Meta's Quest filmed everything, and I want the tapes

A satire. The clip it begins with is a comedy video, not a broadcast; the hack in it did not happen.

On Wednesday a man in the Netherlands named Tony posted twenty-eight seconds of television that never aired, and I have not been able to sit down since. You can watch it here. Go on. I will wait. I have nowhere to be and nothing left to lose.

@SkarredGhost, 28 Oct 2026, 0:01. Source: https://x.com/SkarredGhost/status/2115502858166501776.

In the video a news anchor with the gravity of a woman reading a verdict announces that Facebook's cloud was hacked overnight, that Meta is responding this morning, that they spoke with the company, and then cuts to a Meta representative in a well-lit office, a man of about my own vintage and bearing, who explains — with the patience of a man explaining something to a child who has already guessed it — that the headset has two cameras on the bottom of it, that those cameras are on at all times when it is powered on, that they read your hands and your gestures, and that what the hacker actually stole — and here he paused, the way a man pauses when he has been told to pause — was video the customers had shot of themselves. Below the waist. In the bathroom, in the beanbag chair, at the desk, in the dark, one hand on the headset.

@SkarredGhost, 28 Oct 2026, 0:25. Source: https://x.com/SkarredGhost/status/2115502858166501776.

@SkarredGhost, 28 Oct 2026, 0:17. Source: https://x.com/SkarredGhost/status/2115502858166501776.

The joke is crude, and I am the last man in America who will pretend otherwise. Let me also be fair to the sketch, because the sketch will not be fair to itself: the videos in it are imaginary. No customer's cloud was cracked open, the hacker is a fiction, the anchor is a fiction, and the thirty-nine million is a number invented by a comedian in a beard. What is not imaginary is the arrangement the joke is built on — a device with two cameras pointed at the place a seated man keeps his lap, recording for three years without anyone in the room being asked, sold by a company that has spent this month in court arguing about its paperwork. Because everything funny in that sketch was written by the lawyers.

What Meta's own page admits

Here is Meta's help page, opened this morning, headed Recording or casting your mixed reality view on Meta Quest. It does not say, as I have been told at every dinner party for three years, that the headset merely watches the room in order to draw the room. It says:

Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 3S and Meta Quest Pro let you record and cast your surroundings through mixed reality. This means that when you choose to you can combine your real environment with virtual elements.

And then, because a company that has been fined will always volunteer the detail you were hoping not to need:

When you are recording, casting, or livestreaming with passthrough on Meta Quest 3 or Meta Quest 3S, your headset will show blinking white light to indicate to bystanders that the passthrough cameras are active.

Read that sentence twice. The light is not a promise that you are not being filmed. The light is an announcement that you are. And it only blinks when the user has decided to record — which is a fine arrangement for the user and a poor one for the man standing in the kitchen in his undershirt. Meta also offers, in the same document, a suggestion that I have adopted as my personal motto: Let the people around you know that you will be using the headset to cast or record your mixed reality experience and request their permission before including them in a recording. That is not a technical safeguard. That is a house rule for a fraternity.

The paperwork is funnier than the sketch

The comedian imagined a hack. The company wrote the Supplemental Meta Platforms Technologies Privacy Policy Legal Bases for Meta VR Products, effective 5 March 2026, which enumerates exactly what the machine takes and why, and which contains, in its first hundred words, the phrase where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your rights and freedoms.

Then there are the individual notices, and I recommend them to anyone who thinks the sketch went too far. The Eye Tracking Privacy Notice, effective 5 September 2025, begins when you choose to enable eye tracking. So does the Natural Facial Expressions Privacy Notice: when you choose to enable Natural Facial Expressions. So does the notice for hand and body tracking. Three documents, three sentences, one word between them — enable — as though the alternative to a company knowing the shape of your jaw while you laugh is to sit in the yard with a bucket.

I enabled the eye tracking. I do not remember agreeing to it, but I have never remembered agreeing to anything, including two of the marriages.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico

On 21 October a judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion, after a jury found the company had misled consumers about data privacy — violations counted more than 40 million times, affecting the entire population of the state, roughly two million people. Judge Francis Mathew found that a penalty above $219 billion was warranted and cut it to $25bn anyway. It is the largest penalty ever levied against the company, and it descends, as everything does in this business, from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which already cost Meta $5bn at the Federal Trade Commission in 2019.

Meta's head lawyer, CJ Mahoney, said the ruling makes it "all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico" and that the appeal will succeed. Meta had argued that anything beyond $3.4bn would be unconstitutional. The company also settled an $18bn deal with California over child safety this year.

I want to be precise about the distinction, because my reputation is the only thing I own that has not been repossessed. The clip says the cameras filmed a hack and leaked the customers. That is fiction. The $25bn is not fiction, and neither is the sentence from the European Data Protection Board's statement 1/2026 on smart glasses, adopted 13 October, in which the Board's chair, Anu Talus, writes:

These devices look like ordinary glasses, but they include cameras and microphones and are connected to the internet. This raises serious privacy concerns, as individuals may be recorded without their knowledge.

Without their knowledge. Madam, I have never had knowledge. Not once. I was filmed by a doorbell in 2019 and I still check my hair before leaving the house.

The footage, as recovered

I have seen the files. I cannot show you the files — for reasons that will be obvious, and for the rest of the reasons, none of your business. What I can show you are five stills from the recovered set, reproduced as the headset captured them, with the parts that would embarrass a lesser man pixelated at my own expense. A fair selection, chronologically arranged, from a man who has nothing left to hide and would like that noted on the record.

File one is the bathroom mirror, four in the morning. He is in there for nine minutes. The headset is on the towel rail, watching, which is the part that bothers me.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

File two is the beanbag chair, a quarter to three. Nine minutes and eleven seconds of a man being comfortable. I have watched it four times and I still cannot say what he was doing, and I am the man.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

File three is the desk at eleven at night. He is arguing with a printout. He is not wearing trousers. Nobody has ever been able to explain this, including him.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

File four is the kitchen at twenty past one. The refrigerator light did the rest.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

File five is the armchair. This one is only embarrassing, and I include it so the set reads as a fair portrait rather than a highlight reel.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

My demands, which are two

One. I want the footage of me released. All of it. Every session. I have spent three years in a robe at two in the morning, mid-argument with a piece of paper, and I am told that a machine has been drawing my hands and reading my face and counting the times I flinch at a neural network diagram. If that footage exists, it is the most honest portrait of an American columnist produced this century, and it belongs in a museum, not in a download bucket with the rest of the customers.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

Two. I will pay the $25bn. I do not have the $25bn. I have a basement, a 1974 dartboard, and the mineral rights to a field in which nothing has ever been found. But I have been told — by the same industry that told me the cameras were only watching to draw the room — that a sufficient volume of personal data can be converted into money, and I am prepared to test that proposition with forty minutes of myself in a headset, provided the check clears in New Mexico first.

What I actually want, and I will say it once

The sketch is a joke and it is going to be forgotten by Friday along with the rest of the internet. What will not be forgotten is the paper trail underneath it: a support page that tells you to ask the room's permission, three notices that begin with the word enable, and a jury in a state I have never visited that counted forty million violations and then did the arithmetic.

The cameras on the bottom of the headset have been watching you draw your own room for three years. They have been watching me argue with mine. The difference between us is that I would like the receipt.

This column is satire: the broadcast it opens on is a comedy video made by other people, and no Meta customer was hacked or filmed by a hacker. The New Mexico judgment, the Meta documents and the European statement are real, and every one of them is linked above. Our own reporting on what a privacy report of 542 events actually contained is here.