Wyden and Markey Gave Meta Until November 25 to Answer Nine Questions About Its Camera Glasses

The letter is dated October 28, 2026, addressed to Mark Zuckerberg, and signed by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts. The senators say they are seeking information on "serious privacy and safety risks" tied to Meta's AI-enabled smart glasses, including their use to record people in "private situations." Meta has until November 25, 2026 to send back answers and documents. It is the second letter on the glasses this year. In March, Markey, Wyden and Jeff Merkley asked Meta about reported facial recognition plans and set an April 6 deadline.

November 25 is a Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. Engadget gave the deadline as Thanksgiving itself, November 26, but the date Wyden's office published is November 25.

Nine requests, and two of them ask for paper

The letter carries an accusation, that Meta "launched a product tailor-made for invading the privacy of its users and bystanders," but its working part is a numbered list. The first item sets the tone. It cites Meta's 2021 Human Rights Report, which the senators say records an internal human rights analysis conducted before Ray-Ban Stories launched, and it asks Meta to hand over that analysis along with all later human rights, privacy and safety assessments and related due diligence on its camera glasses. Nothing in that request depends on whether the senators are right about anything else. The fifth item is the only other one that asks for documents, in that case copies of contract provisions. The rest ask Meta to explain itself in writing.

From there the questions get more specific about process. One asks whether Meta evaluated voyeurism and nonconsensual intimate capture as risks, and asks for that evaluation broken out by stage: capture, storage, transmission, access by staff and contractors, use in AI training, and disclosure. Another asks what testing Meta ran on accidental camera activation, on tampering with the recording indicator, and on camera-based AI features that read the world without lighting the indicator at all. Meta has described its safeguards in public. A mandatory update in July disables the camera when the glasses detect that the capture LED was physically tampered with or destroyed, and a change in August stopped the camera if the light is covered during a recording. Neither says what testing Meta ran, which is what the senators asked, and Engadget reported on July 31, before the August change, that a sticker kit hid the light on second-generation Ray-Ban Meta glasses without triggering a warning. The second half of the question covers situations where the light may not be visible at all, whether because of ambient conditions, interference, or a bystander who is blind or has low vision. That lands in the same week Meta announced an accessibility partnership with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and in August Meta pledged 15,000 pairs to Vision Ireland. Both programs depend on the camera being useful to a blind wearer. A bystander who cannot see an indicator is the same person from the other side of the lens.

Three of the requests are really about the pipeline behind the device. The senators want to know when imagery from the glasses becomes accessible to employees or contractors, what filtering sits in front of that access, which contractors and subcontractors are authorized, and which countries the review happens in. They also want copies of the relevant contract provisions. They want to know whether Meta trains on all eligible imagery or a subset, how the subset is chosen, and what stops Meta itself from using, disclosing, publishing or processing intimate imagery that the person depicted never consented to. They also ask whether device owners and the people their glasses capture can request deletion of biometric and other data, and how Meta ensures that deletion is timely and complete. The bystander half is the harder one, because a person filmed through someone else's glasses may have no relationship with Meta and no way of knowing who filmed them.

The remaining items ask how much the company's own women's safety and intimate image abuse teams were involved in designing and evaluating the product, what comparable safeguards the glasses have, given that Meta's documentation describes blurring faces and license plates in certain visual AI interactions and that it uses other tools against nonconsensual intimate imagery on Facebook and Instagram, and what redress exists for someone whose imagery was published or used for training without consent.

What the letter cites

The letter draws on press reporting and on Meta's own disclosures. It cites an October 2025 investigation by 404 Media, which in the senators' words "documented men secretly filming women while soliciting sexual services," and BBC reporting on women covertly filmed for social media content and then harassed. It also says contractors working on Meta's AI systems reported reviewing glasses footage of people undressing, using the bathroom and having sex. That matches February reporting by two Swedish newspapers, and the BBC reported in April that Meta ended its contract with Sama, whose Kenya-based workers spoke to the papers, less than two months later. Meta told the BBC that Sama did not meet its standards. Separately, the Los Angeles Times reported in September that more than 70 people have sued Meta, claiming their intimate images were exposed to workers abroad. The letter acknowledges that Meta recently introduced an option for wearers to prevent the retention of visual data for AI training, then says people captured without consent "have no corresponding control."

What the public reporting does not give is a reliable count of how often any of this happens. Reporters have documented individual cases and plaintiffs have made allegations, and any figures that could size the problem would sit inside Meta, if they exist at all. The BBC also reported that the UK's data watchdog wrote to Meta after the Swedish investigation and that Kenya's data protection office opened an inquiry into the glasses.

The floor underneath all of this is still voluntary

VR.org has found no federal or state law requiring a camera indicator on a pair of glasses sold in the United States, so the ones on the market are there by manufacturer choice. California came closest to changing that, and Governor Newsom vetoed SB 1130 on September 30, four weeks before this letter went out. Its manufacturer clause would have barred sales, from January 1, 2028, of any wearable recording device without an indicator "sufficiently prominent so that a reasonable person in the vicinity would be alerted to the capturing activity." It died with the rest of the bill.

Europe has gone further on the indicator itself, though not by statute. On October 13 the European Data Protection Board adopted a statement on smart glasses, which it describes as preliminary guidance, and its chair, Anu Talus, said the glasses "should make their recording obvious" with warnings that are "reliable, hard to ignore, and always up to date." The Commission's delegated act on battery removal, adopted in July and published in the Official Journal on October 22, is a manufacturing matter by comparison. A Senate letter carries no force of law either. If Meta answers in full, the senators will hold a detailed account of what a camera glasses due diligence file contains. A response to a senator is not automatically public, so whether that account becomes a reference point for the next company depends on what Meta sends and what Wyden and Markey choose to release.

Why the timing is awkward for Meta

Glasses are the line that is working. Meta's third-quarter 10-Q, filed the day after its October 21 earnings call, puts Reality Labs revenue at $443 million against $470 million a year earlier, with an operating loss of $4.13 billion for the segment. It attributes the revenue decline to lower Meta Quest sales, "partially offset by higher sales of AI glasses." No figure in the filing separates glasses from headsets, so it shows the direction of each line and the size of neither. The same 10-Q names "bystander privacy" among the regulatory requirements facing its wearables business, along with "potential restrictions or prohibitions on glasses in certain jurisdictions." That is the context in which Zuckerberg told investors new VR hardware now ships only on major breakthroughs.

For anyone else building a camera into a pair of glasses, the useful part of this letter is a narrow one. Nobody is being asked to recall a product. The questions that should concern a competitor are the ones about contractors, review countries and contract terms, since any manufacturer using human review of glasses footage could be asked the same three things. Meta has under four weeks to describe its arrangement. Whatever it sends by November 25 may never be published, and two senators cannot compel a reply. The more than 70 people suing Meta are asking about the same review pipeline, and if that case reaches discovery, those questions can be compelled.