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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Group chats work when everyone knows each other.
That is (a) not true and (b) a non-issue, because you can create as many groups as you'd like.
> PostX is indeed something like a private blogging space. I just wanted a place where I can dump my thoughts without feeling like seeking immediate attention.
So, you are working on yet-another blog engine and you are promoting it like it's some revolutionary new idea? It may be interested for you if you want to treat it as some exercise, but do you see how underwhelming this seems to anyone else?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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 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.
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 ...
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.
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."
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 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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.")
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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!
"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.
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.
It doesn't happen in my country and the charge is from sometimes back. I kept looking for records of that transaction but could not find it.
Not even, I’d reverse the charge with my bank/credit card company.
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Venus, in her naked glory, I could understand at a stretch, but Saturn?
Somebody liked Saturn enough to put a ring on it.
Some Saturn photos you can find on duckduckgo look like a woman's breast if you're AI enough
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If you won’t take to arms for Venus, when will you?
Venus needth not arms! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo
Looks like someone took arms to me.
The AI isn't even wrong, naked planets are bannable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailor_Saturn
Just don't show Uranus!
Can’t really see much nakedness through all those CO2 clouds.
Mystery is the font of desire.
Thank God you didn't use Uranus.
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
> humans now understand that they should be callous and cold
Were humans working on health insurance claims previously known for being warm and tend to err on the side of the patient?
> 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)
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.
The bot should have let ~5% of auto-accepted claims through to the humans. And then tracked their decision.
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.
In what way is MSFT "slow-playing" AI?
Harder than just automatically rejecting every claim.
Nice that you're mentioning it. I've seen this piece today from Bloomberg, "Call Center Workers Are Tired of Being Mistaken for AI."
https://archive.ph/rB2Rg
They were probably using a bloom filter in the backend
Do you have a link to the picture, unmodified?
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.
From the very beginning Facebook has been an AI wearing your friends as a skinsuit. People are only just starting to notice now.
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.
Call me nostalgic, but we were saner then.
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.
Simpler, simpler days.
The wall was released maybe 6 months after Facebook launched. I think it was still called “The Facebook” at the time.
Oh wow, I’d even forgotten about pokes. Thanks for that trip down memory lane.
The early, organic days of social networking are always fun. They never would have pulled in billions of users if they started off how they are now.
Couldn't have said it better.
Nothing is a social network anymore.
Everything is a content-consumer a platform now.
People just want to scroll and scroll
People want to scroll and scroll, because social media make them miserable [1, 2, 3]
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/...
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.
Well they had to grow the userbase before they could abuse it :)
Very true! I was annoyed by the loss of the "is" pattern and basically stopped using Facebook when the chronological feed was removed.
They were stealing your contacts from wherever they could get them. There was never a time when they didn't abuse their users.
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.
This is a perfect illustration of misaligned AI.
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.
I don't think it's AI
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)
They didn't even have algorithmic feeds from beginning, so no.
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.
What delusional nonsense. What AI was Facebook using in 2005?
I am building one with a chronological feed and no public profiles.
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
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.
We will do what we can.
> I don't know what else can be done
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.
"We don't let anyone..."
"A really private place with only people that matter."
Including an unnecessary third party at the controls.
Hmmm.
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.
Thanks for the response
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.
Awesome. I was going to say just don’t have a way to like photos, but then I don’t know if that solves the clout-chasing problem.
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.
I messed up the formatting. Below is the correct text
> 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.
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.
new users will face the empty feed problem since by design one can't find anyone without their code.
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?
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.
Thank you Anand - for the encouragement and joining the waitlist!
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!
> PostX is a private, no-clout, no-AI social network for close friends
What can you possibly offer in this space that can not be done with a messaging group on WhatsApp/Signal/Matrix/XMPP ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44402600
Basically group chats work only when everyone knows each other
> Group chats work when everyone knows each other.
That is (a) not true and (b) a non-issue, because you can create as many groups as you'd like.
> PostX is indeed something like a private blogging space. I just wanted a place where I can dump my thoughts without feeling like seeking immediate attention.
So, you are working on yet-another blog engine and you are promoting it like it's some revolutionary new idea? It may be interested for you if you want to treat it as some exercise, but do you see how underwhelming this seems to anyone else?
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.
> correlating
That's the issue, and it is what you attempted to answer.
Causation is much harder to tease out from the noise.
Rose-tinted glasses. Here's what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about his own platform in 2004:
> 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
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.
I have Fluff-Busting Purity, I'm part of a bunch of Facebook groups, and I only browse on my laptop. I pretty much only see what I want to.
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.
These days I treat Facebook as a marketplace for offloading lightly used items.
Social media is dead to me.
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.
Would a friends and staying in touch social network even succeed today?
Read Careless People. It was never about that.
Don’t forget supercharging the spread of hate such as the harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar
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.
This is a real Rip Van Winkle style take (posted with gentle humor)
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.
So Feb 4, 2004 (founding) to September 6, 2006 (newsfeed). LOL.
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
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.
Some cultures long avoided being photographed, because they believed the camera would steal their soul.
It took the rest of us much longer to realize they were right.
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.
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.
Since Facebook is pulling from the camera roll, not posting is not an adequate defense.
I did the same. And then my mother-in-law decided to ignore my requests. And then my mother got angry. And then I caved.
[flagged]
The joy of deleting Facebook in 2021 is something I'll never be able to put into words.
A company that's right up there with gambling and tobacco: designed to keep you hooked, no matter the cost.
The best time to delete Facebook was many years ago. The second best time is now.
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.
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.
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 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
I was going to say Instagram is much worse in terms of keeping you hooked but then I remembered who owns it.
deleted it in 2018. happy ever since. did not regret for a moment
just deleted that trash in 2025, fuck Zuck
Cool. I gamble, use tobacco, alcohol and other drugs and occasionally use FB from time to time. I enjoy things.
All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost.
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 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.
They have already captured federal regulation in the USA. If a federal agent decides to prosecute, it's one press of the "you're FIRED!" button.
It's simple, they don't care.
I’m sure they use a provider like Hive to scan all the photos before processing them.
I doubt anyone who works there would care.
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 ...
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.
> Facebook and Instagram are installed by default on many android phones and cannot be fully uninstalled
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.
I wonder how many pieces of code at facebook there are with guards like
Don’t worry, I upload Zuck’s photos to facebook for him.
Mark's user id is 4
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."
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.
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Zucks empire has done a lot in the field of LLMs, I don’t know if local llms would have been possible without their contributions
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).
Probably would have been a more fitting comment for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494
Remember that you can delete your Meta accounts and have nothing to do with them. It’s not hard to do.
> 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 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
> 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?
https://archive.is/3lllh
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
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/27/facebook-is-asking-to-use-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494)
Curious, is this really necessary? I'd assume the subtotal of public images posted on meta services to be in the trillions.
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.
Probably for personalization.
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
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.
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.)
Question to the Meta engineers on here, do you ever speak out about this internally?
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.
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.
> i give it a year or less.
Yesterday.[1]
[1] https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2025/06/26/jd-vance-me...
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.
If you have so much trouble government I don’t think deleting facebook will change anything.
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.
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).
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.
Very helpful for ad targeting. As Apple kills tracking and ramps up its own ad business, Meta will need to collect as many signals as possible.
Yeah holy crap can you imagine the data goldmine of all the things they could know about you from analyzing every photo you ever take with AI?
Hacker News users keep getting worked up about opt-in services they don't want to opt in to.
I don’t use meta products. Photos of me are on the camera rolls of people who do.
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.
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.
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?
iOS -> Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Photos -> Facebook -> Set limited access
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.")
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.
They will sell a product that people will use to photograph random people doing stuff.
I heard something about meta glasses
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
As commercial AI kills its food source (the internet) we'll see corporations doing desperate things to keep feeding it.
> 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 article seems false.
> 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.
This comment should be the top one. I hate FB and I do believe they train their AI using this, but it's a believe, it's speculations.
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
The AR glasses are also about the same... just get a lot of pictures so they can feed their AI.
Not your computer, data not encrypted with keys you control, not your data.
Data and people are the commodity in this Ai gold rush. Primary benefactors are big tech.
Beneficiaries
Wonder if you could ddos it by taking selfies with ai generated faces in background.
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!
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
> nobody cares
Some people do but other people don't elect them.
>Some people do but other people don't elect them.
So, the other people don't care.
The world would be a better place without this shitty company.
fuck Meta
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Facebook has, though, historically been less than honest about consent
I bet "agree to" is "we clicked the box for you anyway"
Oops, we totally didn't mean to, but an undiscovered bug did not obey the check box and slurped in everything anyways.
"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.
How would you know? If Facebook has a bug that accidentally increases user privacy, does The Verge write an article about it?
My KPIs? I don’t see what my new Lamborghini has to do with anything!
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.
They trained on libgen without qualms. There's little reason to suspect they'll give the rest of their users more respect.
Curious about accounts that have been deactivated/deleted.
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.
> 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
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 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.
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.
Neat-O.
Maybe this will finally convince people to throw out their smartphones.