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.
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
Maybe relationships are more important to GP than attitude. I know what GP means and I was even recently asked to join a Messenger group of friends. I declined but only because I have other comm channels and I dropped FB and Messenger years 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).
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.
Yes the death of forums is one of the huge hidden costs and another great reason to hate fb.
Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility.
We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.
Limiting the spread of the information is a feature, not a bug. You don’t want others to take your 2009 forum post out of context and ridicule you in front of a million angry YouTube viewers.
Unfortunately we're facing a cultural issue here as well - people moved on from Facebook to Discord or private WhatsApp groups, and young would-be pirates see it as normal and good.
I disagree about the goodness of discord (and facebook) compared to old style forums or (better yet) mailing lists with archives.
Searching the forum archives is much worse with facebook, slack or discord than it ever was with even the jankiest phpbb forum or mailman list. Hell, before they grew it up, Yahoo! groups were better from that perspective. And a big part of what made forums for either tech or non-tech hobbies so nice was the ability to search and reference prior discussions.
I was actually hopeful that "login with facebook" and "login with discord" would bring those more search-friendly alternatives back a little bit, but so far I haven't seen it.
On forums you can search by username, by topic alone, inside of a subforum, or by text inside of a thread. That level of search granularity is by design so you aren't querying the entire database unnecessarily.
As a result it's far better than "omnisearch" options on social media that only sometimes surfaces what you were looking for.
This is a larger cultural issue. The general population finally got used to being on the Internet, and the Internet adapted to serve its needs and modes of thinking - which are predominantly social. Objective reality, information and access to it is of secondary importance (if even that) - what matters is socializing with friends and having experiences.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp and Discord are the true social media - they work much like real-life interactions. So to join a topical group, or even know it exists, you literally have to know the right people. Don't have friends who are into something? Don't have friends? Tough luck. It's high school again, but the Internet is owned by jocks now.
--
Edited to add:
The shift from e-mail and mailing lists to bulletin boards to link sites with threaded discussions (like HN, or Reddit), to Facebook and finally to Discord and WhatsApp, tells the story of objective reality and information becoming less important to the Internet as more people are on it.
To put it bluntly: the old tools forced the more social people to engage in exchange of actual information. Electronic mail, posts, comments were all forms promoting information hygiene. Even the shitposts were publications which could be referred back to in the future. It all felt like writing something, so people cared, even if only a little bit. Now, the new tools are catering to what the more social/extrovert population really wants: endless chit chat. Talking, talking, talking, talking. Everything ephemeral, access managed by interpersonal relations, navigating it requires engaging in the social games.
Objectivity? Verifiability? Accuracy? Truth? They don't matter much, because outside of crisis situations, they don't matter to most people. That the Internet was briefly oriented around information and knowledge, was a temporary aberration, mostly thanks to it being built by nerds for nerds. But now the whole of society is here, and the Internet finally became social.
I don't know how you can confidently say so - I would have missed out on so many bike rides and car meets and so many things I learnt by being in the right communities by not being on Facebook, because they just aren't posted anywhere else.
We can always find words to justify being a follower instead of a leader. We shouldn't. Being in the space that the Eternal September has chosen to congregate to have access to the most hikers isn't a hard necessity.
>>We can always find words to justify being a follower instead of a leader
I'm not sure what you mean by that in this context. Just like I have to be part of my local "nerdy" store to play MtG every Friday, I kinda have to be part of local MTB groups to know when they are riding. I could like you say, be a leader and organise my own rides I suppose? Is that what you mean? If so, then I'm sure you can see limitations to this approach.
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 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.
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.
Yeah facebook is definitely worse, though it's kind of like twitter: any action can become an item in other people's timelines.
instagram is still bad now that they push more ads and content from people you don't follow onto you, but at least it's only things that are explicitly posted, and it's easier to maintain multiple profiles with different feeds
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.
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?
I think the TechCrunch headline is slightly more accurate than the Verge headline, which is "Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos".
In both cases they imply training models is happening when that's not been confirmed.
(Facebook could help here by answering press inquiries about it, which they apparently have not done.)
Yeah, I read the title of the other one and thought it was just about pictures you sent through Messenger or put in private on Facebook, so I wasn't too bothered (because I assumed they'd do this already), but actively reading your camera roll is next level.
> but actively reading your camera roll is next level.
Now that it was established that they wrote malware to bypass tracking protections, nothing surprises me. Apps written by Meta are malware, as far as I'm concerned.
While I agree the articles are click bait since this as not been confirmed, it's not far fetched to assume that a giant corporation with a terrible track record and a big legal department worded their TOS like this because they intend to use that capability.
Given Facebook is about as voracious an actor of surveillance as has ever existed, their track record of respecting few red lines until they have been caught crossing them egregiously, and the bright spotlight Zuckerberg is currently shining on their AI ambitions, it defies reality to imagine them forgoing any data they can get there hands on.
You just know there is a dashboard that summarizes all potential data sources, and engineers wake up with the shakes and sweats, after dreaming that Zuck was standing behind them, with furrowed brow, and pointing to a stat that shows 2% of someone’s most private information still hasn’t been plundered.
Ok, a little hyperbolic. But he & Meta are relentless.
Ok, good info. So GP means to evoke the type of information shearing garbage some of us are wise enough to expect from unaligned and underspecified human-emulating but self-serving autonomous digital systems, and not comment on their sincere affection for information loss in clickbait titles that. . .
That's true, and people should learn to recognize it. But in general, sarcasm is easily misunderstood in pure text. You read it with a tone in your head, but they can't hear it.
Also, it's best to avoid it a site like this with many non-native English speakers. It's an extra layer of difficulty.
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 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.
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?
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."
You have to accept that attitude exists here because HN is a forum hosted by a VC firm. The reality is that the fediverse doesn't really have a huge economic impact and the people who swim around the capitalism waters think that stinks. Even though the fediverse by default is perfectly fine this way.
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.
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.
> 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 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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Maybe relationships are more important to GP than attitude. I know what GP means and I was even recently asked to join a Messenger group of friends. I declined but only because I have other comm channels and I dropped FB and Messenger years 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).
The best time to delete Facebook was many years ago. The second best time is now.
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.
Yes the death of forums is one of the huge hidden costs and another great reason to hate fb.
Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility.
We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.
Limiting the spread of the information is a feature, not a bug. You don’t want others to take your 2009 forum post out of context and ridicule you in front of a million angry YouTube viewers.
On a forum, "you" is an anonymous username, so ridicule is meaningless. It doesn't follow you into the real world.
Unfortunately we're facing a cultural issue here as well - people moved on from Facebook to Discord or private WhatsApp groups, and young would-be pirates see it as normal and good.
I disagree about the goodness of discord (and facebook) compared to old style forums or (better yet) mailing lists with archives.
Searching the forum archives is much worse with facebook, slack or discord than it ever was with even the jankiest phpbb forum or mailman list. Hell, before they grew it up, Yahoo! groups were better from that perspective. And a big part of what made forums for either tech or non-tech hobbies so nice was the ability to search and reference prior discussions.
I was actually hopeful that "login with facebook" and "login with discord" would bring those more search-friendly alternatives back a little bit, but so far I haven't seen it.
On forums you can search by username, by topic alone, inside of a subforum, or by text inside of a thread. That level of search granularity is by design so you aren't querying the entire database unnecessarily.
As a result it's far better than "omnisearch" options on social media that only sometimes surfaces what you were looking for.
> Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers
No, even that is terrible compared to forums – it doesn't get indexed by search engines!
Which, unfortunately, is the point.
This is a larger cultural issue. The general population finally got used to being on the Internet, and the Internet adapted to serve its needs and modes of thinking - which are predominantly social. Objective reality, information and access to it is of secondary importance (if even that) - what matters is socializing with friends and having experiences.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp and Discord are the true social media - they work much like real-life interactions. So to join a topical group, or even know it exists, you literally have to know the right people. Don't have friends who are into something? Don't have friends? Tough luck. It's high school again, but the Internet is owned by jocks now.
--
Edited to add:
The shift from e-mail and mailing lists to bulletin boards to link sites with threaded discussions (like HN, or Reddit), to Facebook and finally to Discord and WhatsApp, tells the story of objective reality and information becoming less important to the Internet as more people are on it.
To put it bluntly: the old tools forced the more social people to engage in exchange of actual information. Electronic mail, posts, comments were all forms promoting information hygiene. Even the shitposts were publications which could be referred back to in the future. It all felt like writing something, so people cared, even if only a little bit. Now, the new tools are catering to what the more social/extrovert population really wants: endless chit chat. Talking, talking, talking, talking. Everything ephemeral, access managed by interpersonal relations, navigating it requires engaging in the social games.
Objectivity? Verifiability? Accuracy? Truth? They don't matter much, because outside of crisis situations, they don't matter to most people. That the Internet was briefly oriented around information and knowledge, was a temporary aberration, mostly thanks to it being built by nerds for nerds. But now the whole of society is here, and the Internet finally became social.
Yes, this makes me sad how so many hobby groups are trapped within FB. It’s usually hobbies with an older demographic.
It's worth it to miss out on that information to delete your account. I don't have one and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything
I don't know how you can confidently say so - I would have missed out on so many bike rides and car meets and so many things I learnt by being in the right communities by not being on Facebook, because they just aren't posted anywhere else.
We can always find words to justify being a follower instead of a leader. We shouldn't. Being in the space that the Eternal September has chosen to congregate to have access to the most hikers isn't a hard necessity.
>>We can always find words to justify being a follower instead of a leader
I'm not sure what you mean by that in this context. Just like I have to be part of my local "nerdy" store to play MtG every Friday, I kinda have to be part of local MTB groups to know when they are riding. I could like you say, be a leader and organise my own rides I suppose? Is that what you mean? If so, then I'm sure you can see limitations to this approach.
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.
deleted it in 2018. happy ever since. did not regret for a moment
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.
I was going to say Instagram is much worse in terms of keeping you hooked but then I remembered who owns it.
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.
Yeah facebook is definitely worse, though it's kind of like twitter: any action can become an item in other people's timelines.
instagram is still bad now that they push more ads and content from people you don't follow onto you, but at least it's only things that are explicitly posted, and it's easier to maintain multiple profiles with different feeds
Its just "giving users more of what they want", said the owner of Marks Meats. I dont think a take on technology and society could be more naive.
All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost.
they don't want your money - they want your attention
They want your attention because it makes them money. It’s not attention for attention’s sake.
its not soley for money and thats not why attention is important and matters for a large platform
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.
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
Cool. I gamble, use tobacco, alcohol and other drugs and occasionally use FB from time to time. I enjoy things.
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?
There's a big active thread about this here already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44401406
I think the TechCrunch headline is slightly more accurate than the Verge headline, which is "Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos".
In both cases they imply training models is happening when that's not been confirmed.
(Facebook could help here by answering press inquiries about it, which they apparently have not done.)
> In both cases they imply training models is happening when that's not been confirmed.
It is safest to assume that your photos are being used for training.
Yeah, I read the title of the other one and thought it was just about pictures you sent through Messenger or put in private on Facebook, so I wasn't too bothered (because I assumed they'd do this already), but actively reading your camera roll is next level.
> but actively reading your camera roll is next level.
Now that it was established that they wrote malware to bypass tracking protections, nothing surprises me. Apps written by Meta are malware, as far as I'm concerned.
While I agree the articles are click bait since this as not been confirmed, it's not far fetched to assume that a giant corporation with a terrible track record and a big legal department worded their TOS like this because they intend to use that capability.
Exactly.
Given Facebook is about as voracious an actor of surveillance as has ever existed, their track record of respecting few red lines until they have been caught crossing them egregiously, and the bright spotlight Zuckerberg is currently shining on their AI ambitions, it defies reality to imagine them forgoing any data they can get there hands on.
You just know there is a dashboard that summarizes all potential data sources, and engineers wake up with the shakes and sweats, after dreaming that Zuck was standing behind them, with furrowed brow, and pointing to a stat that shows 2% of someone’s most private information still hasn’t been plundered.
Ok, a little hyperbolic. But he & Meta are relentless.
I like how the headline is truncated. I was thinking of 'seen' or 'taken' but turns out it ended with 'shared'.
Could be more fun options:
Soon with their AI, it'll be "photos you haven't yet taken"
What do you like about it?
How is it the photos are shared when they’re not shared?
Perhaps you're not aware, but starting a sentence about something you don't like with "I like how..." is basically a form of sarcasm.
Ok, good info. So GP means to evoke the type of information shearing garbage some of us are wise enough to expect from unaligned and underspecified human-emulating but self-serving autonomous digital systems, and not comment on their sincere affection for information loss in clickbait titles that. . .
That's true, and people should learn to recognize it. But in general, sarcasm is easily misunderstood in pure text. You read it with a tone in your head, but they can't hear it.
Also, it's best to avoid it a site like this with many non-native English speakers. It's an extra layer of difficulty.
In this case it might not have been sarcasm. The headline cut in just the right place to let you fill in the blank for your own amusement.
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.)
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).
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?
Question to the Meta engineers on here, do you ever speak out about this internally?
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?
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."
My impression about Fedi is that it’s much bigger than most people think it is, but those who are in it don’t like talking about it a lot.
You have to accept that attitude exists here because HN is a forum hosted by a VC firm. The reality is that the fediverse doesn't really have a huge economic impact and the people who swim around the capitalism waters think that stinks. Even though the fediverse by default is perfectly fine this way.
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.
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
> 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 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
[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44401406
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.
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!
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.
The AR glasses are also about the same... just get a lot of pictures so they can feed their AI.
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