detect the Bluetooth signatures of any smart glasses nearby and send you a push notification. Other than that, I guess you can just tell people off for wearing them.
So Meta loves to watch everything you do. And the crazy thing is you can disconnect every line from the switchboard. You can quit every app, block Meta pixels, and convince your family and friends to quit, too. And the bulbs will get dimmer, but they won’t go out, because Meta keeps shadow profiles on people. If a friend uploads a picture with you, or if you use an app built with Meta trackers, or if you visit a website with its pixel, you’re in its system. Even a newborn baby is likely in there, if the parents shared a picture in a DM, used a pregnancy app, or a hospital portal. Meta has turned the internet and increasingly real life into its monetizable space. And blocking its tracking is the first step. We could build an internet that protects your privacy. We just have to fight for it.