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

https://www.theverge.com/meta/694685/meta-ai-camera-roll

by pier25 • 1 year ago

517 334 1 year ago

goku123• 1 year ago

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.

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

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.

dylan604• 1 year ago

which what, 0.5% of users will know and be able to do?

goku123• 1 year ago

That's what I did. But as others point out, how many know about this? And modifications are getting harder by the year. They are relying on these factors to ensure that the majority of the population remains exploitable.

baobun• 1 year ago

Bettet make it a script or ansible playbook from the start since you will need to reapply it after system updates.

tjpnz3• 1 year ago

I don't want their shit on my phone at all. Can I remove it entirely?

ethagnawl2• 1 year ago

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 ...

goku123• 1 year ago

That's what I plan to do too. My current device is locked down pretty aggressively. But the problem here is, what percentage of the population has the skill and patience to do it? These companies need to hold only a simple majority of the population hostage. The holdouts like you or me can be eventually peer pressured into accepting the same abuse.

For example, let's say that you avoid a certain abusive messaging platform. But what if your bank or some other essential institution insist on using it to provide their service? We can complain all they want. But they will probably just neglect you until you concede in despair.

To fight this, you need affordable and ethical alternatives for the device, platform and applications. You also would need either regulation or widespread public awareness. Honestly, the current situation is hopeless on that front.

fsflover2• 1 year ago

I should sit down and try something like postmarketOS or Mobian as a portable Linux machine is what I really want ...

Or you can buy Librem 5 with preinstalled Debian-like OS. Works for me.

herbst4• 1 year ago

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.

AJ007• 1 year ago

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.

cameldrv• 1 year ago

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?

toofy• 1 year ago

how long until we find out that the brand new government/palantir deal is using these photos as well against citizens?

i give it a year or less.

bigiain• 1 year ago

I look forward to the schadenfreude I will feel when someone makes the right FOI request and we discover this "feature" was built by Meta at the request of the NSA or the FBI or some other government TLA.

Animats2• 1 year ago

i give it a year or less.

Yesterday.[1]

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

blub• 1 year ago

According to the thread on /r/europe that person smoked weed and lied about it on their immigration form.

dzhiurgis5• 1 year ago

If you have so much trouble government I don’t think deleting facebook will change anything.

fwn• 1 year ago

This is the boolean privacy fallacy: the idea that if some large-scale violation of privacy exists, then nothing else you do is relevant for privacy.

It’s seductive because it justifies complacency. On a theoretical level, it seems irrelevant whether someone has your data if anyone does. That abstraction collapses all distinctions and makes further choices seem moot.

But in practice, this logic breaks down. Anyone who has worked with data or communication forensics knows that a single missing email thread can be the difference between understanding what happened and hitting a dead end.

jbombadil• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/3lllh

ants_everywhere• 1 year ago

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.

sebmellen2• 1 year ago

Since Facebook is pulling from the camera roll, not posting is not an adequate defense.

zhivota• 1 year ago

Only logical thing to do personally is to take it completely off your mobile devices. You still get caught in the dragnet if you have friends and family posting you.

Also in many places WhatsApp is practically a requirement for daily life which is frustrating. What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.

dangus2• 1 year ago

Recent iOS versions have granular controls over library access to prevent this.

jwr3• 1 year ago

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.

throwacct• 1 year ago

I don't care if they label me a weirdo. I agree with OP. Please refrain from posting any pictures of my children. Simple as that.

mrweasel2• 1 year ago

Same in Denmark. Some companies don't have websites, only a Facebook page, Facebook Marketplace has all but killed the local marketplace sites and pretty much anything related to organized sports and after school activities are coordinated on closed Facebook groups. The last one is the worst one. That's basically telling people that they will hold your child's social life hostage until you join Facebook.

LinkedIn was used in a similar manor, to coordinate meetups for our local Cloud Native meetups, but the LinkedIn algorithms are much much worse than Facebooks, so people would get "You might be interested in this meetup" two weeks after the event.

Facebook basically took over communication, no more mailing lists, no more updates on the website, if there even is a website. You just have to accept Facebook if you want to be notified about changes in scheduling, upcoming events or general information about your kids soccer practise.

mystifyingpoi2• 1 year ago

For real. I've been searching for a swimming school for our daughter in Poland. The one that looked promising had a contract with clause, giving the school full rights to post any pictures of her in the swimming pool to social media. Of course, parents are strictly prohibited from making ANY photos at all. Fuck them.

microtonal3• 1 year ago

Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.

Here (NL) we get a form at the beginning of each school year to mark which uses of photos we find acceptable. E.g. we allow photos in the school portal (which is private and not owned by big tech), but not on Facebook, etc. It's the way it should be done, because there is not much burden on the parents. If the school also wants to put photos on social media, the burden should be on them to make sure that kids for which they don' have an ack are not put there.

A bit harder was initially convincing my parents not to put pictures of their granddaughter on Facebook. They are understandably proud and want to show their friends. But they respect it.

I think in all her life there has only been two violations of our policy. In both cases we contacted the person who published the photo/video and they took it offline.

You just need enough 'weirdos' to make it normal. I know that there are other parents that agree, but not everyone has the gut to stand up to the social media tyranny, but will join if some people set an example.

mitthrowaway2• 1 year ago

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.

chii2• 1 year ago

the camera would steal their soul.

wasn't the camera doing the stealing, but the holder of the photo (facebook in this case)! And it wasn't the soul being stolen, but money!

b00ty4breakfast• 1 year ago

As is the wont of industrial society, we had to meticulously design and build our demons.

wkat42425• 1 year ago

I like this poetic way of putting it, though I don't agree with the message.

In Holland we have a saying, what do you bring it your house is burning down? And most people said my photos. This was before the digital age and cloud obviously. We take photos because we care. Stuffing them into everyone else's face has also been a thing at birthday parties but outside that not so much.

LightBug1• 1 year ago

Geeze, well said ... I remember hearing that when I was kid and not thinking much of it beyond respect their wishes.

Now, realising they were 100% right.

huhkerrf3• 1 year ago

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.

fvgvkujdfbllo• 1 year ago

They are simply addicted to likes and photos of your children can hook them up easily.

jamesponddotco• 1 year ago

My mother-in-law did the same, then I cut her off, no more pictures of the kid. She got into the program after that.

blindriver• 1 year ago

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.

ndsipa_pomu• 1 year ago

Time to invest in facial plastic surgery

kevingadd• 1 year ago

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?

sebmellen2• 1 year ago

I’m sure they use a provider like Hive to scan all the photos before processing them.

latentsea2• 1 year ago

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.

heavyset_go• 1 year ago

It's simple, they don't care.

tjpnz3• 1 year ago

I doubt anyone who works there would care.

bregma• 1 year ago

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.

IncreasePosts2• 1 year ago

I wonder how many pieces of code at facebook there are with guards like

    if (userId == 1) {
      // don't add mark's data to training set
    }

samlinnfer• 1 year ago

Don’t worry, I upload Zuck’s photos to facebook for him.

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

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."

polyomino• 1 year ago

Mark's user id is 4

IncreasePosts2• 1 year ago

Lame, it already jumped the shark by then

anticensor• 1 year ago

1 is @mark, 4 is @zuck

coef2• 1 year ago

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.

droopyEyelids• 1 year ago

This is a real Rip Van Winkle style take (posted with gentle humor)

msgodel3• 1 year ago

From the very beginning Facebook has been an AI wearing your friends as a skinsuit. People are only just starting to notice now.

d_watt• 1 year ago

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.

labster• 1 year ago

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.

rafaelmn• 1 year ago

They didn't even have algorithmic feeds from beginning, so no.

arizen• 1 year ago

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.

IshKebab3• 1 year ago

What delusional nonsense. What AI was Facebook using in 2005?

npalli• 1 year ago

So Feb 4, 2004 (founding) to September 6, 2006 (newsfeed). LOL.

cornfieldlabs17• 1 year ago

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

pulkitanand• 1 year ago

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.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 1 year ago

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".

motoxpro• 1 year ago

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

fivestones3• 1 year ago

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.

IshKebab3• 1 year ago

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.

rglullis6• 1 year ago

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 ?

   - They are invite only
   - They are not public
   - People share updates in chronological order

xyst2• 1 year ago

These days I treat Facebook as a marketplace for offloading lightly used items.

Social media is dead to me.

idiotsecant• 1 year ago

What a coincidence, I use it as a market for buying lightly used items.

cornfieldlabs17• 1 year ago

Facebook marketplace has surprisingly large number of listings and in my country not even dedicated marketplaces can come close

danielbln• 1 year ago

Social media is dead to me

You know, HN is social media.

robocat2• 1 year ago

Provide wildly different features: get everybody hooked on a different feature.

That's the trick with these social systems. They don't care about the features each person dislikes or doesn't use.

DSingularity• 1 year ago

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.

absurdo• 1 year ago

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.

suzzer99• 1 year ago

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.

wkat42425• 1 year ago

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.

figassis2• 1 year ago

Would a friends and staying in touch social network even succeed today?

cornfieldlabs17• 1 year ago

I am trying to find out with the one I am building :)

I wonder how many people can give up effortless doomscrolling to see a limited length chronological feed made up of their friends' posts

neepi• 1 year ago

Read Careless People. It was never about that.

oulipo• 1 year ago

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

ulfw• 1 year ago

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.

arrowsmith• 1 year ago

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.

TrackerFF• 1 year ago

I don't know where you live, but at least here in Scandinavia FB is still the de facto "one-stop shop" as far as social media goes.

Sure, younger people use other apps / platforms, but society as a whole here is way, way too invested in FB.

morkalork• 1 year ago

Marketplace :/

n1b0m• 1 year ago

Don’t forget supercharging the spread of hate such as the harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar

guicen• 1 year ago

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.

throwaway830942• 1 year ago

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

imhoguy• 1 year ago

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.

aetherspawn• 1 year ago

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

msgodel3• 1 year ago

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.")

hedora2• 1 year ago

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

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

Esophagus4• 1 year ago

Argh… I didn’t even think about that

msgodel3• 1 year ago

Neat-O.

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

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/27/facebook-is-asking-to-use-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494)

dzhiurgis5• 1 year ago

Wonder if you could ddos it by taking selfies with ai generated faces in background.

deadbabe2• 1 year ago

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.

setnone• 1 year ago

I heard something about meta glasses

abhinavk• 1 year ago

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

deadbabe2• 1 year ago

That only gives you POV type photos and they are too random and uncategorized.

If you hire a large amount of photographers and assign each of them to capture photos with certain themes you will be far more efficient and get cleaner data. And you can get images from places where people do not use meta products.

xyst2• 1 year ago

Data and people are the commodity in this Ai gold rush. Primary benefactors are big tech.

omnicognate• 1 year ago

Beneficiaries

Jackson__• 1 year ago

Curious, is this really necessary? I'd assume the subtotal of public images posted on meta services to be in the trillions.

ipsum2• 1 year ago

I imagine many people will react only to the headline and not read the article, but:

"Meta tells The Verge that, for now, it’s not training on your unpublished photos with this new feature. “[The Verge’s headline] implies we are currently training our AI models with these photos, which we aren’t. This test doesn’t use people’s photos to improve or train our AI models,”

As someone who is familiar with the ML space, it seems unlikely that the addition of private photos will significantly improve models, as you have mentioned.

ejstronge• 1 year ago

I imagine many people will react only to the headline and not read the article [...]

I saw this line in the article: "Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images."

It would seem important to share this with people who may 'not read the article'

mupuff1234• 1 year ago

Probably for personalization.

JimDabell• 1 year ago

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.

BiteCode_dev• 1 year ago

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.

jurschreuder• 1 year ago

They're also developing VR glasses.

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

I guess nobody cares

noisy_boy• 1 year ago

nobody cares

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

Ylpertnodi• 1 year ago

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

So, the other people don't care.

squigz3• 1 year ago

Hasn't Facebook (and pretty much all major social media platforms) had a clause in their TOS giving them a license to whatever you upload to their services, since forever?

osmsucks• 1 year ago

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.

windex2• 1 year ago

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.

Alifatisk• 1 year ago

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

notsydonia• 1 year ago

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.

southernplaces7• 1 year ago

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.

p_l2• 1 year ago

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.

molteanu• 1 year ago

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

wiseowise• 1 year ago

Thank God you didn't use Uranus.

nelox• 1 year ago

Venus, in her naked glory, I could understand at a stretch, but Saturn?

loloquwowndueo• 1 year ago

Can’t really see much nakedness through all those CO2 clouds.

tclancy• 1 year ago

If you won’t take to arms for Venus, when will you?

slazaro• 1 year ago

Somebody liked Saturn enough to put a ring on it.

GoblinSlayer• 1 year ago

The AI isn't even wrong, naked planets are bannable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailor_Saturn

exe342• 1 year ago

Just don't show Uranus!

doctorpangloss• 1 year ago

Do you have a link to the picture, unmodified?

lawrenceyan• 1 year ago

They were probably using a bloom filter in the backend

litmus-pit-git2• 1 year ago

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.

exe342• 1 year ago

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.

nottorp2• 1 year ago

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

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

rickdeckard• 1 year ago

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...

nottorp2• 1 year ago

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

(Or so I hope.)

robin_reala2• 1 year ago

Remember that you can delete your Meta accounts and have nothing to do with them. It’s not hard to do.

clcaev• 1 year ago

Remember that you can delete your Meta accounts and have nothing to do with them. It’s not hard to do.

This means deleting real-world social connections. Meta owns the interwoven communication hubs of many local communities.

Let me provide an example. My swim team coach uses WhatsApp for all communication, including frequent pool schedule changes. They have strongly resisted change, as it is too much work to get 50+ subscribers to move to an alternative platform. They are the only local choice; this team is where my friends swim. Sure, I could work tirelessly to convince everyone to switch. However, most of the members use WhatsApp for other communities (eg triathlon and open-water clubs). Introducing an alternative incrementally means each member has to manage N+1 apps, etc. Importantly, super nodes (coaches, multi-club parents) with the most connections offer the most resistance: things work for them, why should they change?

robin_reala2• 1 year ago

I didn’t say you should delete your account, I said you can. There will of course be downsides, but it’s a choice you can make if the negative factors tip the balance.

throwaway830942• 1 year ago

You could choose not to engage with communities that force you to use platforms that violate your rights. No need to cut anyone off for now, but something to keep in mind for the future.

herbst4• 1 year ago

Meta owns your friendships?

yonatan8070• 1 year ago

I actually attempted to create a Facebook account recently to be able to access Facebook Marketplace. During sign-up, I was asked to upload a video selfie of myself to confirm I'm a real person.

Never did a 180 so fast in my life.

I guess I simply won't communicate with anyone selling anything there, even if it's the best deal possible or not available anywhere else

herbst4• 1 year ago

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

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

RamblingCTO• 1 year ago

and have nothing to do with them. It’s not hard to do.

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

ch_fr2• 1 year ago

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).

ch_fr2• 1 year ago

Probably would have been a more fitting comment for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494

gorjusborg• 1 year ago

As commercial AI kills its food source (the internet) we'll see corporations doing desperate things to keep feeding it.

pyman2• 1 year ago

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.

gambiting4• 1 year ago

I was going to say Instagram is much worse in terms of keeping you hooked but then I remembered who owns it.

pyman2• 1 year ago

Facebook is way worse than Instagram.

I've never, ever seen an algorithm as evil and anti-social as the one Facebook's programmers created. At one point, it was showing my family and friends a comment my cousin had made about a politician, and they started getting into heated arguments with him. And this kept happening again and again. It honestly felt like the algorithm was trying to polarise entire families and friend groups, driving engagement by surfacing exactly the things people disagreed with or didn't want to hear. During the pandemic the algorithm drove everyone insane.

At one point, I compared Facebook to a virus. It hijacked conversations, infected relationships, misled people, and distorted their perceptions of others.

willsmith72• 1 year ago

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

fredley• 1 year ago

The best time to delete Facebook was many years ago. The second best time is now.

gambiting4• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, many of the old forums for various non-IT-related hobbies have disappeared and moved over to facebook groups and there is no alternative as such. Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers, there are some fantastic communities, but if you are into cars or mountain biking or watches or fellwalking/hiking etc......you really don't have any alternative to facebook. I'm trying to never just passively browse the main feed because it very quickly turns into pure trash, but there are communities there that are worth participating there and which don't really have any other online space.

nikolayasdf123• 1 year ago

deleted it in 2018. happy ever since. did not regret for a moment

reaperducer2• 1 year ago

I got locked out of Facebook right about that time. Looking back at the last eight years, I can say without qualification that it did wonders for my personality, my mental health, and the way I interact with other people.

A couple of times I've looked back at my messages and photos from the annual data downloads I did back then. I can't believe how angry I was, and that I would think it was O.K. to talk that way to perfect strangers.

Then I dig a little deeper, and see that the early messages were fine. I was a nice to strangers. But as my Facebook use continued, the tone and unpleasantness of the messages becomes palpable. It's like watching a malignant Facebook disease spreading in my own brain. Kind of horrifying now that I put it into words.

Glad I'm Facebook-free today, and enjoying life almost as much as someone in an Apple commercial.

yieldcrv• 1 year ago

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

mslansn2• 1 year ago

All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost.

reaperducer2• 1 year ago

All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost.

This is false; and considering the hundreds of thousands of companies that people encounter every day that do not operate with your singular mindset, I can only assume the comment was not made in good faith.

unfolding• 1 year ago

they don't want your money - they want your attention

MOARDONGZPLZ• 1 year ago

Facebook is the worst. I haven’t had the app itself in a decade, but use the mobile version in a mobile browser to catch up on friends’ posts. I hope they go through with Zuckerberg’s idea of removing all connections, at which point the lift to reconnect is too great and I will actually delete my account (and I was one of the first FB users when they expanded to my school just after Harvard).

polishdude20• 1 year ago

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.

repeekad• 1 year ago

I don’t think it’s self congratulatory to get an “I was right” in about an article where meta is covertly asking to train their AI models on your entire private camera roll

add-sub-mul-div2• 1 year ago

You're still enabling them in a way that others who have deleted their accounts are not. You're contributing to the network effect problem.

bongodongobob• 1 year ago

Cool. I gamble, use tobacco, alcohol and other drugs and occasionally use FB from time to time. I enjoy things.

hoistbypetard2• 1 year ago

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.

whoisyc3• 1 year ago

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.

noman-land• 1 year ago

Millions of thematic groups have existed for many hundreds of years and they did not need Facebook to organize. People are experiencing inertia and are too lazy or naive to help themselves. And, yes, some are truly addicted.

This inertia and naivete is harmful and dangerous to everyone involved. It's like if they met in a sketchy part of town or were using tools unsafely to the point where they could injure someone. Going along with that, and especially without saying anything, or trying to change the situation makes you complicit.

backendEngineer2• 1 year ago

just deleted that trash in 2025, fuck Zuck

ATechGuy• 1 year ago

Some of the best decisions I made ever: 1. Deleted FB in 2012 :) 2. Didn't create insta or whatsapp account 3. Never applied to meta jobs

29athrowaway• 1 year ago

The AR glasses are also about the same... just get a lot of pictures so they can feed their AI.

geor9e• 1 year ago

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

sciencerobot• 1 year ago

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

labrador• 1 year ago

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.

bgwalter• 1 year ago

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?

Finnucane• 1 year ago

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.

puttycat2• 1 year ago

Some time ago I asked on HN "will you go work for Meta?" [1].

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

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

huhkerrf3• 1 year ago

I mean, the very first two replies on your link are "yes" and the third is "maybe."

Doesn't seem very unanimous to me.

(My comment makes less sense now. OP had originally said the replies were unanimously negative, but has since edited the comment to remove that.)

Anon1096• 1 year ago

So you failed their interview and then proceeded to post a whole thread to get validation that Meta's not a good company to work for? And you're still posting about it a year later? Talk about sour grapes.

puttycat2• 1 year ago

Thanks for the good vibes. Did it occur to you that the original question might have been posted before the rejection?

charcircuit• 1 year ago

Who would want to have AI be applied after you share the photos? Most people would want to check what the photos actually look like before publishing them. The appeal of this feature is to be able to see the suggestions immediately. The feature is opt in and you don't have to grant permission to your camera roll if you don't want to.

demarq2• 1 year ago

Question to the Meta engineers on here, do you ever speak out about this internally?

StochasticLi• 1 year ago

No. I worked at Meta, and these are mostly mid-skilled engineers who want to make money while working a few hours a week and pretending to work the rest. They would never attract top talent because top engineers can earn 10 times their salary on their own without leaving the terminal nowadays. Even if they offered $10M/year, I feel these kinds of people can't be bought.

It's just a job. You will get fired if you question people above you.

demarq2• 1 year ago

That’s sad.

barbazoo• 1 year ago

We’re on here are privileged. I feel bad for the billions of people that aren’t aware of or unable to see how truly terrible that organization is for societies and the planet.

harvey9• 1 year ago

I don't think this privilege counts for much since we all live in the same societies, and even among hn users there are few people with meaningful influence over Meta.

Anthony-G• 1 year ago

Similar to how Cassandra’s gift of prophecy was actually a curse because she was unable to use her foresight to avoid or mitigate the predicted misfortunes and tragedies.

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

api• 1 year ago

Not your computer, data not encrypted with keys you control, not your data.

phendrenad23• 1 year ago

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.

huhkerrf3• 1 year ago

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?

krapp3• 1 year ago

Alternatives such as the Fediverse are doing just fine, despite HN's categorical rejection of anything that doesn't match the big corporate platforms in scale and revenue as "viable."

phendrenad23• 1 year ago

By "technical user" I don't mean just programmers, I mean people who have an above-average knowledge of computers. There are orders of magnitude more of these people than there are programmers, and they are completely unidentifiable from the outside. One might be the drummer in a local band, another is a dump truck driver, another works at a grocery store. Their above-average knowledge of computers hasn't helped them in life, but it does make them the go-to person to help their relatives get "online" or "fix their smartphone". And their friends and relatives look up to them for advice on what social media to use. Trust me, I was there.

There have been dozens upon dozens over the years

Such as? I think you'll find that all of them were created back when Facebook wasn't completely evil (and thus couldn't even get the backing of "technical" people), or they were created with some congenital flaw that made them completely unattractive to the average person. You have to have a Steve Jobs level of eye for detail with this stuff, and sadly most people cloning Twitter in a weekend are just doing it for fun.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

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.

exabrial• 1 year ago

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.

anonymars• 1 year ago

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!

windex2• 1 year ago

I mentioned this on another thread. I tried my best to avoid FB, but then they acquire products like WhatsApp to then hoover up personal data again. This shouldn't be allowed. PII and personal data should be bound to the original terms on which the product launched.

Zuck should find a quiet part of the internet or the metaverse to curl up and fade away. The guy just doesn't have any redeeming qualities.

ProllyInfamous2• 1 year ago

My local DNS rules (PiHole) block all Google & Facebook products.

It's actually kind of fun seeking/using less-global alternatives, even if just for the different perspectives.

e.g. Bing maps is my favorite way to explore cities (yes, I know they're a MSFT product, their code/login doesn't permeate across my internets).

righthand2• 1 year ago

Why MS Bing maps? The UI is nice or are there extra features that make it great for exploration? And by exploration do you mean physical or digital?

akomtu• 1 year ago

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.

cpersona• 1 year ago

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.

imartin2k• 1 year ago

The world would be a better place without this shitty company.

backendEngineer2• 1 year ago

fuck Meta

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

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