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Posted by pier25 6 days ago

Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared(www.theverge.com)
515 points | 366 commentspage 5
jurschreuder 6 days ago|
They're also developing VR glasses.

The company that is destroying children's mental health with phone addiction is developing VR glasses.

I guess nobody cares

noisy_boy 6 days ago|
> nobody cares

Some people do but other people don't elect them.

Ylpertnodi 5 days ago||
>Some people do but other people don't elect them.

So, the other people don't care.

imartin2k 5 days ago||
The world would be a better place without this shitty company.
backendEngineer 4 days ago||
fuck Meta
varelse 5 days ago||
[dead]
b0a04gl 5 days ago||
[dead]
ashdksnndck 6 days ago||
[flagged]
alex1138 6 days ago||
Facebook has, though, historically been less than honest about consent

I bet "agree to" is "we clicked the box for you anyway"

dylan604 6 days ago|||
Oops, we totally didn't mean to, but an undiscovered bug did not obey the check box and slurped in everything anyways.
bigiain 6 days ago|||
"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.

ashdksnndck 6 days ago||
How would you know? If Facebook has a bug that accidentally increases user privacy, does The Verge write an article about it?
shakna 5 days ago||
If the Verge hears, you'd probably get something like this [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/news/694246/google-android-pixel-wa...

jiggawatts 6 days ago|||
My KPIs? I don’t see what my new Lamborghini has to do with anything!
ashdksnndck 6 days ago||||
Maybe you should get a job at The Verge!

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.

shakna 6 days ago||||
They trained on libgen without qualms. There's little reason to suspect they'll give the rest of their users more respect.
JKCalhoun 6 days ago|||
Curious about accounts that have been deactivated/deleted.
bigiain 6 days ago||
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.
eviks 6 days ago|||
> The Verge’s clickbait headline makes it sound like Facebook is using private photos without the user’s knowledge/consent.

Nah, that's the company's reputation that appends malice in your mind to an innocent headline

ashdksnndck 6 days ago||
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.
gessha 6 days ago|||
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.
paulnpace 6 days ago|||
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.
msgodel 6 days ago||
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.
wat10000 6 days ago||
The plans were available in the basement, behind the door that says “beware of the leopard.”

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.

ashdksnndck 6 days ago||
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.

basilgohar 6 days ago|||
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.
ashdksnndck 6 days ago||
> 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.

wat10000 6 days ago|||
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.
ashdksnndck 6 days ago||
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.
wat10000 6 days ago||
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.

ashdksnndck 6 days ago||
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.
wat10000 5 days ago||
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.
msgodel 6 days ago|
Neat-O.

Maybe this will finally convince people to throw out their smartphones.