After Facebook, Would You Trust A Meta-Powered Humanoid Robot In Your Home?
Meta, a corporation that got slapped with a $1.3 billion fine in Europe and a record $5 billion penalty in the U.S. for violating privacy rules, hopes to put an AI-powered humanoid robot in your home. According to a report from Bloomberg, the company Is pouring a significant amount of resources into developing "futuristic robots that can act like humans and assist with physical tasks."
The humanoid robot project will reportedly be led by the company's Reality Labs division, which is already working on the Metaverse ecosystem, smart glasses with holographic display, and a variety of body sensing-based hardware. The project will be led by a top former executive from General Motors' self-driving division.
The company is reportedly in no urgency to put a Meta-branded humanoid robot on the shelf, and given its track record with privacy, the robot may not exactly sell like hotcakes. However, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company apparently wants to leapfrog what fellow billionaire, Elon Musk, hopes to achieve with his Optimus robot.
Meta is hoping to not only sell robots powered by its Llama AI stack, but also hopes to hawk individual elements, such as the sensing stack, hardware modules, and computing kits, to interested parties. Think of it as a near end-to-end approach, where Meta provides finished components, as well as the software platform, for others to embed in their own robotic hardware. The pivot is not surprising, as the company has been teasing robotic advancements as DIGIT and ReSkin for the past few years.
It's an obvious choice for Meta's future
Before we dig into the sordid history of Meta's privacy violations, let's break down the robotic stack. Humanoid robots rely on tech called "computer vision" for navigating around a space, which is essentially the same formula that moves self-driving cars. That means giving its maker an interrupted view of everything in your house, and a camera feed of what's happening in real-time.
This is an AI-powered robot we are talking about, so it would be worth digging into the Terms & Conditions page to see what kind of multi-modal input it is recording for training and improving itself, how much of the audio-visual data is going to Meta's servers, and what are the chances of a privacy disaster. The best AI models of our time, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and DeepSeek, have given their fair share of leak-prone security scares to researchers. Entrusting an AI-powered robot with a continuous feed of your home is something that would make any tech enthusiast reconsider their choice. And when that humanoid robot comes from Meta, well, the stakes are higher. Here are a few classic examples:
1. The FTC launched an investigation into Facebook (and settled) over deceptive privacy declarations in 2011.
2. The Cambridge Analytica scandal involved harvesting Facebook data on over 87 million users.
3. Meta collected data on internet users who don't even run a Facebook account.
Meta is currently putting its AI everywhere, from social media platforms to the metaverse. Given the generous number of lawsuits targeting AI companies for unethically and illegally harvesting user data; a walking, all-seeing AI humanoid robot should be the last thing one should buy from Meta.