Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

Posted by pier25 6/28/2025

Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared(www.theverge.com)

517 points | 366 commentspage 3

charcircuit 6/28/2025|

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.

geor9e 6/28/2025||

Hacker News users keep getting worked up about opt-in services they don't want to opt in to.

sciencerobot 6/28/2025||

I don’t use meta products. Photos of me are on the camera rolls of people who do.

labrador 6/28/2025||

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.

phendrenad2 6/28/2025||

Meta products are such a bad deal for users.

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.

huhkerrf 6/28/2025|

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?

phendrenad2 6/29/2025|||

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.

krapp 6/28/2025|||

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."

phendrenad2 6/30/2025|||

Yes, and the success of fediverse, despite being hard to get into, is a testament to how much people in general want to escape being cannibalized by Meta for shareholder value. There just aren't good alternatives, because of attitudes like you can see here on HN, and investors being incredibly paranoid right now.

p2detar 6/28/2025||||

My impression about Fedi is that it’s much bigger than most people think it is, but those who are in it don’t like talking about it a lot.

krapp 6/28/2025||

The more people know about it, the faster it gets ruined. An unfortunate law of nature.

Luckily the fediverse already seems to push away a lot of trolls, bigots and capitalists, but it's just a matter of time.

p2detar 6/29/2025||

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.

krapp 6/29/2025||

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.

righthand 6/28/2025|||

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.

aetherspawn 6/28/2025||

iOS -> Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Photos -> Facebook -> Set limited access

msgodel 6/28/2025|

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.")

hedora 6/28/2025|||

As much as I’m annoyed when my iPhone makes me do the dumb “give access to these photos to the app” dance, I’m happy they block that, at least.

However, I wish they’d grow a pair and just outright block the FB and other similar dependencies that make such stuff necessary.

ben_w 6/28/2025||

> 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).

Esophagus4 6/28/2025|||

Argh… I didn’t even think about that

deadbabe 6/28/2025||

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.

abhinavk 6/28/2025||

They will sell a product that people will use to photograph random people doing stuff.

deadbabe 6/28/2025||

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.

setnone 6/28/2025||

I heard something about meta glasses

nottorp 6/28/2025||

Hmm I don't post photos privately on FB, and I maybe post one public photo every 2-3 years.

What can I use to "poison" their training? I'll just send them privately to the friends that would consider that fun.

rickdeckard 6/28/2025|

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...

nottorp 6/28/2025||

Oh... that ain't going to happen. I don't have any Facebook apps on my phone nor i'm signed into the site in the browser.

(Or so I hope.)

cpersona 6/28/2025||

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.

barbazoo 6/28/2025||

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.

harvey9 6/28/2025|

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.

Anthony-G 6/28/2025||

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra

squigz 6/28/2025||

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?

osmsucks 6/28/2025|

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.

akomtu 6/28/2025|

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.

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