It's also a huge danger as the system FB uses to tag and categorize photos is clearly flawed. example: Meta took a business page I ran that had over 150K followers offline because of a photo that violated their 'strict anti-pornography' etc etc policies. The picture was of a planet - Saturn - and it took weeks of the most god-awful to and fro with (mostly) bots to get them to revoke the ban - their argument was that the planet was 'flesh-toned' and that their A.I. could not tell that was not actually skin. The image was from NASA via a stock library and labelled as such.
Google had banned (years ago) my secondary Google a/c that at best I used once in a few months - never even browed from a browser with that a/c logged in, never ever used it for anything other than Gmail - I doubt YT etc was even activated on that. The reason given was a kind of porn that I can't bring myself to type the name of. I didn't even think of appealing - I was so fucking scared and ashamed without ever indulging in that.
But that was when I bought my domain and mail hosting service and few months later I had moved my email to my domain almost everywhere.
Years later Google also killed my primary Gmail (i.e what was primary email earlier) Google Play a/c (for lack of use; true I had never published an app) and didn't refund the $25 USD even though I had finished all the tasks needed to keep the a/c alive 3 days before deadline and I had also requested them to tell me "how to add the bank a/c" to get the refund (asked at least 5 times over a span of 40 days) - because they kept telling me "add the bank a/c for refund" and never telling me "how" or sharing an article or page that told me how. I could never find out how.
They kept the $25 - not even appeals were allowed/entertained. I got "final.. no further response" and that was it, literally no further response on it.
I stop to think sometimes why.. just why we gave these trillion dollar companies this much power - the likes of Apple, Google, AMZN, Meta, MSFT.. why?? Now we literally can't fight them - not legally, not with anything else. It seems we just can't.
> They kept the $25 - not even appeals were allowed/entertained. I got "final.. no further response" and that was it, literally no further response on it.
It's the kind of thing I'd send to the small claims court out of spite.
One reads completely ridiculous cases like the one you describe, and shakes their head at those who preach the notion of creating ever more thickets of AI "powered" bots as a prima facie interface for our social services, customer support and other institutional interaction needs.
Idiocies like this are why AI should absolutely never (at least at any present level of technology) be an inescapable means of filtering how a human is responded to with any complaint. Truly, fuck the mentality of those who want to cram this tendency down the public's throat. Though it sadly won't happen thanks to sheer corporate growth inertia, companies that do push such things should be punished into oblivion by the market.
I worked on a project where one of the services was a model that decided whether to pay a medical bill.
Before you start justified screams of horror, let me explain the simple honesty trick that ensured proper ethics, though I guess at cost of profit unacceptable to some corporations:
The model could only decide between auto approving a repayment, or refer the bill to existing human staff. The entire idea was that the obvious cases will be auto approved, and anything more complex would follow the existing practice.
Mmmmhm, which means the humans now understand that they should be callous and cold. If they're not rubber stamping rejections all the time then the AI isn't doing anything useful by making a feed of easy-to-reject applications.
The system will become evil even if it has humans in it because they have been given no power to resist the incentives
All you have to do is take an initial cost hit where you have multiple support staff review a case as a calibration phase and generate cohorts of say 3 reviews where 2 have the desired denial rate and 1 doesn't. Determine the performance of each cohort by how much in agreement they are and then rotate out whose in training over time and you'll achieve a target denial rate.
There will always be people who "try to do their best" and actually read the case and decide accordingly. But you can drown them out with malleable people who come to understand if they deny 100 cases today then they're getting a cash bonus for alignment (with the other guy mashing deny 100 times).
Technology solves technological problems. It does not solve societal ones.
I am not disagreeing, and I am not arguing for AI.
I am just saying that the perverse incentives already exist and that in this case AI-assisted evaluation (which defers to a human when uncertain) is not going to make it any better, but it is not going to make it any worse.
Actually it may, even if only slightly. Because now as the GP says, the humans know the only cases they're going to get are the ones the AI suspects are not worthy. They will look more skeptically.
I totally agree that the injustices at play here are already long baked in and this is not the harbinger of doom, medical billing already sucks immense amounts of ass and this isn't changing it much? But it is changing it and worse, it's infusing the credibility of automation, even in a small way, into a system. "Our decisions are better because a computer made them" which doesn't deal at all with how we don't fully understand how these systems work or what their reasoning is for any particular claim.
Insofar as we must have profit-generating investment funds masquerading as healthcare providers, I don't think it's asking a ton that they be made to continue employing people to handle claims, and customer service for that matter. They're already some of the most profitable corporations on the planet, are costs really needing cutting here?
>"Our decisions are better because a computer made them"
This is the root of the problem, and it is (relatively) easy to solve: make any decision taken by the computer directly attributed to the CEO. Let them have some Skin in The Game, it should be more than enough to align the risk and the rewards.
Actually the real issue for the humans was that it would mean possible reduction in employment which is why we had union block deployment for a time until a deal was brokered.
It helps, as you can suspect from "union" comment, that it wasn't an american health care insurance company.
How hard would it be tweak that model so that it decides between auto-paying and sending it to a different bot that hallucinates reasons to deny the claim? Eventually some super smart MBA will propose this innovative AI-first strategy that will boost profits.
Funny enough, the large AI companies run by CEOs with MBAs (Alphabet and MSFT), seem to be slow-playing AI. The ones promising the most (Meta, Tesla, OpenAI, Nvidia) are led by strict technologists.
Maybe it’s time to adjust your internal “MBAs are evil” bias for something more dynamic.
They are slow-playing the promise of what AI can, should, and will accomplish for us.
Nadella said this yesterday at YC’s AI Startup School:
== “The real test of AI,” Nadella said, “is whether it can help solve everyday problems — like making healthcare, education, and paperwork faster and more efficient.”
“If you’re going to use energy, you better have social permission to use it,” he said. “We just can’t consume energy unless we are creating social and economic value.”==
Thanks. I agree w the things Nadella said there. But it rings pretty hollow, given how hard every MSFT product is pushing AI. What would it look like if they weren't "slow-playing" it?
That’s fair. I was looking more at the promises of what it can/will do than integrating it into products. The MBA CEOs seem more focused on solving business problems and the tech CEOs are more focused on changing the world.
This is all an aside from the original point, which was that I think it is unfair to pin the proliferation and promises made about AI on some cabal of MBAs somehow forcing it. The people building the tools are just as at fault, if not more.
Right, I can't sustain for a moment the idea that the guy who fumbled Recall like a stack of wet fish dipped in baby oil is actually a wise sage full of caution. I permit myself one foolish idea a day and that's not going to be the one for any day of the week.
I miss the old days when Facebook was simply a fun way to reconnect with friend and family who lived far away. Unfortunately, those days are gone. It feels like an over engineered attention-hogging system that collects a large amount of data and risks people's mental health along the way.
Perhaps naive to say, but I think there was the briefest moment where your status updates started with "is", feeds were chronological, and photos and links weren't pushed over text, that it was not an adversarial actor to one's wellbeing.
There was an even briefer moment where there was no such thing as status updates. You didn't have a "wall." The point wasn't to post about your own life. You could go leave public messages on other people's profiles. And you could poke them. And that was about it.
I remember complaining like hell when the wall came out, that it was the beginning of the end. But this was before publicly recording your own thoughts somewhere everyone could see was commonplace, so I did it by messaging my friends on AIM.
And then when the Feed came out? It was received as creepy and stalkerish. And there are now (young) adults born in the time since who can't even fathom a world without ubiquitous feeds in your pocket.
Unless I’m remembering wrong, posting a public message on someone else’s profile was posting on their wall. Or was it called something else before it was somebody’s wall?
It didn't have a name. It wasn't really a "feature." You just went and posted on their "page" I guess I would call it.
The change to being able to post things on your own page and expecting other people to come to your page and read them (because, again, no Feed) wasn't received well at first.
Keep in mind, smartphones didn't exist yet, and the first ones didn't have selfie cameras even once they did. And the cameras on flip phones were mostly garbage, so if you wanted to show a picture, you had to bring a camera with you, plug it in, and upload it. So at first the Wall basically replaced AIM away messages so you could tell your friends which library you were going to go study in and how long. And this didn't seem problematic, because you were probably only friends with people in your school (it was only open to university students, and not many schools at first), and nobody was mining your data, because there were no business or entity pages.
Yeah, that's about when it changed. The lack of a wall was a very early situation. I joined in 2004, back when it was only open to Ivy League and Boston-area schools.
It was still acceptable to write on someone else's wall when they came to be called that. You can still do that now I think but it's quite uncommon and how it works is now complicated but settings.
Sure, you could. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that now you could post on your own.
That's what turned it from a method of reaching out and sending messages to specific people when you had something to say to them to a means of shouting into the void and expecting (or at least hoping) that someone, somewhere, would see it and care what you had to say. It went from something actively pro-social to something self-focused.
Blogs and other self-focused things already existed, but almost nobody used them for small updates throughout the day. Why do you think the early joke about Twitter was that it was just a bunch of self-absorbed people posting pictures of their lunch? Nobody knew what to do with a tool like that yet, but the creation of that kind of tool has led to an intensity of self-focus and obsession the world had never seen before.
I made the mistake of sending a Gen Z (adult) friend a poking finger emoji to try to remind him about something.
It wasn't the first time I've had a generational digital (ha) communication failure, but it was the first time I've had one because I'm old and out of touch with what things mean these days!
My hunch is that instant messaging is slowly taking over that space. If you actually want to connect with people you can without needing much of a platform.
I mean let's be clear on the history and not romanticize anything, Zuck created Facebook pretty much so he could spy on college girls. He denies this of course, but it all started with his Facemash site for ranking the girls, and then we get to the early Facebook era and there's his quote about the "4,000 dumbfucks trusting him with their photos" etc.
There is no benevolent original version of FB. It was a toy made by a college nerd who wanted to siphon data about chicks. It was more user friendly back then because he didn't have a monopoly yet. Now it has expanded to siphoning data from the entire human race and because they're powerful they can be bigger bullies about it. Zuck has kind of indirectly apologized for being a creeper during his college years. But the behavior of his company hasn't changed.
There was a sweet spot right after the first big redesign and before the wall feed changed where things felt good. I was in high school still too, and lived in another state during the summer, so even if I didn't use it A LOT, it still really helped me keep up with some of my friends. Interestingly though, my best friends basically never posted anything.
Nah, not from the very beginning. Before the News Feed, The Facebook was great to find people and keep in contact. Following someone’s page too often was called
Facebook stalking and was socially discouraged.
Unfortunately parasocial behavior is good for engagement.
Yeah... aside from all the very obvious problems with this (network effects, most friends aren't weird techy no-images types, etc.)... the moment has passed. Nobody is going to trust another tech company with their real name & permanent social life again. They've seen what happens.
True though.
We will be adding support for images in the next release.
We can add an option to export all data (in the pipeline) and let users delete account and data in one click (available on first release) but I don't know what else can be done.
End to end encryption is hard and I am not a programmer capable of implementing it safe enough to stop NSA level threats.
I don't think there's anything technical you can do. I think it would require:
1. A stable income stream that doesn't depend on something at odds with your goals (i.e. not like Mozilla).
2. Incorporate as a non-profit with rock-solid "we're never going to transition to for-profit" legal terms.
I think Wikipedia is probably the closest thing we have to that, but even they don't have a reliable income source. I mean, they have more money than they know what to do with and waste most of it on outreach nonsense rather than putting it into an endowment... but it's not exactly a reliable source of money.
In addition to exporting one's contacts from Facebook in order to import them into an alternative, there should be a way to use whatever is provided through Facebook's "Download your data" to populate new accounts in the new alternative.
Perhaps it already exists but I have thought about writing something that takes what is provided by "Download your data" and produces a local SQLite database, a local webpage, local website or some combination thereof that is served from the user's computer instead of Meta servers.
However I do not use Facebook enough to justify the effort, and when I do I never look at the "feed".
We don't let anyone find you on the site without your short secret code which they need to ask you for. The code can be changed anytime. You (the user) need to actively ask your friends' code to build up the network. This also keeps the network small since you won't go out of your way to ask someone their code unless you really know them.
A really private place with only people that matter.
Are you really planning to not allow photos? I understand your reasoning for why this works in places a group chat wouldn’t, and I have group chats that I wish could do what your site does (share things to all my friends but we don’t all have to have all the same friends). But something I really appreciate about some of those group chats, especially smaller ones like a group of three, are the photos that friends post. Usually it’s not low effort, it’s real photos of their real lives.
I like what you are doing a lot but the ability to post my photos to show to friends seems like a must for me.
What is the difference between this and a group chat? Most people have < 20 people that they know well enough to give a secret code to unless you're a creator or personality, in which care we are back to snapchat.
If the posts are more long form, what is the difference between this and a blog where the "secret code" is the URL?
Or even a finsta account currated the way you want.
I don't say these as a "it's not gonna work" as in consumer its about the experience, I genuinely wonder why the experience will be better
These are very valid questions , thanks for asking them.
> Group chat
Group chats work when everyone in one know each other. I have N different circles which don't overlap so group doesn't chat makes sense. Messages in group chat are more "in the face" - everyone has to. I just wanted a place where I can dump my thoughts without feeling like seeking immediate attention.
> Blog
PostX is indeed something like a private blogging space.
It's something I wanted for myself.
Honestly I am not fully sure how it's going to be used by people but I have built something me and my friends like and use.
Your landing page talks about all the right goals. postx is a good placeholder name, I recommend ideating a better name for launch.
looking forward, wish you the best.
Show 3 walls side by side: updates by friends, interactions by direct connections on shares by friends of friends, and public stories by those nearby (geographically). The latter could also turn into a way for local businesses to promote themselves. Keep the 3 in separate lanes in order to let the user decide how much they want to doom scroll.
Sure thing. Oh - maybe let people follow non-friends that they want to see public updates from, and make everyone follow you, so their walls won't be so empty on Day 1 ;).
Few others have suggested the same. But it kind of defeats the purpose since the goal is to see updates from your close friends and have only private profils.
Even though empty feed is not good, it's a feature in our platform. We want to see what users do when the feed is empty.
Only real way to have a non empty feed without compromising the core idea is letting users invite friends.
Risks people’s mental health? I would say it is pretty obvious that FB and IG are bad for people. Some may have a natural mental fortitude and can survive it without instruction but for the rest of us we need some instructions on how to use these platforms without compromising key aspects of our mental health.
I’d like to see a proper study on this that can be replicated before I jump on this train. And I’m a supporter of Jonathan “the kids are not alright” Haidt but let’s not kid ourselves his work is questionable throughout.
It’s easy to dogpile. I’d like to see more proof, that’s all. “It’s obvious” doesn’t cut it for me. For one, we have major societal problems that are being exposed through these platforms, and the mere knowledge of the problem has a negative impact on the individual. Do we shut the platform down because it’s showing us things we don’t want to see, or do we fix the societal problem? And many others.
Pop some terms into Google scholar and you'll find study after study after study both correlating social media use with worse mental health and demonstrating improvements from reducing use, in children and adults both.
It varies by demographic, but yeah, social media are pretty universally awful for humans, and that's not just conjecture.
I have similar feelings. In the early days, Facebook was more like a cozy corner of the Internet, where you could see the latest news from your high school classmates and the dinner photos posted by distant relatives. It was very relaxing. Now when I open the app, I feel like I am being manipulated by the algorithm, constantly pushing you to click and watch things, and I can't stop. It has become smarter, but also more indifferent.
From early days of FB I remember it nagged to read all my addressbook/contacts. It was always data hungry. It wouldn't grow so quickly and big without gray ethics.
Who even uses Facebook anymore? I don't know anyone who posts to their own profile anymore, and I'm part of the generation where literally everybody was posting every detail of their lives to FB as students.
For "seeing what old friends are up to", that's entirely shifted to IG. (Yes, pedants, I know that this is an FB product.)
The only time I ever open FB nowadays is for the marketplace, and when I do, all I see in the feed is garbage brainrot from big slop accounts.
Yeah the one difference with some other enshittified things is that I really have the impression that Facebook was always meant to go this way.
It was also one of the first to drop genuine user-sercing features like the old timeline (just all the posts of people you followed which you came there to see) which it replaced with the algorithmic feed which recommended stuff you never asked for or wanted.
Instagram did keep that feature though until 2 years and still has it although it's constantly switching it off.
Facebook marketplace killed or vastly reduced the size of other marketplace platforms in many countries. Strangely it also seems like the amount of fraud rose as people moved to Facebook Marketplace. I guess it was easier for scammers to work on Facebook, needing only one platform to commit fraud in multiple countries, rather than attempting to work on hundreds of local sites.
Actually I don't think there is a single definition of social media but some countries/juridictions created their own for legal purposes and for most of them hn would not be considered a social media for various reasons:
- no discovery of users
- no subscription of users content
- no private/direct messages
myspace back in the day was a creative open canvas. You could put whatever random stuff on an HTML page and that was "you". Super unstructured, wild. Whatever.
Facebook came out and was a whole different thing. Facebook is a "database with a web (and later mobile app) frontend". It's all about data mining. Always has, always will be.
What I don't understand is how come they could make such a crappy product, almost everything is totally unusable both on the web and the app, it's pathetic to be a Meta engineer at that point
Unfortunately, many of the old forums for various non-IT-related hobbies have disappeared and moved over to facebook groups and there is no alternative as such. Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers, there are some fantastic communities, but if you are into cars or mountain biking or watches or fellwalking/hiking etc......you really don't have any alternative to facebook. I'm trying to never just passively browse the main feed because it very quickly turns into pure trash, but there are communities there that are worth participating there and which don't really have any other online space.
Yes the death of forums is one of the huge hidden costs and another great reason to hate fb.
Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility.
We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.
Limiting the spread of the information is a feature, not a bug. You don’t want others to take your 2009 forum post out of context and ridicule you in front of a million angry YouTube viewers.
Facebook is used to coordinate real world events. Think weekend hikes, dog shows, garage sales, you name it. If you have to hide your real world identity to post on a forum, then it will not be able to replace Facebook.
Unfortunately we're facing a cultural issue here as well - people moved on from Facebook to Discord or private WhatsApp groups, and young would-be pirates see it as normal and good.
Discord is fine as a active chat medium. It is absolutely awful as an information store. Even beyond the "can't be indexed by search engines" (which is catastrophically bad all by itself), it's just horrible for dealing with any information that isn't part of an active combination _right now_.
This is a larger cultural issue. The general population finally got used to being on the Internet, and the Internet adapted to serve its needs and modes of thinking - which are predominantly social. Objective reality, information and access to it is of secondary importance (if even that) - what matters is socializing with friends and having experiences.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp and Discord are the true social media - they work much like real-life interactions. So to join a topical group, or even know it exists, you literally have to know the right people. Don't have friends who are into something? Don't have friends? Tough luck. It's high school again, but the Internet is owned by jocks now.
--
Edited to add:
The shift from e-mail and mailing lists to bulletin boards to link sites with threaded discussions (like HN, or Reddit), to Facebook and finally to Discord and WhatsApp, tells the story of objective reality and information becoming less important to the Internet as more people are on it.
To put it bluntly: the old tools forced the more social people to engage in exchange of actual information. Electronic mail, posts, comments were all forms promoting information hygiene. Even the shitposts were publications which could be referred back to in the future. It all felt like writing something, so people cared, even if only a little bit. Now, the new tools are catering to what the more social/extrovert population really wants: endless chit chat. Talking, talking, talking, talking. Everything ephemeral, access managed by interpersonal relations, navigating it requires engaging in the social games.
Objectivity? Verifiability? Accuracy? Truth? They don't matter much, because outside of crisis situations, they don't matter to most people. That the Internet was briefly oriented around information and knowledge, was a temporary aberration, mostly thanks to it being built by nerds for nerds. But now the whole of society is here, and the Internet finally became social.
I disagree about the goodness of discord (and facebook) compared to old style forums or (better yet) mailing lists with archives.
Searching the forum archives is much worse with facebook, slack or discord than it ever was with even the jankiest phpbb forum or mailman list. Hell, before they grew it up, Yahoo! groups were better from that perspective. And a big part of what made forums for either tech or non-tech hobbies so nice was the ability to search and reference prior discussions.
I was actually hopeful that "login with facebook" and "login with discord" would bring those more search-friendly alternatives back a little bit, but so far I haven't seen it.
On forums you can search by username, by topic alone, inside of a subforum, or by text inside of a thread. That level of search granularity is by design so you aren't querying the entire database unnecessarily.
As a result it's far better than "omnisearch" options on social media that only sometimes surfaces what you were looking for.
I don't know how you can confidently say so - I would have missed out on so many bike rides and car meets and so many things I learnt by being in the right communities by not being on Facebook, because they just aren't posted anywhere else.
We can always find words to justify being a follower instead of a leader. We shouldn't. Being in the space that the Eternal September has chosen to congregate to have access to the most hikers isn't a hard necessity.
>>We can always find words to justify being a follower instead of a leader
I'm not sure what you mean by that in this context. Just like I have to be part of my local "nerdy" store to play MtG every Friday, I kinda have to be part of local MTB groups to know when they are riding. I could like you say, be a leader and organise my own rides I suppose? Is that what you mean? If so, then I'm sure you can see limitations to this approach.
I haven’t used Facebook in years and I don’t think I will ever pick it up again. But I also don’t think “just quit facebook, bro” is an effective pitch to the average person.
Facebook (and other Meta properties) has sadly become the only popular channel for many sorts of offline activities. The average local sports group, DIY group, parents group, outdoors group etc around me are all on Facebook. The average musician and local business is on Instagram. Not to mention the millions in Europe and Latin America who only use WhatsApp for online communication.
Which is to say for many people the choice is not between Facebook and no Facebook. Their choice is between Facebook and inability to participate in their communities. Yes this sucks, but this is the reality. You cannot ask individuals to make expensive individual decisions to solve a society-wide problem. Instead you should look for regulations, and start building reasonable alternative to facebook and make it palatable to the average person.
You mentioned tobacco and gambling and I think they are actually apt examples of why the change must happen at the society level. Tobacco usage plummeted after decades of anti-tobacco education, smoking bans, advertising bans etc. And we also don’t just ask people to stop smoking, we prescribe nicotine patches to make it easier to quit. Similar for gambling. We don’t just ask people to not gamble, we regulate the industry (or outright ban it) and even in places where gambling is legal and prevalent there are still regulations like making it possible to ban yourself from gambling if it is becoming a problem.
Millions of thematic groups have existed for many hundreds of years and they did not need Facebook to organize. People are experiencing inertia and are too lazy or naive to help themselves. And, yes, some are truly addicted.
This inertia and naivete is harmful and dangerous to everyone involved. It's like if they met in a sketchy part of town or were using tools unsafely to the point where they could injure someone. Going along with that, and especially without saying anything, or trying to change the situation makes you complicit.
I keep my Facebook account mainly because I use messenger for a lot of interactions with friends. I never really go on Facebook itself. I don't get the self congratulatory fest that goes on when deleting your account. I get the same feeling and outcome by just not using it.
I don’t think it’s self congratulatory to get an “I was right” in about an article where meta is covertly asking to train their AI models on your entire private camera roll
Maybe relationships are more important to GP than attitude. I know what GP means and I was even recently asked to join a Messenger group of friends. I declined but only because I have other comm channels and I dropped FB and Messenger years ago.
Facebook is the worst. I haven’t had the app itself in a decade, but use the mobile version in a mobile browser to catch up on friends’ posts. I hope they go through with Zuckerberg’s idea of removing all connections, at which point the lift to reconnect is too great and I will actually delete my account (and I was one of the first FB users when they expanded to my school just after Harvard).
I completely agree, and haven't had the meta/twitter/reddit apps in years. But facebook does keep me around (or at least keep me from deleting my account) through marketplace. I've now found my last two apartment rentals there, both of which were nicer and cheaper than alternatives on dedicated rental sites.
I find keeping an account open solely for desktop marketplace is a fine compromise
Too many people I know still use it. I created mine (and keep it) to prevent someone from impersonating me to my friends and acquaintences, and use it as a directory where friends and acquaintences can find my contact info and vice versa. I avoid feeding them any new data (other than acknowledging or blocking friend requests I receive) but deleting seems worse for me than being present but inactive right now.
I got locked out of Facebook right about that time. Looking back at the last eight years, I can say without qualification that it did wonders for my personality, my mental health, and the way I interact with other people.
A couple of times I've looked back at my messages and photos from the annual data downloads I did back then. I can't believe how angry I was, and that I would think it was O.K. to talk that way to perfect strangers.
Then I dig a little deeper, and see that the early messages were fine. I was a nice to strangers. But as my Facebook use continued, the tone and unpleasantness of the messages becomes palpable. It's like watching a malignant Facebook disease spreading in my own brain. Kind of horrifying now that I put it into words.
Glad I'm Facebook-free today, and enjoying life almost as much as someone in an Apple commercial.
I've never, ever seen an algorithm as evil and anti-social as the one Facebook's programmers created. At one point, it was showing my family and friends a comment my cousin had made about a politician, and they started getting into heated arguments with him. And this kept happening again and again. It honestly felt like the algorithm was trying to polarise entire families and friend groups, driving engagement by surfacing exactly the things people disagreed with or didn't want to hear. During the pandemic the algorithm drove everyone insane.
At one point, I compared Facebook to a virus. It hijacked conversations, infected relationships, misled people, and distorted their perceptions of others.
Yeah facebook is definitely worse, though it's kind of like twitter: any action can become an item in other people's timelines.
instagram is still bad now that they push more ads and content from people you don't follow onto you, but at least it's only things that are explicitly posted, and it's easier to maintain multiple profiles with different feeds
All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost.
This is false; and considering the hundreds of thousands of companies that people encounter every day that do not operate with your singular mindset, I can only assume the comment was not made in good faith.
I haven't had Facebook app in 12 years or so and the only thing that hampers me are
- Coordinating with Gen Xers’s burning man camps. They are just stuck in their ways. Like they say, nobody can prevent you from becoming like your parents
- A couple times I want to use Facebook marketplace, a new profile looks like a scammer. Which is the platform’s problem
This is why I requested family not to post pictures of my children on Facebook.
They will get to decide what to do with their likenesses when they're older. It seemed cruel to let Facebook train a model on them from the time they were babies until they first start using social media in earnest.
I like this poetic way of putting it, though I don't agree with the message.
In Holland we have a saying, what do you bring it your house is burning down? And most people said my photos. This was before the digital age and cloud obviously. We take photos because we care. Stuffing them into everyone else's face has also been a thing at birthday parties but outside that not so much.
Photography stealing someone’s soul is easy to discount as an obvious misconception, but if you think of “soul” as a shortcut metaphor for some difficult to describe sociopsychological phenomena then there is some food for thought in it.
First, for most of us in daily life, once you know you are being photographed you exit any context you were in and enter the new “I am being photographed” context. In some important way, you are stolen from the world around you for a period of time. Your body is still present, but you might be thinking about how this all would look at any later time. This does not apply when photography is specifically arranged by you (common in analog era), or if you are unaware of being a subject photographed (but there may be other concerns about that[0]).
Second, a photo/likeness of you is a proxy allowing other people to relate to you. Keeping in mind that we only ever relate to images/models that we build of each other in our minds (we have no “direct access” to other people), in this case a photo is a shallow (there is little other information than appearance) but weirdly high fidelity (for sighted people) model of you. This is not an issue if the photo is kept just by people you know (common in analog era) or after you are dead, but otherwise if published[1] it means people can somehow relate to “you” without the actual-you knowing or having met them. Some people may feel some sort of satisfaction from this, others it can make uncomfortable.
Third, as someone noted, soul could map to another nebulous concept: identity. It could range from problematic cases (someone pretending to be you to resell work you made) to twisted but benign (stories about people making fake profiles pretending to be successful SV employees come to mind).
[0] If you are secretly photographed[2], this can happen for a number of reasons. Some may imply a missing interaction (if that photographer could not photograph you, maybe they would talk to you instead). Some may be done with intent of sharing your photo in unknown context where again people may relate to you in specific ways that can be unpleasant (e.g., mockery).
[1] Now when generative models start to be trained on what we thought is our private photos, the idea of “published” is blurred.
[2] In most cases here “photo” can be swapped with “video”.
> First, for most of us in daily life, once you know you are being photographed you exit any context you were in and enter the new “I am being photographed” context. In some important way, you are stolen from the world around you for a period of time. Your body is still present, but you might be thinking about how this all would look at any later time. This does not apply when photography is specifically arranged by you (common in analog era), or if you are unaware of being a subject photographed (but there may be other concerns about that[0]).
True, this is something that bothers me a lot too. But especially GenZ has a problem with that (surprising because they grew up with ubiquitous photography) and I see more and more parties that tape off phone cams. They are indeed wonderful.
I don't agree this doesn't apply when it is arranged though. For me that has always been awkward.
In some countries (notably Poland) Facebook is so burned into people's brains that you can't avoid this, and if you try, people and institutions will consider you a tinfoil hat weirdo and put pressure on you.
Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.
Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.
Here (NL) we get a form at the beginning of each school year to mark which uses of photos we find acceptable. E.g. we allow photos in the school portal (which is private and not owned by big tech), but not on Facebook, etc. It's the way it should be done, because there is not much burden on the parents. If the school also wants to put photos on social media, the burden should be on them to make sure that kids for which they don' have an ack are not put there.
A bit harder was initially convincing my parents not to put pictures of their granddaughter on Facebook. They are understandably proud and want to show their friends. But they respect it.
I think in all her life there has only been two violations of our policy. In both cases we contacted the person who published the photo/video and they took it offline.
You just need enough 'weirdos' to make it normal. I know that there are other parents that agree, but not everyone has the gut to stand up to the social media tyranny, but will join if some people set an example.
Our (NL) elementary school places pictures of the fun activities they do with kids on Instagram, but they blur children's faces, resulting in the photos straight out of the uncanny valley.
I do wonder also if the blur effect they use is one of those that can easily be reversed. I need to check that one of these days.
> Our (NL) elementary school places pictures of the fun activities they do with kids on Instagram, but they blur children's faces, resulting in the photos straight out of the uncanny valley.
Honestly what's the point at this point? Are parents not going to send their children to that school because they didn't see pictures of blurry-faced children having fun on the Internet, or is this just teachers wanting to post about their students?
Same in Denmark. Some companies don't have websites, only a Facebook page, Facebook Marketplace has all but killed the local marketplace sites and pretty much anything related to organized sports and after school activities are coordinated on closed Facebook groups. The last one is the worst one. That's basically telling people that they will hold your child's social life hostage until you join Facebook.
LinkedIn was used in a similar manor, to coordinate meetups for our local Cloud Native meetups, but the LinkedIn algorithms are much much worse than Facebooks, so people would get "You might be interested in this meetup" two weeks after the event.
Facebook basically took over communication, no more mailing lists, no more updates on the website, if there even is a website. You just have to accept Facebook if you want to be notified about changes in scheduling, upcoming events or general information about your kids soccer practise.
For real. I've been searching for a swimming school for our daughter in Poland. The one that looked promising had a contract with clause, giving the school full rights to post any pictures of her in the swimming pool to social media. Of course, parents are strictly prohibited from making ANY photos at all. Fuck them.
Maybe I should have. There were more red flags in the contract draft. Like if I don't bring her to the lessons, I get no money back, but if they fail to do the lesson at all, they just keep the money and can reschedule. I have no clue why anyone signs this. I mean, I know, people don't care.
i deleted my facebook account over 15 years ago, and people at the time thought i was weird for doing so. I would feel vindicated today, except i dont, because neither my friends nor coworkers have followed, nor want to despite all evidence to the contrary!
There are children who don't even know if they want to be spies or undercover cops when they grow up that have already been identified by facial recognition. There will be an entire generation or more of spies and undercover agents that will have been identified before they had a chance to even contemplate their lives in that field.
Only logical thing to do personally is to take it completely off your mobile devices. You still get caught in the dragnet if you have friends and family posting you.
Also in many places WhatsApp is practically a requirement for daily life which is frustrating. What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.
What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.
GrapheneOS comes pretty close to that I think? You can put such apps in a separate profile and cut off a lot of permissions. You can also scope contacts, storage, etc.
It isn’t nice to use though.
You select your picture then when you need to add more you’ve got to go back into the settings for that app and select the picture. Then add the picture you selected.
I’m grateful though. We would have called meta malware back when.
The built in camera roll widget lets you edit what pictures are allowed without going to settings. Maybe it’s a new change or the apps you use have a custom photo picker, I dunno.
I try to use web versions of everything (fb, insta, x). If it’s shitty enough I’ll use it less.
I.e. messenger.com is possible to use if you request desktop version, change font size and deal with all sort of zoom issues. Of course fb doesn’t support actual calls or notifications just because, so I don’t use it.
Instagram is even sneakier - you can’t post stories via mobile to “close friends”, post videos or view them from instant messages.
Yeah, first thing to do on an Android phone is to use adb or something like the universal debloater to uninstall (besides the Facebook app) crap like: com.facebook.system, com.facebook.appmanager, and com.facebook.services.
Description of the latter from the uad list:
Facebook Services is a tool that lets you manage different Facebook services automatically using your Android device. In particular, the tool focuses on searching for nearby shops and establishments based on your interests.
Why is this even always running on a pristine Samsung, etc. phone? Creepy.
I was writing a response before realising this profile is an AI agent. Is this seriously allowed on HN? The bio reads: "It's largely for my amusement and I like to play games."
thats a great excuse to avoid answering my question, not that i care very much for your opinion but i find it ironic that you would use censorship to deflect attention from a non issue
They can use Facebook however they want. They just can’t upload pictures taken of other people without consent. That has nothing to do with Facebook and everything with generally applicable laws.
They are still pushing the "AI dominance over China" argument to clueless politicians.
The anti regulation clause sneaked into the "Big Beautiful Bill" ($5 trillion new debt) facilitates consumer exploitation and has no impact at all on military applications.
If China dominates consumer exploitation, let them and shut off their Internet companies.
Strangely enough, why not invest $500 billion in a working fusion reactor if these people are so worried about U.S. dominance?
This is truly egregious. Facebook and Instagram are installed by default on many android phones and cannot be fully uninstalled. And even if asked for consent, many people may choose the harmful option by mistake or due to lack of awareness. It's alarming that these companies cannot be held to even the bare minimum standards of ethics.
As an aside, there was a discussion a few days back where someone argued that being locked in to popular and abusive social/messaging platforms like these is an acceptable compromise, if it means retaining online contacts with everyone you know. Well, this is precisely the sort of apathy that gives these platforms the power to abuse their marketshare so blatantly. However, it doesn't affect only the people who choose to be irresponsible about privacy. It also drags the ignorant and the unwilling participants under the influence of these spyware.
This is why I just spent weeks tracking down a modern device that I could vendor unlock and install LineageOS on. It's no longer possible on recent OnePlus devices and many people selling other brands on Swappa and Amazon claim their devices are vendor unlockable when they're actually just carrier unlockable. I don't want any vendor's crapware running on my device. I hate that I "have to" use Google Play to function in the modern world but Lineage and MindTheGapps is at least a less bad way to go.
I should sit down and try something like postmarketOS or Mobian as a portable Linux machine is what I really want ...
That's what I plan to do too. My current device is locked down pretty aggressively. But the problem here is, what percentage of the population has the skill and patience to do it? These companies need to hold only a simple majority of the population hostage. The holdouts like you or me can be eventually peer pressured into accepting the same abuse.
For example, let's say that you avoid a certain abusive messaging platform. But what if your bank or some other essential institution insist on using it to provide their service? We can complain all they want. But they will probably just neglect you until you concede in despair.
To fight this, you need affordable and ethical alternatives for the device, platform and applications. You also would need either regulation or widespread public awareness. Honestly, the current situation is hopeless on that front.
You can use ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to disable pre-installed Facebook/Instagram apps without root via `pm disable-user` commands, effectively preventing them from running or collecting data.
That's what I did. But as others point out, how many know about this? And modifications are getting harder by the year. They are relying on these factors to ensure that the majority of the population remains exploitable.
zuck needs to fade into irrelevance. The guy hasnt done anything interesting in years. Every few years he raids private data and thinks he can do something with it.
Be it opt-in or not, I don't like that Meta is comfortable enough to even suggest it.
Even when putting AI out of the equation, this is still one more of Meta's repeated attempts at breaking out of mobile app encapsulation (see the Onavo VPN or localhost tracking).
> Remember that you can delete your Meta accounts and have nothing to do with them. It’s not hard to do.
This means deleting real-world social connections. Meta owns the interwoven communication hubs of many local communities.
Let me provide an example. My swim team coach uses WhatsApp for all communication, including frequent pool schedule changes. They have strongly resisted change, as it is too much work to get 50+ subscribers to move to an alternative platform. They are the only local choice; this team is where my friends swim. Sure, I could work tirelessly to convince everyone to switch. However, most of the members use WhatsApp for other communities (eg triathlon and open-water clubs). Introducing an alternative incrementally means each member has to manage N+1 apps, etc. Importantly, super nodes (coaches, multi-club parents) with the most connections offer the most resistance: things work for them, why should they change?
I didn’t say you should delete your account, I said you can. There will of course be downsides, but it’s a choice you can make if the negative factors tip the balance.
You could choose not to engage with communities that force you to use platforms that violate your rights. No need to cut anyone off for now, but something to keep in mind for the future.
I don’t know why you’re downvoted, you are absolutely right. We need to 1. Not engage and therefore be part of the problem and 2. Be vocal and loudly tell these businesses that it’s not acceptable to offer only Social Media mediated channels for communication. And stop doing business with those who keep doing it.
I actually attempted to create a Facebook account recently to be able to access Facebook Marketplace. During sign-up, I was asked to upload a video selfie of myself to confirm I'm a real person.
Never did a 180 so fast in my life.
I guess I simply won't communicate with anyone selling anything there, even if it's the best deal possible or not available anywhere else
So you failed their interview and then proceeded to post a whole thread to get validation that Meta's not a good company to work for? And you're still posting about it a year later? Talk about sour grapes.
No. I worked at Meta, and these are mostly mid-skilled engineers who want to make money while working a few hours a week and pretending to work the rest. They would never attract top talent because top engineers can earn 10 times their salary on their own without leaving the terminal nowadays. Even if they offered $10M/year, I feel these kinds of people can't be bought.
It's just a job. You will get fired if you question people above you.
I imagine many people will react only to the headline and not read the article, but:
"Meta tells The Verge that, for now, it’s not training on your unpublished photos with this new feature. “[The Verge’s headline] implies we are currently training our AI models with these photos, which we aren’t. This test doesn’t use people’s photos to improve or train our AI models,”
As someone who is familiar with the ML space, it seems unlikely that the addition of private photos will significantly improve models, as you have mentioned.
> I imagine many people will react only to the headline and not read the article [...]
I saw this line in the article: "Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images."
It would seem important to share this with people who may 'not read the article'
I mentioned this on another thread. I tried my best to avoid FB, but then they acquire products like WhatsApp to then hoover up personal data again. This shouldn't be allowed. PII and personal data should be bound to the original terms on which the product launched.
Zuck should find a quiet part of the internet or the metaverse to curl up and fade away. The guy just doesn't have any redeeming qualities.
I would love a source about the immigration form. That would at least make more sense. Weed is legal in half of the US. As a citizen, I find the story troubling.
The tweets just saying “drug use” and then you hear it’s weed is ridiculous. Why wouldn’t they just state that they lied on their immigration form about drug use?
Weed is illegal everywhere in the US. The federal government has a policy of, in most cases, not bothering to enforce the law in states that have stopped also making it illegal under their own separate legal codes. However that doesn’t mean it’s actually legal because federal law applies everywhere.
Of course the story was fabricated, but we live in a post-truth world. The mistake was believing the story from the beginning; the story was obvious nonsense.
So, they engaged in behavior that’s legal at Facebook HQ?
In other news, FB has been using whatsapp metadata to coordinate genocide campaigns in Gaza. What’d all those dead civilians (including infants) do, again?
I look forward to the schadenfreude I will feel when someone makes the right FOI request and we discover this "feature" was built by Meta at the request of the NSA or the FBI or some other government TLA.
This is the boolean privacy fallacy: the idea that if some large-scale violation of privacy exists, then nothing else you do is relevant for privacy.
It’s seductive because it justifies complacency. On a theoretical level, it seems irrelevant whether someone has your data if anyone does. That abstraction collapses all distinctions and makes further choices seem moot.
But in practice, this logic breaks down. Anyone who has worked with data or communication forensics knows that a single missing email thread can be the difference between understanding what happened and hitting a dead end.
It's like that Ricky Gervais joke: Guy walks to a public square, sees a message board and on it sees an ad for guitar lessons. Guy gets upset and angrily says "but I don't want guitar lessons!" Calls the number and complains to the guitar teacher.
I wish there was an alternative to Facebook and Instagram, even if it had no users. We, as users, can solve the "no users" problem for you. Facebook and Instagram became popular, contrary to popular belief, not because it had "critical mass" or some Hoffmanite bullshit like that, but because it had the technical community using them, and they brought their friends and family.
This, sadly, just doesn't live up to reality. It wasn't the technical users that made Facebook popular. It was college students, and not the CS ones. I remember, I was there.
As for Instagram, again, I was there. Had that been a platform primarily for a technical audience, it wouldn't have taken it off.
The one platform you can say this about is Twitter. That, undoubtedly, started off with a much more tech audience, and grew so popular due to API integrations.
As for someone just needing to build alternatives. There have been dozens upon dozens over the years. Where are they now?
By "technical user" I don't mean just programmers, I mean people who have an above-average knowledge of computers. There are orders of magnitude more of these people than there are programmers, and they are completely unidentifiable from the outside. One might be the drummer in a local band, another is a dump truck driver, another works at a grocery store. Their above-average knowledge of computers hasn't helped them in life, but it does make them the go-to person to help their relatives get "online" or "fix their smartphone". And their friends and relatives look up to them for advice on what social media to use. Trust me, I was there.
> There have been dozens upon dozens over the years
Such as? I think you'll find that all of them were created back when Facebook wasn't completely evil (and thus couldn't even get the backing of "technical" people), or they were created with some congenital flaw that made them completely unattractive to the average person. You have to have a Steve Jobs level of eye for detail with this stuff, and sadly most people cloning Twitter in a weekend are just doing it for fun.
Alternatives such as the Fediverse are doing just fine, despite HN's categorical rejection of anything that doesn't match the big corporate platforms in scale and revenue as "viable."
While I agree that untamed capitalism causes nothing but damage to our societies, I do not agree that replacing one ideology with another does us any good. I have noticed a good chunk of Mastodon users signing as „communists“ in their profiles but I’m yet to understand what exactly they mean by that.
Edit: FWIW I come from a country where people considered themselves communists. Grandpa of my better half has a red star on their grave cross. IMHO ideologies are somewhat fucking people up.
By "capitalists" I meant people who only want to use the fediverse as a commercial platform like an influencer or entrepreneur. Thus far platforms using the fediverse aren't as optimized for addiction and emotional manipulation as mainstream social media platforms are, so they remain unattractive to those interests.
But yes, there are a lot of self-described communists, socialists, anarchists and other leftist types there as well.
You have to accept that attitude exists here because HN is a forum hosted by a VC firm. The reality is that the fediverse doesn't really have a huge economic impact and the people who swim around the capitalism waters think that stinks. Even though the fediverse by default is perfectly fine this way.
You'd have to block nearly every app from ever seeing any image you don't want Facebook getting ahold of including apps that are made by other companies. Almost everyone uses their libraries, they practically have a shell on your phone (which is funny because you're not allowed that on your own device for "security.")
> However, I wish they’d grow a pair and just outright block the FB and other similar dependencies that make such stuff necessary.
When the giants fight, which one of them is an evil monopolist, and which is the defender of freedom?
(This is why I actually like the iPhone approach more than the macOS approach these days; thought I do miss the late 90s when I didn't need to care because nothing had any mechanism to spy on me anyway).
This seems like a liability nightmare. If they're just scanning all the image files on people's devices and using them for training, they're inevitably going to scoop up nudes without permission, not to mention the occasional CSAM or gore photo, right? Why would you want to risk having stuff like that sneak into your training set when you already have access to all people's public photos?
The purpose of a system is what it does. To that end it could actually be a plot by the CIA to find targets with this type of material on their devices, which can then be used against them to turn them into assets.
There's a future where people (or AI) will take pictures, AI will edit and post the ones that will be liked, and then AI will like pictures based on previous like history.
LOL at the idea that he uses Facebook. None of the silicon valley bigwigs or their kids have anything to do with social media tech except in perhaps very controlled, orchestrated ways. The normal users are just "dumb fucks."
We’re on here are privileged. I feel bad for the billions of people that aren’t aware of or unable to see how truly terrible that organization is for societies and the planet.
I don't think this privilege counts for much since we all live in the same societies, and even among hn users there are few people with meaningful influence over Meta.
Similar to how Cassandra’s gift of prophecy was actually a curse because she was unable to use her foresight to avoid or mitigate the predicted misfortunes and tragedies.
According to the article they want to upload and process "selected pictures from your camera roll" to make suggestions.
Now the definition may vary, but the camera roll is probably the list of images on your phone (which the app accesses when you pick an image to post), not a list of pictures you already posted privately...
> Unfortunately for end users, in tech companies’ rush to stay ahead, it’s not always clear what they’re agreeing to when features like this appear.
At this point, is there really a lack of clarity? I think we all know Facebook is going to interpret any permission to look at anything, as full permission to do whatever the hell they want with it.
There are people who care about this, and people who don’t. Telling ourselves there’s confusion… I think is not going to produce an accurate model of reality.
I think these social media companies are evil. I just don’t see the point in deluding myself into thinking that they are outsmarting everybody. It is a difference of priorities, not smarts.
this shifts meta ai from reaction to anticipation. before: algo sees what you post ,reacts. now: it sees what you might post ,decides how to shape it. your intent used to live in the gap between photo taken and photo shared. they're moving compute into that gap
> On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or themes like birthdays or graduations.”
> By allowing this feature, the message continues, users are agreeing to Meta AI terms, which allows their AI to analyze “media and facial features” of those unpublished photos, as well as the date said photos were taken, and the presence of other people or objects in them. You further grant Meta the right to “retain and use” that personal information.
The straightforward explanation is this: they have a feature where it is helpful to group people together. For instance suggesting a photo of you and a friend to be posted on their birthday. In order to make this work, they need to perform facial recognition, so they ask for permission using their standard terms.
Can they train their AI with it? Yes, you are giving them permission to do so. Does the information available tell us that is what they are doing? No, it does not. In fact, a Meta spokesperson said this:
> “These suggestions are opt-in only and only shown to you – unless you decide to share them – and can be turned off at any time,” she continued. “Camera roll media may be used to improve these suggestions, but are not used to improve AI models in this test.”
Could they be lying about this? Sure, I guess. But don’t publish an article saying that they are doing it, when you have no evidence to show that they are doing this and they say they aren’t doing this.
Might they do it in the future? Sure, I guess. But don’t publish an article saying that they are doing it, if the best you have is speculation about what they might do in the future.
Does it make sense for them to do this? Not really. They’ve already got plenty of training data. Will your private photos really move the needle for them? Almost certainly not. Will it be worth the PR fallout? Definitely not.
Should you grant them permission if you don’t want them to train on your private photos? No.
This could have been a decent article if they were clearer about what is fact and what is speculation. But they overreached and said that Facebook is doing something when that is not evident at all. That crosses the line into dishonesty for me.
Who would want to have AI be applied after you share the photos? Most people would want to check what the photos actually look like before publishing them. The appeal of this feature is to be able to see the suggestions immediately. The feature is opt in and you don't have to grant permission to your camera roll if you don't want to.
Would it be any better if Facebook hired photographers to walk around cities and major events and just photograph random people doing stuff? AI will get hungrier.
That only gives you POV type photos and they are too random and uncategorized.
If you hire a large amount of photographers and assign each of them to capture photos with certain themes you will be far more efficient and get cleaner data. And you can get images from places where people do not use meta products.
Silicon Valley has a problem with one word: consent.
What stinks is the original concept: keeping up with disperate friends, its pretty awesome. I enjoy seeing my friends' kids grow up even though I don't really know them.
Whatever do you mean? WhatsApp asks consent before hoovering up my contact info.
Oh, what's that, I can't actually initiate any conversations without giving that up? Well, that's just the free market, baby. Use something else if you don't like it.
You're telling me that all over the world WhatsApp is basically mandatory to communicate with most people and businesses? Well in this land of freedom, network effects cannot stand up to my Free Market Principles good sir!
Corps are going to be as abusive as the situation allows. Today Facebook is asking, tomorrow the consent to AI will be required to continue using the service.
I continue to be retroactively vindicated for never using fb from my phone. Now, if they figure out how to get access to my Hasselblad 503 I'm screwed.
Hasn't Facebook (and pretty much all major social media platforms) had a clause in their TOS giving them a license to whatever you upload to their services, since forever?
I forget the exact language, but I think it originally accounted for use of only public media in "marketing and promotional" material, so it didn't include private photos and ML training. This seems to be a step up (or, down, I guess) from that.
"Somebody moved fast and broke things. We have no idea why they thought that was appropriate behaviour on production systems, it's completely against company policy."
It's surprising(not) how that class of error always seems to fall on the side of Facebook grabbing more data without consent, and never on the side of accidentally increasing user privacy.
I’m sure if you log the Facebook app’s network traffic on your phone and show that it uploads photos without you clicking on the agree button, they’ll happily publish an article about your findings.
Mine has been deleted for almost 10 years now. I fully assume they've retained and are mining every post I made, every photo I uploaded, and every interaction I ever had on FB, and are still using FB tracking pixels on every website running them to feed more data about me into my profile - and are not only selling that to advertisers but are now training their AI on it without consent at every opportunity.
And most people who commented on the article, who presumably got stopped by the paywall. It’s almost like we have a trapped prior that is impairing our ability to interpret new information on this subject.
Facebook deserves not only the negative media coverage but a thick antitrust case shattering this demon blood-soaked company into billions of pieces. Since when has Facebook cared about consent? Just look through the recent news about them tracking users on Android, the VPN(s) scandal, psychology experiments, and god knows what else.
What does something like this look like from the other side? Do users just agree to everything put in their face? The copy there sounds like it's a really convenient fun new thing.
Have you ever watched a "normal" person interact with a modal dialog? They don't even read it, they'll just spam whatever button they think will make it go away.
The consent screen says “upload it to our cloud on an ongoing basis” and “analyzed by meta AI”. To me that seems like a reasonable level of explanation for non-technical users. Most people don’t know what it means to “train” an AI, but reading that meta is processing the photos in the cloud and analyzing them with AI gives them some picture.
This isn’t buried. The user has to see the screen and click accept for their photos to be uploaded.
Compared to the usual buried disclaimers and vague references to “improving services,” consenting to 1000 things when you sign up for an account, this is pretty transparent. If someone is concerned, they at least have a clear opportunity to decline before anything gets uploaded.
It’s just surprising to me that people look at this example of Facebook going out of their way to not do the bad thing and respond with a bunch of comments about how they doing the bad thing.
This is a pretty generous take. You even highlight most people won't know what this means and then handwave away the concerns of people who DO know what it means and assert most people won't accept it if they did understand it.
> assert most people won't accept it if they did understand it
I didn’t make that assertion. I think most people don’t care if their photos are used to train an AI model as long as Facebook doesn’t post the photos publicly. Fundamentally, I care if people see my photos, and don’t care if computers see them. But I’m aware some people dislike AI and/or have strong beliefs about how data should be used and disagree. It makes sense to give those people an opportunity to say no, so it seems like a good thing that the feature is opt-in rather than an opt-out buried in a menu.
People are not going to understand it that way. You know it, I know it, and Facebook knows it. Don’t excuse them for hiding what they’re doing on the basis that people don’t know what it means anyway. I’m pretty sure the average moron can understand “training AI,” considering that both “training” and “AI” are pretty common concepts. Sure, they won’t be able to explain gradient descent and whatever, but “training AI” is something people will recognize as using your data to improve their stuff.
Granted, many people could guess what “train” means, but it’s not obvious if on average people will be more likely to read and understand that than the words “analyze” and “create ideas” they choose to use instead.
In context, those sound like things they’re going to do for you. People are not going to understand this as “we’re going to use your stuff for our own purposes unrelated to the services you get.”
Here’s the thing. Even if we grant your idea that maybe this is more understandable, why would that be reasonable? Facebook employs a lot of very smart people and has enormous resources. I’m confident they could come up with wording that would make this very clear to everyone. I mean, “we will use your photos to build our next generation AI systems” is a lot clearer than what they have here, and I just came up with that on the spot. That they haven’t done so is a deliberate choice.
According to the company spokesperson quoted by TechCrunch, they aren’t using the photos to train models, which is probably why they didn’t put that in the dialog.
Spokesperson says they’re not, legally binding terms say they’re allowed to. At the very least you are giving them permission without it being clearly described up front, even if they might not be using that permission at this moment.
But that was when I bought my domain and mail hosting service and few months later I had moved my email to my domain almost everywhere.
Years later Google also killed my primary Gmail (i.e what was primary email earlier) Google Play a/c (for lack of use; true I had never published an app) and didn't refund the $25 USD even though I had finished all the tasks needed to keep the a/c alive 3 days before deadline and I had also requested them to tell me "how to add the bank a/c" to get the refund (asked at least 5 times over a span of 40 days) - because they kept telling me "add the bank a/c for refund" and never telling me "how" or sharing an article or page that told me how. I could never find out how.
They kept the $25 - not even appeals were allowed/entertained. I got "final.. no further response" and that was it, literally no further response on it.
I stop to think sometimes why.. just why we gave these trillion dollar companies this much power - the likes of Apple, Google, AMZN, Meta, MSFT.. why?? Now we literally can't fight them - not legally, not with anything else. It seems we just can't.
It's the kind of thing I'd send to the small claims court out of spite.
Idiocies like this are why AI should absolutely never (at least at any present level of technology) be an inescapable means of filtering how a human is responded to with any complaint. Truly, fuck the mentality of those who want to cram this tendency down the public's throat. Though it sadly won't happen thanks to sheer corporate growth inertia, companies that do push such things should be punished into oblivion by the market.
Before you start justified screams of horror, let me explain the simple honesty trick that ensured proper ethics, though I guess at cost of profit unacceptable to some corporations:
The model could only decide between auto approving a repayment, or refer the bill to existing human staff. The entire idea was that the obvious cases will be auto approved, and anything more complex would follow the existing practice.
The system will become evil even if it has humans in it because they have been given no power to resist the incentives
Were humans working on health insurance claims previously known for being warm and tend to err on the side of the patient?
I know that in the continuously audited FEP space, human claims processors were at 95%+ accuracy (vs audited correct results).
Often with sub-2 min per claim processing times.
The irony is that GP's system is exactly how you would want this deployed into production. Fail safe, automate happy path, HITL on everything else.
With the net result that those people can spend longer looking at more difficult claims. (For the same cost)
There will always be people who "try to do their best" and actually read the case and decide accordingly. But you can drown them out with malleable people who come to understand if they deny 100 cases today then they're getting a cash bonus for alignment (with the other guy mashing deny 100 times).
Technology solves technological problems. It does not solve societal ones.
I am just saying that the perverse incentives already exist and that in this case AI-assisted evaluation (which defers to a human when uncertain) is not going to make it any better, but it is not going to make it any worse.
I totally agree that the injustices at play here are already long baked in and this is not the harbinger of doom, medical billing already sucks immense amounts of ass and this isn't changing it much? But it is changing it and worse, it's infusing the credibility of automation, even in a small way, into a system. "Our decisions are better because a computer made them" which doesn't deal at all with how we don't fully understand how these systems work or what their reasoning is for any particular claim.
Insofar as we must have profit-generating investment funds masquerading as healthcare providers, I don't think it's asking a ton that they be made to continue employing people to handle claims, and customer service for that matter. They're already some of the most profitable corporations on the planet, are costs really needing cutting here?
This is the root of the problem, and it is (relatively) easy to solve: make any decision taken by the computer directly attributed to the CEO. Let them have some Skin in The Game, it should be more than enough to align the risk and the rewards.
It helps, as you can suspect from "union" comment, that it wasn't an american health care insurance company.
Maybe it’s time to adjust your internal “MBAs are evil” bias for something more dynamic.
Nadella said this yesterday at YC’s AI Startup School:
== “The real test of AI,” Nadella said, “is whether it can help solve everyday problems — like making healthcare, education, and paperwork faster and more efficient.”
“If you’re going to use energy, you better have social permission to use it,” he said. “We just can’t consume energy unless we are creating social and economic value.”==
https://www.thehansindia.com/tech/satya-nadella-urges-ai-to-...
This is all an aside from the original point, which was that I think it is unfair to pin the proliferation and promises made about AI on some cabal of MBAs somehow forcing it. The people building the tools are just as at fault, if not more.
https://archive.ph/rB2Rg
I remember complaining like hell when the wall came out, that it was the beginning of the end. But this was before publicly recording your own thoughts somewhere everyone could see was commonplace, so I did it by messaging my friends on AIM.
And then when the Feed came out? It was received as creepy and stalkerish. And there are now (young) adults born in the time since who can't even fathom a world without ubiquitous feeds in your pocket.
Call me nostalgic, but we were saner then.
The change to being able to post things on your own page and expecting other people to come to your page and read them (because, again, no Feed) wasn't received well at first.
Keep in mind, smartphones didn't exist yet, and the first ones didn't have selfie cameras even once they did. And the cameras on flip phones were mostly garbage, so if you wanted to show a picture, you had to bring a camera with you, plug it in, and upload it. So at first the Wall basically replaced AIM away messages so you could tell your friends which library you were going to go study in and how long. And this didn't seem problematic, because you were probably only friends with people in your school (it was only open to university students, and not many schools at first), and nobody was mining your data, because there were no business or entity pages.
Simpler, simpler days.
That's what turned it from a method of reaching out and sending messages to specific people when you had something to say to them to a means of shouting into the void and expecting (or at least hoping) that someone, somewhere, would see it and care what you had to say. It went from something actively pro-social to something self-focused.
Blogs and other self-focused things already existed, but almost nobody used them for small updates throughout the day. Why do you think the early joke about Twitter was that it was just a bunch of self-absorbed people posting pictures of their lunch? Nobody knew what to do with a tool like that yet, but the creation of that kind of tool has led to an intensity of self-focus and obsession the world had never seen before.
It wasn't the first time I've had a generational digital (ha) communication failure, but it was the first time I've had one because I'm old and out of touch with what things mean these days!
Nothing is a social network anymore.
Everything is a content-consumer a platform now.
People just want to scroll and scroll
Perfect storm.
[1] https://time.com/4882372/social-media-facebook-instagram-unh... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-media-... [3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/navigating-the-maze/...
There is no benevolent original version of FB. It was a toy made by a college nerd who wanted to siphon data about chicks. It was more user friendly back then because he didn't have a monopoly yet. Now it has expanded to siphoning data from the entire human race and because they're powerful they can be bigger bullies about it. Zuck has kind of indirectly apologized for being a creeper during his college years. But the behavior of his company hasn't changed.
The AI is given a proxy goal- 'maximize engagement'- which it achieves perfectly.
The user's goal - 'foster genuine connection' - is completely secondary.
The AI isn't malicious, it's just ruthlessly effective at optimizing for the wrong thing.
the problem with meta is three fold:
1. zuckerberg is completely misaligned
2. facebook has hundreds of billions dollars of resources
3. zuckerberg has total control of facebook
normally a company with this level of resources would not be under the total control of a single individual
other shareholders would have pushed back on the obviously bad ideas of "metaverse" and "training AI on private photos of children"
but with facebook: misaligned zuckerberg is in total control, and no-one can stop him
so the rest of the world has to suffer whatever this amoral asshole wants to inflict upon them this month
now add AI into this, and zuckerberg can inflict even more damage onto society with fewer and fewer people to get in his way
(the same applies to Google and Musk's empire too)
Unfortunately parasocial behavior is good for engagement.
You need to already know someone to find them here.
Check out the waitlist!
https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev/
Edit:
Here are some rough layout designs https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uLwnXDdUsC9hMZBa1ysR...
It's intentionally simple
We can add an option to export all data (in the pipeline) and let users delete account and data in one click (available on first release) but I don't know what else can be done.
End to end encryption is hard and I am not a programmer capable of implementing it safe enough to stop NSA level threats.
We will do what we can.
I don't think there's anything technical you can do. I think it would require:
1. A stable income stream that doesn't depend on something at odds with your goals (i.e. not like Mozilla).
2. Incorporate as a non-profit with rock-solid "we're never going to transition to for-profit" legal terms.
I think Wikipedia is probably the closest thing we have to that, but even they don't have a reliable income source. I mean, they have more money than they know what to do with and waste most of it on outreach nonsense rather than putting it into an endowment... but it's not exactly a reliable source of money.
Perhaps it already exists but I have thought about writing something that takes what is provided by "Download your data" and produces a local SQLite database, a local webpage, local website or some combination thereof that is served from the user's computer instead of Meta servers.
However I do not use Facebook enough to justify the effort, and when I do I never look at the "feed".
A really private place with only people that matter.
"A really private place with only people that matter."
Including an unnecessary third party at the controls.
Hmmm.
Many early adopters have asked for photo support so we will be definitely supporting it in the next release.
We are just trying to figure out how to do it without it turning into a clout-chasing machine.
If the posts are more long form, what is the difference between this and a blog where the "secret code" is the URL?
Or even a finsta account currated the way you want.
I don't say these as a "it's not gonna work" as in consumer its about the experience, I genuinely wonder why the experience will be better
> Group chat Group chats work when everyone in one know each other. I have N different circles which don't overlap so group doesn't chat makes sense. Messages in group chat are more "in the face" - everyone has to. I just wanted a place where I can dump my thoughts without feeling like seeking immediate attention.
> Blog PostX is indeed something like a private blogging space. It's something I wanted for myself.
Honestly I am not fully sure how it's going to be used by people but I have built something me and my friends like and use.
> Blog
PostX is indeed something like a private blogging space. It's something I wanted for myself.
Honestly I am not fully sure how it's going to be used by people but I have bi uilt something me and my friends like and use.
What can you possibly offer in this space that can not be done with a messaging group on WhatsApp/Signal/Matrix/XMPP ?
Basically group chats work when only when everyone knows each other
No "People you may know" or "select at least N interests or follow N accounts to continue".
I think early adopters will invite their friends to join and that is the only way.
Got any suggestions?
But we are not interested turning into Facebook. You will only see posts of your friends and nothing more.
I was spending 8+ hours a day doom scrolling which led to this idea. I just want to see what my friends want me to see and that's it.
Few others have suggested the same. But it kind of defeats the purpose since the goal is to see updates from your close friends and have only private profils. Even though empty feed is not good, it's a feature in our platform. We want to see what users do when the feed is empty. Only real way to have a non empty feed without compromising the core idea is letting users invite friends.
I am thinking along those lines!
It means really a lot to us.
We are working on a better name and the site!
I'll send you the welcome email manually soon!
It’s easy to dogpile. I’d like to see more proof, that’s all. “It’s obvious” doesn’t cut it for me. For one, we have major societal problems that are being exposed through these platforms, and the mere knowledge of the problem has a negative impact on the individual. Do we shut the platform down because it’s showing us things we don’t want to see, or do we fix the societal problem? And many others.
It varies by demographic, but yeah, social media are pretty universally awful for humans, and that's not just conjecture.
That's the issue, and it is what you attempted to answer.
Causation is much harder to tease out from the noise.
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask.
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks
For "seeing what old friends are up to", that's entirely shifted to IG. (Yes, pedants, I know that this is an FB product.)
The only time I ever open FB nowadays is for the marketplace, and when I do, all I see in the feed is garbage brainrot from big slop accounts.
Sure, younger people use other apps / platforms, but society as a whole here is way, way too invested in FB.
I wonder how many people can give up effortless doomscrolling to see a limited length chronological feed made up of their friends' posts
It was also one of the first to drop genuine user-sercing features like the old timeline (just all the posts of people you followed which you came there to see) which it replaced with the algorithmic feed which recommended stuff you never asked for or wanted.
Instagram did keep that feature though until 2 years and still has it although it's constantly switching it off.
Social media is dead to me.
That's the trick with these social systems. They don't care about the features each person dislikes or doesn't use.
You know, HN is social media.
Facebook came out and was a whole different thing. Facebook is a "database with a web (and later mobile app) frontend". It's all about data mining. Always has, always will be.
A company that's right up there with gambling and tobacco: designed to keep you hooked, no matter the cost.
Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility.
We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.
No, even that is terrible compared to forums – it doesn't get indexed by search engines!
This is a larger cultural issue. The general population finally got used to being on the Internet, and the Internet adapted to serve its needs and modes of thinking - which are predominantly social. Objective reality, information and access to it is of secondary importance (if even that) - what matters is socializing with friends and having experiences.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp and Discord are the true social media - they work much like real-life interactions. So to join a topical group, or even know it exists, you literally have to know the right people. Don't have friends who are into something? Don't have friends? Tough luck. It's high school again, but the Internet is owned by jocks now.
--
Edited to add:
The shift from e-mail and mailing lists to bulletin boards to link sites with threaded discussions (like HN, or Reddit), to Facebook and finally to Discord and WhatsApp, tells the story of objective reality and information becoming less important to the Internet as more people are on it.
To put it bluntly: the old tools forced the more social people to engage in exchange of actual information. Electronic mail, posts, comments were all forms promoting information hygiene. Even the shitposts were publications which could be referred back to in the future. It all felt like writing something, so people cared, even if only a little bit. Now, the new tools are catering to what the more social/extrovert population really wants: endless chit chat. Talking, talking, talking, talking. Everything ephemeral, access managed by interpersonal relations, navigating it requires engaging in the social games.
Objectivity? Verifiability? Accuracy? Truth? They don't matter much, because outside of crisis situations, they don't matter to most people. That the Internet was briefly oriented around information and knowledge, was a temporary aberration, mostly thanks to it being built by nerds for nerds. But now the whole of society is here, and the Internet finally became social.
Searching the forum archives is much worse with facebook, slack or discord than it ever was with even the jankiest phpbb forum or mailman list. Hell, before they grew it up, Yahoo! groups were better from that perspective. And a big part of what made forums for either tech or non-tech hobbies so nice was the ability to search and reference prior discussions.
I was actually hopeful that "login with facebook" and "login with discord" would bring those more search-friendly alternatives back a little bit, but so far I haven't seen it.
As a result it's far better than "omnisearch" options on social media that only sometimes surfaces what you were looking for.
I'm not sure what you mean by that in this context. Just like I have to be part of my local "nerdy" store to play MtG every Friday, I kinda have to be part of local MTB groups to know when they are riding. I could like you say, be a leader and organise my own rides I suppose? Is that what you mean? If so, then I'm sure you can see limitations to this approach.
Facebook (and other Meta properties) has sadly become the only popular channel for many sorts of offline activities. The average local sports group, DIY group, parents group, outdoors group etc around me are all on Facebook. The average musician and local business is on Instagram. Not to mention the millions in Europe and Latin America who only use WhatsApp for online communication.
Which is to say for many people the choice is not between Facebook and no Facebook. Their choice is between Facebook and inability to participate in their communities. Yes this sucks, but this is the reality. You cannot ask individuals to make expensive individual decisions to solve a society-wide problem. Instead you should look for regulations, and start building reasonable alternative to facebook and make it palatable to the average person.
You mentioned tobacco and gambling and I think they are actually apt examples of why the change must happen at the society level. Tobacco usage plummeted after decades of anti-tobacco education, smoking bans, advertising bans etc. And we also don’t just ask people to stop smoking, we prescribe nicotine patches to make it easier to quit. Similar for gambling. We don’t just ask people to not gamble, we regulate the industry (or outright ban it) and even in places where gambling is legal and prevalent there are still regulations like making it possible to ban yourself from gambling if it is becoming a problem.
This inertia and naivete is harmful and dangerous to everyone involved. It's like if they met in a sketchy part of town or were using tools unsafely to the point where they could injure someone. Going along with that, and especially without saying anything, or trying to change the situation makes you complicit.
I find keeping an account open solely for desktop marketplace is a fine compromise
A couple of times I've looked back at my messages and photos from the annual data downloads I did back then. I can't believe how angry I was, and that I would think it was O.K. to talk that way to perfect strangers.
Then I dig a little deeper, and see that the early messages were fine. I was a nice to strangers. But as my Facebook use continued, the tone and unpleasantness of the messages becomes palpable. It's like watching a malignant Facebook disease spreading in my own brain. Kind of horrifying now that I put it into words.
Glad I'm Facebook-free today, and enjoying life almost as much as someone in an Apple commercial.
I've never, ever seen an algorithm as evil and anti-social as the one Facebook's programmers created. At one point, it was showing my family and friends a comment my cousin had made about a politician, and they started getting into heated arguments with him. And this kept happening again and again. It honestly felt like the algorithm was trying to polarise entire families and friend groups, driving engagement by surfacing exactly the things people disagreed with or didn't want to hear. During the pandemic the algorithm drove everyone insane.
At one point, I compared Facebook to a virus. It hijacked conversations, infected relationships, misled people, and distorted their perceptions of others.
instagram is still bad now that they push more ads and content from people you don't follow onto you, but at least it's only things that are explicitly posted, and it's easier to maintain multiple profiles with different feeds
This is false; and considering the hundreds of thousands of companies that people encounter every day that do not operate with your singular mindset, I can only assume the comment was not made in good faith.
- Coordinating with Gen Xers’s burning man camps. They are just stuck in their ways. Like they say, nobody can prevent you from becoming like your parents
- A couple times I want to use Facebook marketplace, a new profile looks like a scammer. Which is the platform’s problem
They will get to decide what to do with their likenesses when they're older. It seemed cruel to let Facebook train a model on them from the time they were babies until they first start using social media in earnest.
It took the rest of us much longer to realize they were right.
In Holland we have a saying, what do you bring it your house is burning down? And most people said my photos. This was before the digital age and cloud obviously. We take photos because we care. Stuffing them into everyone else's face has also been a thing at birthday parties but outside that not so much.
First, for most of us in daily life, once you know you are being photographed you exit any context you were in and enter the new “I am being photographed” context. In some important way, you are stolen from the world around you for a period of time. Your body is still present, but you might be thinking about how this all would look at any later time. This does not apply when photography is specifically arranged by you (common in analog era), or if you are unaware of being a subject photographed (but there may be other concerns about that[0]).
Second, a photo/likeness of you is a proxy allowing other people to relate to you. Keeping in mind that we only ever relate to images/models that we build of each other in our minds (we have no “direct access” to other people), in this case a photo is a shallow (there is little other information than appearance) but weirdly high fidelity (for sighted people) model of you. This is not an issue if the photo is kept just by people you know (common in analog era) or after you are dead, but otherwise if published[1] it means people can somehow relate to “you” without the actual-you knowing or having met them. Some people may feel some sort of satisfaction from this, others it can make uncomfortable.
Third, as someone noted, soul could map to another nebulous concept: identity. It could range from problematic cases (someone pretending to be you to resell work you made) to twisted but benign (stories about people making fake profiles pretending to be successful SV employees come to mind).
[0] If you are secretly photographed[2], this can happen for a number of reasons. Some may imply a missing interaction (if that photographer could not photograph you, maybe they would talk to you instead). Some may be done with intent of sharing your photo in unknown context where again people may relate to you in specific ways that can be unpleasant (e.g., mockery).
[1] Now when generative models start to be trained on what we thought is our private photos, the idea of “published” is blurred.
[2] In most cases here “photo” can be swapped with “video”.
True, this is something that bothers me a lot too. But especially GenZ has a problem with that (surprising because they grew up with ubiquitous photography) and I see more and more parties that tape off phone cams. They are indeed wonderful.
I don't agree this doesn't apply when it is arranged though. For me that has always been awkward.
wasn't the camera doing the stealing, but the holder of the photo (facebook in this case)! And it wasn't the soul being stolen, but money!
Now, realising they were 100% right.
Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.
Here (NL) we get a form at the beginning of each school year to mark which uses of photos we find acceptable. E.g. we allow photos in the school portal (which is private and not owned by big tech), but not on Facebook, etc. It's the way it should be done, because there is not much burden on the parents. If the school also wants to put photos on social media, the burden should be on them to make sure that kids for which they don' have an ack are not put there.
A bit harder was initially convincing my parents not to put pictures of their granddaughter on Facebook. They are understandably proud and want to show their friends. But they respect it.
I think in all her life there has only been two violations of our policy. In both cases we contacted the person who published the photo/video and they took it offline.
You just need enough 'weirdos' to make it normal. I know that there are other parents that agree, but not everyone has the gut to stand up to the social media tyranny, but will join if some people set an example.
I do wonder also if the blur effect they use is one of those that can easily be reversed. I need to check that one of these days.
Honestly what's the point at this point? Are parents not going to send their children to that school because they didn't see pictures of blurry-faced children having fun on the Internet, or is this just teachers wanting to post about their students?
LinkedIn was used in a similar manor, to coordinate meetups for our local Cloud Native meetups, but the LinkedIn algorithms are much much worse than Facebooks, so people would get "You might be interested in this meetup" two weeks after the event.
Facebook basically took over communication, no more mailing lists, no more updates on the website, if there even is a website. You just have to accept Facebook if you want to be notified about changes in scheduling, upcoming events or general information about your kids soccer practise.
Also in many places WhatsApp is practically a requirement for daily life which is frustrating. What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.
GrapheneOS comes pretty close to that I think? You can put such apps in a separate profile and cut off a lot of permissions. You can also scope contacts, storage, etc.
I’m grateful though. We would have called meta malware back when.
Limited Access to Your Library
"App" can only access the items that you select. The app can add to your library even if no items are selected.
I.e. messenger.com is possible to use if you request desktop version, change font size and deal with all sort of zoom issues. Of course fb doesn’t support actual calls or notifications just because, so I don’t use it.
Instagram is even sneakier - you can’t post stories via mobile to “close friends”, post videos or view them from instant messages.
This UX would get developers and product managers fired at any of the mid-tier tech companies at which I’ve worked, but apparently not at Meta.
And on Android they're not even the worst privacy player which is Google of course
Description of the latter from the uad list:
Why is this even always running on a pristine Samsung, etc. phone? Creepy.Samsung has nothing against creepy, their own TVs are full of spyware too. At least here it can be removed.
And they do care about money which is the reason they do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747
The anti regulation clause sneaked into the "Big Beautiful Bill" ($5 trillion new debt) facilitates consumer exploitation and has no impact at all on military applications.
If China dominates consumer exploitation, let them and shut off their Internet companies.
Strangely enough, why not invest $500 billion in a working fusion reactor if these people are so worried about U.S. dominance?
As an aside, there was a discussion a few days back where someone argued that being locked in to popular and abusive social/messaging platforms like these is an acceptable compromise, if it means retaining online contacts with everyone you know. Well, this is precisely the sort of apathy that gives these platforms the power to abuse their marketshare so blatantly. However, it doesn't affect only the people who choose to be irresponsible about privacy. It also drags the ignorant and the unwilling participants under the influence of these spyware.
I should sit down and try something like postmarketOS or Mobian as a portable Linux machine is what I really want ...
For example, let's say that you avoid a certain abusive messaging platform. But what if your bank or some other essential institution insist on using it to provide their service? We can complain all they want. But they will probably just neglect you until you concede in despair.
To fight this, you need affordable and ethical alternatives for the device, platform and applications. You also would need either regulation or widespread public awareness. Honestly, the current situation is hopeless on that front.
Or you can buy Librem 5 with preinstalled Debian-like OS. Works for me.
You don't buy a bike and complain about the missing roof
Edit:// on my last Xiaomi I could remove anything with ADB, even definitely necessary apps, without root, do try it.
If you buy a phone with this kind of business practice. It's still your own choice to do so. Many good brands let you remove any app.
This means deleting real-world social connections. Meta owns the interwoven communication hubs of many local communities.
Let me provide an example. My swim team coach uses WhatsApp for all communication, including frequent pool schedule changes. They have strongly resisted change, as it is too much work to get 50+ subscribers to move to an alternative platform. They are the only local choice; this team is where my friends swim. Sure, I could work tirelessly to convince everyone to switch. However, most of the members use WhatsApp for other communities (eg triathlon and open-water clubs). Introducing an alternative incrementally means each member has to manage N+1 apps, etc. Importantly, super nodes (coaches, multi-club parents) with the most connections offer the most resistance: things work for them, why should they change?
Never did a 180 so fast in my life.
I guess I simply won't communicate with anyone selling anything there, even if it's the best deal possible or not available anywhere else
Found great smaller shops already when looking for things that do care for my business
you know they still collect data about you and build a profile, right?
I'm so glad I didn't pass their (ridiculous, redundant) set of interviews.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935199
Doesn't seem very unanimous to me.
(My comment makes less sense now. OP had originally said the replies were unanimously negative, but has since edited the comment to remove that.)
It's just a job. You will get fired if you question people above you.
"Meta tells The Verge that, for now, it’s not training on your unpublished photos with this new feature. “[The Verge’s headline] implies we are currently training our AI models with these photos, which we aren’t. This test doesn’t use people’s photos to improve or train our AI models,”
As someone who is familiar with the ML space, it seems unlikely that the addition of private photos will significantly improve models, as you have mentioned.
I saw this line in the article: "Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images."
It would seem important to share this with people who may 'not read the article'
Zuck should find a quiet part of the internet or the metaverse to curl up and fade away. The guy just doesn't have any redeeming qualities.
It's actually kind of fun seeking/using less-global alternatives, even if just for the different perspectives.
e.g. Bing maps is my favorite way to explore cities (yes, I know they're a MSFT product, their code/login doesn't permeate across my internets).
i give it a year or less.
Yesterday.[1]
[1] https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2025/06/26/jd-vance-me...
[1] https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2024-07/cbp_form_605...
The tweets just saying “drug use” and then you hear it’s weed is ridiculous. Why wouldn’t they just state that they lied on their immigration form about drug use?
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c5y2l9nn7y1o
In other news, FB has been using whatsapp metadata to coordinate genocide campaigns in Gaza. What’d all those dead civilians (including infants) do, again?
Presumably they signed a TOS, so it’s OK.
It’s seductive because it justifies complacency. On a theoretical level, it seems irrelevant whether someone has your data if anyone does. That abstraction collapses all distinctions and makes further choices seem moot.
But in practice, this logic breaks down. Anyone who has worked with data or communication forensics knows that a single missing email thread can be the difference between understanding what happened and hitting a dead end.
I wish there was an alternative to Facebook and Instagram, even if it had no users. We, as users, can solve the "no users" problem for you. Facebook and Instagram became popular, contrary to popular belief, not because it had "critical mass" or some Hoffmanite bullshit like that, but because it had the technical community using them, and they brought their friends and family.
Someone just needs to build it.
As for Instagram, again, I was there. Had that been a platform primarily for a technical audience, it wouldn't have taken it off.
The one platform you can say this about is Twitter. That, undoubtedly, started off with a much more tech audience, and grew so popular due to API integrations.
As for someone just needing to build alternatives. There have been dozens upon dozens over the years. Where are they now?
> There have been dozens upon dozens over the years
Such as? I think you'll find that all of them were created back when Facebook wasn't completely evil (and thus couldn't even get the backing of "technical" people), or they were created with some congenital flaw that made them completely unattractive to the average person. You have to have a Steve Jobs level of eye for detail with this stuff, and sadly most people cloning Twitter in a weekend are just doing it for fun.
Luckily the fediverse already seems to push away a lot of trolls, bigots and capitalists, but it's just a matter of time.
Edit: FWIW I come from a country where people considered themselves communists. Grandpa of my better half has a red star on their grave cross. IMHO ideologies are somewhat fucking people up.
But yes, there are a lot of self-described communists, socialists, anarchists and other leftist types there as well.
However, I wish they’d grow a pair and just outright block the FB and other similar dependencies that make such stuff necessary.
When the giants fight, which one of them is an evil monopolist, and which is the defender of freedom?
(This is why I actually like the iPhone approach more than the macOS approach these days; thought I do miss the late 90s when I didn't need to care because nothing had any mechanism to spy on me anyway).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra
What can I use to "poison" their training? I'll just send them privately to the friends that would consider that fun.
Now the definition may vary, but the camera roll is probably the list of images on your phone (which the app accesses when you pick an image to post), not a list of pictures you already posted privately...
(Or so I hope.)
At this point, is there really a lack of clarity? I think we all know Facebook is going to interpret any permission to look at anything, as full permission to do whatever the hell they want with it.
There are people who care about this, and people who don’t. Telling ourselves there’s confusion… I think is not going to produce an accurate model of reality.
I think these social media companies are evil. I just don’t see the point in deluding myself into thinking that they are outsmarting everybody. It is a difference of priorities, not smarts.
> On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or themes like birthdays or graduations.”
> By allowing this feature, the message continues, users are agreeing to Meta AI terms, which allows their AI to analyze “media and facial features” of those unpublished photos, as well as the date said photos were taken, and the presence of other people or objects in them. You further grant Meta the right to “retain and use” that personal information.
The straightforward explanation is this: they have a feature where it is helpful to group people together. For instance suggesting a photo of you and a friend to be posted on their birthday. In order to make this work, they need to perform facial recognition, so they ask for permission using their standard terms.
Can they train their AI with it? Yes, you are giving them permission to do so. Does the information available tell us that is what they are doing? No, it does not. In fact, a Meta spokesperson said this:
> “These suggestions are opt-in only and only shown to you – unless you decide to share them – and can be turned off at any time,” she continued. “Camera roll media may be used to improve these suggestions, but are not used to improve AI models in this test.”
— https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/27/facebook-is-asking-to-use-...
Could they be lying about this? Sure, I guess. But don’t publish an article saying that they are doing it, when you have no evidence to show that they are doing this and they say they aren’t doing this.
Might they do it in the future? Sure, I guess. But don’t publish an article saying that they are doing it, if the best you have is speculation about what they might do in the future.
Does it make sense for them to do this? Not really. They’ve already got plenty of training data. Will your private photos really move the needle for them? Almost certainly not. Will it be worth the PR fallout? Definitely not.
Should you grant them permission if you don’t want them to train on your private photos? No.
This could have been a decent article if they were clearer about what is fact and what is speculation. But they overreached and said that Facebook is doing something when that is not evident at all. That crosses the line into dishonesty for me.
If you hire a large amount of photographers and assign each of them to capture photos with certain themes you will be far more efficient and get cleaner data. And you can get images from places where people do not use meta products.
What stinks is the original concept: keeping up with disperate friends, its pretty awesome. I enjoy seeing my friends' kids grow up even though I don't really know them.
Oh, what's that, I can't actually initiate any conversations without giving that up? Well, that's just the free market, baby. Use something else if you don't like it.
You're telling me that all over the world WhatsApp is basically mandatory to communicate with most people and businesses? Well in this land of freedom, network effects cannot stand up to my Free Market Principles good sir!
The company that is destroying children's mental health with phone addiction is developing VR glasses.
I guess nobody cares
Some people do but other people don't elect them.
So, the other people don't care.
I bet "agree to" is "we clicked the box for you anyway"
It's surprising(not) how that class of error always seems to fall on the side of Facebook grabbing more data without consent, and never on the side of accidentally increasing user privacy.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/news/694246/google-android-pixel-wa...
I’m sure if you log the Facebook app’s network traffic on your phone and show that it uploads photos without you clicking on the agree button, they’ll happily publish an article about your findings.
Nah, that's the company's reputation that appends malice in your mind to an innocent headline
Nothing on that screen says they’re using your photos for training. I’m sure it’s in the linked terms, but Facebook knows those won’t be read.
This isn’t buried. The user has to see the screen and click accept for their photos to be uploaded.
Compared to the usual buried disclaimers and vague references to “improving services,” consenting to 1000 things when you sign up for an account, this is pretty transparent. If someone is concerned, they at least have a clear opportunity to decline before anything gets uploaded.
It’s just surprising to me that people look at this example of Facebook going out of their way to not do the bad thing and respond with a bunch of comments about how they doing the bad thing.
I didn’t make that assertion. I think most people don’t care if their photos are used to train an AI model as long as Facebook doesn’t post the photos publicly. Fundamentally, I care if people see my photos, and don’t care if computers see them. But I’m aware some people dislike AI and/or have strong beliefs about how data should be used and disagree. It makes sense to give those people an opportunity to say no, so it seems like a good thing that the feature is opt-in rather than an opt-out buried in a menu.
Here’s the thing. Even if we grant your idea that maybe this is more understandable, why would that be reasonable? Facebook employs a lot of very smart people and has enormous resources. I’m confident they could come up with wording that would make this very clear to everyone. I mean, “we will use your photos to build our next generation AI systems” is a lot clearer than what they have here, and I just came up with that on the spot. That they haven’t done so is a deliberate choice.
Maybe this will finally convince people to throw out their smartphones.