Top
Best
New

Posted by pier25 3 days ago

Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared(www.theverge.com)
506 points | 367 commentspage 2
robin_reala 3 days ago|
Remember that you can delete your Meta accounts and have nothing to do with them. It’s not hard to do.
clcaev 3 days ago||
> 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?

robin_reala 3 days ago|||
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.
herbst 2 days ago||||
Meta owns your friendships?
throwaway83094 3 days ago|||
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.
ryandrake 2 days ago||
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.
yonatan8070 3 days ago|||
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

herbst 2 days ago||
That's how I deal with facebook and Instagram. If it's only there, it basically doesn't exist and definitely doesn't want my business.

Found great smaller shops already when looking for things that do care for my business

RamblingCTO 2 days ago||
> and have nothing to do with them. It’s not hard to do.

you know they still collect data about you and build a profile, right?

jbombadil 3 days ago||
https://archive.is/3lllh
ATechGuy 3 days ago||
Some of the best decisions I made ever: 1. Deleted FB in 2012 :) 2. Didn't create insta or whatsapp account 3. Never applied to meta jobs
ChrisArchitect 3 days ago||
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/27/facebook-is-asking-to-use-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494)
Jackson__ 3 days ago||
Curious, is this really necessary? I'd assume the subtotal of public images posted on meta services to be in the trillions.
ipsum2 3 days ago||
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.

ejstronge 3 days ago||
> 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'

squigz 3 days ago||
Shouldn't it have zero rights over your "camera roll images", which implies to me to be photos saved to a phone but not yet uploaded to Facebook?
mupuff1234 3 days ago||
Probably for personalization.
puttycat 2 days ago||
Some time ago I asked on HN "will you go work for Meta?" [1].

I'm so glad I didn't pass their (ridiculous, redundant) set of interviews.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935199

Anon1096 2 days ago||
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.
puttycat 2 days ago||
Thanks for the good vibes. Did it occur to you that the original question might have been posted before the rejection?
huhkerrf 2 days ago||
I mean, the very first two replies on your link are "yes" and the third is "maybe."

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.)

demarq 2 days ago||
Question to the Meta engineers on here, do you ever speak out about this internally?
StochasticLi 2 days ago|
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.

demarq 2 days ago||
That’s sad.
toofy 3 days ago||
how long until we find out that the brand new government/palantir deal is using these photos as well against citizens?

i give it a year or less.

Animats 3 days ago||
> i give it a year or less.

Yesterday.[1]

[1] https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2025/06/26/jd-vance-me...

blub 3 days ago||
According to the thread on /r/europe that person smoked weed and lied about it on their immigration form.
Animats 2 days ago|||
It's not a question on the Customs and Border Protection form for US visitors.[1]

[1] https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2024-07/cbp_form_605...

samtheprogram 3 days ago||||
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?

umanwizard 2 days ago|||
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.
xoxxala 3 days ago|||
BBC has a video on the story. DHS says it was drug use not the meme.

https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c5y2l9nn7y1o

mslansn 3 days ago||
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.
hedora 3 days ago|||
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?

Presumably they signed a TOS, so it’s OK.

bigiain 3 days ago|||
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.
dzhiurgis 3 days ago||
If you have so much trouble government I don’t think deleting facebook will change anything.
fwn 3 days ago||
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.

windex 2 days ago||
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.

ProllyInfamous 2 days ago|
My local DNS rules (PiHole) block all Google & Facebook products.

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).

righthand 2 days ago||
Why MS Bing maps? The UI is nice or are there extra features that make it great for exploration? And by exploration do you mean physical or digital?
ProllyInfamous 1 day ago||
>Why Bing?

I first saught out Bing Maps because the aerial views can be set askew from cardinal directions, which allows you to (sometimes) discover objects beneath tree-cover (hidden in top-down views).

I've continued using Bing for digital explorations because the physical printouts have more contrast (i.e. are easier to read; however, alltrails has the best printouts).

Bing seems to list more businesses than other platforms, and presents the information with less clutter.

But ultimately, I use Bing because I can use it while still blocking all other tracking products of its parent company (which is very difficult to do with e.g. Google products — which I just ban entirely).

charcircuit 2 days ago|
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.
More comments...