[HN Gopher] Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you have...
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Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven't yet shared
Author : pier25
Score : 470 points
Date : 2025-06-28 00:08 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| goku12 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| which what, 0.5% of users will know and be able to do?
| esseph wrote:
| That number is way way way way way too high
| goku12 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Bettet make it a script or ansible playbook from the start
| since you will need to reapply it after system updates.
| tjpnz wrote:
| I don't want their shit on my phone at all. Can I remove it
| entirely?
| samtheprogram wrote:
| With root.
| tjpnz wrote:
| So the ADB method alone isn't sufficient?
| herbst wrote:
| Buy a phone that doesn't sell your soul to the highest
| bidder. Or install an alternative OS.
|
| You don't buy a bike and complain about the missing roof
|
| Edit:// on my last Xiaomi I could remove anything with ADB,
| even definitely necessary apps, without root, do try it.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| 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 ...
| goku12 wrote:
| 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.
| fsflover wrote:
| > 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.
| herbst wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| > i give it a year or less.
|
| Yesterday.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2025/06/26/jd-vance-
| me...
| blub wrote:
| According to the thread on /r/europe that person smoked weed
| and lied about it on their immigration form.
| hedora wrote:
| So, they engaged in behavior that's legal at Facebook HQ?
|
| In other news, FB has been using whatsapp metadata to
| coordinate genocide campaigns in Gaza. What'd all those
| dead civilians (including infants) do, again?
|
| Presumably they signed a TOS, so it's OK.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| I would love a source about the immigration form. That
| would at least make more sense. Weed is legal in half of
| the US. As a citizen, I find the story troubling.
|
| The tweets just saying "drug use" and then you hear it's
| weed is ridiculous. Why wouldn't they just state that they
| lied on their immigration form about drug use?
| xoxxala wrote:
| BBC has a video on the story. DHS says it was drug use
| not the meme.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c5y2l9nn7y1o
| mslansn wrote:
| Of course the story was fabricated, but we live in a
| post-truth world. The mistake was believing the story
| from the beginning; the story was obvious nonsense.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Weed is illegal everywhere in the US. The federal
| government has a policy of, in most cases, not bothering
| to enforce the law in states that have stopped also
| making it illegal under their own separate legal codes.
| However that doesn't mean it's actually legal because
| federal law applies everywhere.
| Animats wrote:
| It's not a question on the Customs and Border Protection
| form for US visitors.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2024-07/cbp_for
| m_605...
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| If you have so much trouble government I don't think deleting
| facebook will change anything.
| fwn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://archive.is/3lllh
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| 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.
| sebmellen wrote:
| Since Facebook is pulling from the camera roll, not posting is
| not an adequate defense.
| zhivota wrote:
| 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.
| latentsea wrote:
| On Android you can just make a separate user profile for it
| and do that I suppose.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Caught in what tho?
| danieldk wrote:
| _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._
|
| GrapheneOS comes pretty close to that I think? You can put
| such apps in a separate profile and cut off a lot of
| permissions. You can also scope contacts, storage, etc.
| dangus wrote:
| Recent iOS versions have granular controls over library
| access to prevent this.
| bnjms wrote:
| It isn't nice to use though. You select your picture then
| when you need to add more you've got to go back into the
| settings for that app and select the picture. Then add the
| picture you selected.
|
| I'm grateful though. We would have called meta malware back
| when.
| dangus wrote:
| It's not that clunky anymore. You can limit access to the
| library to pick media from and it'll give you the full
| library with this message:
|
| Limited Access to Your Library
|
| "App" can only access the items that you select. The app
| can add to your library even if no items are selected.
| what wrote:
| The built in camera roll widget lets you edit what
| pictures are allowed without going to settings. Maybe
| it's a new change or the apps you use have a custom photo
| picker, I dunno.
| bnjms wrote:
| Thanks. It must be improved since I last used it. I only
| need it very rarely and mostly block Meta and Snapchat.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I try to use web versions of everything (fb, insta, x).
| If it's shitty enough I'll use it less.
|
| I.e. messenger.com is possible to use if you request
| desktop version, change font size and deal with all sort
| of zoom issues. Of course fb doesn't support actual calls
| or notifications just because, so I don't use it.
|
| Instagram is even sneakier - you can't post stories via
| mobile to "close friends", post videos or view them from
| instant messages.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| There's some irony in the fact that the company which
| spawned React has also produced some of the world's least
| usable React apps.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I doubt this is accidental. It's purely done to push you
| to install apps.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| It must be. They're unusable even on a flagship handset.
|
| This UX would get developers and product managers fired
| at any of the mid-tier tech companies at which I've
| worked, but apparently not at Meta.
| sneak wrote:
| The way you prevent this is by deleting your facebook
| account and uninstalling the app.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Most people don't know that hidden Facebook services even
| come preinstalled on most Android phones and persist even
| when the main app is deleted :(
|
| And on Android they're not even the worst privacy player
| which is Google of course
| danieldk wrote:
| Yeah, first thing to do on an Android phone is to use adb
| or something like the universal debloater to uninstall
| (besides the Facebook app) crap like:
| com.facebook.system, com.facebook.appmanager, and
| com.facebook.services.
|
| Description of the latter from the uad list:
| Facebook Services is a tool that lets you manage
| different Facebook services automatically using your
| Android device. In particular, the tool focuses on
| searching for nearby shops and establishments based on
| your interests.
|
| Why is this even always running on a pristine Samsung,
| etc. phone? Creepy.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > Why is this even always running on a pristine Samsung,
| etc. phone? Creepy.
|
| Samsung has nothing against creepy, their own TVs are
| full of spyware too. At least here it can be removed.
|
| And they do care about money which is the reason they do
| it.
| jwr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| chii wrote:
| i deleted my facebook account over 15 years ago, and people
| at the time thought i was weird for doing so. I would feel
| vindicated today, except i dont, because neither my friends
| nor coworkers have followed, nor want to despite all
| evidence to the contrary!
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| 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.
| fn-mote wrote:
| I hope you explained your feelings to an administrator. In
| the US, they would be completely clueless.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| Maybe I should have. There were more red flags in the
| contract draft. Like if I don't bring her to the lessons,
| I get no money back, but if they fail to do the lesson at
| all, they just keep the money and can reschedule. I have
| no clue why anyone signs this. I mean, I know, people
| don't care.
| danieldk wrote:
| _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.
| bojan wrote:
| Our (NL) elementary school places pictures of the fun
| activities they do with kids on Instagram, but they blur
| children's faces, resulting in the photos straight out of
| the uncanny valley.
|
| I do wonder also if the blur effect they use is one of
| those that can easily be reversed. I need to check that one
| of these days.
| squigz wrote:
| > Our (NL) elementary school places pictures of the fun
| activities they do with kids on Instagram, but they blur
| children's faces, resulting in the photos straight out of
| the uncanny valley.
|
| Honestly what's the point at this point? Are parents not
| going to send their children to that school because they
| didn't see pictures of blurry-faced children having fun
| on the Internet, or is this just teachers wanting to post
| about their students?
| jwr wrote:
| It's a strange idea that schools need to do "marketing"
| and "promotion".
| jwr wrote:
| I am usually the only parent that doesn't want to sign the
| school media release form. It's a long way...
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| 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.
| chii wrote:
| > 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!
| jaza wrote:
| No, I'm pretty sure they're stealing souls. That or
| kidneys.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| As is the wont of industrial society, we had to meticulously
| design and build our demons.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Photography stealing someone's soul is easy to discount as
| an obvious misconception, but if you think of "soul" as a
| shortcut metaphor for some difficult to describe
| sociopsychological phenomena then there is some food for
| thought in it.
|
| First, for most of us in daily life, once you know you are
| being photographed you exit any context you were in and
| enter the new "I am being photographed" context. In some
| important way, you are stolen from the world around you for
| a period of time. Your body is still present, but you might
| be thinking about how this all would look at any later
| time. This does not apply when photography is specifically
| arranged by you (common in analog era), or if you are
| unaware of being a subject photographed (but there may be
| other concerns about that[0]).
|
| Second, a photo/likeness of you is a proxy allowing other
| people to relate to you. Keeping in mind that we only ever
| relate to images/models that we build of each other in our
| minds (we have no "direct access" to other people), in this
| case a photo is a shallow (there is little other
| information than appearance) but weirdly high fidelity (for
| sighted people) model of you. This is not an issue if the
| photo is kept just by people you know (common in analog
| era) or after you are dead, but otherwise if published[1]
| it means people can somehow relate to "you" without the
| actual-you knowing or having met them. Some people may feel
| some sort of satisfaction from this, others it can make
| uncomfortable.
|
| Third, as someone noted, soul could map to another nebulous
| concept: identity. It could range from problematic cases
| (someone pretending to be you to resell work you made) to
| twisted but benign (stories about people making fake
| profiles pretending to be successful SV employees come to
| mind).
|
| [0] If you are secretly photographed[2], this can happen
| for a number of reasons. Some may imply a missing
| interaction (if that photographer could not photograph you,
| maybe they would talk to you instead). Some may be done
| with intent of sharing your photo in unknown context where
| again people may relate to you in specific ways that can be
| unpleasant (e.g., mockery).
|
| [1] Now when generative models start to be trained on what
| we thought is our private photos, the idea of "published"
| is blurred.
|
| [2] In most cases here "photo" can be swapped with "video".
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > First, for most of us in daily life, once you know you
| are being photographed you exit any context you were in
| and enter the new "I am being photographed" context. In
| some important way, you are stolen from the world around
| you for a period of time. Your body is still present, but
| you might be thinking about how this all would look at
| any later time. This does not apply when photography is
| specifically arranged by you (common in analog era), or
| if you are unaware of being a subject photographed (but
| there may be other concerns about that[0]).
|
| True, this is something that bothers me a lot too. But
| especially GenZ has a problem with that (surprising
| because they grew up with ubiquitous photography) and I
| see more and more parties that tape off phone cams. They
| are indeed wonderful.
|
| I don't agree this doesn't apply when it is arranged
| though. For me that has always been awkward.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| 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.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They are simply addicted to likes and photos of your children
| can hook them up easily.
| jamesponddotco wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Time to invest in facial plastic surgery
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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?
| sebmellen wrote:
| I'm sure they use a provider like Hive to scan all the photos
| before processing them.
| latentsea wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's simple, they don't care.
| tjpnz wrote:
| I doubt anyone who works there would care.
| bregma wrote:
| 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.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Don't worry, I upload Zuck's photos to facebook for him.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Mark's user id is 4
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Lame, it already jumped the shark by then
| coef2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is a real Rip Van Winkle style take (posted with gentle
| humor)
| msgodel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Well they had to grow the userbase before they could abuse
| it :)
| prisenco wrote:
| The early, organic days of social networking are always
| fun. They never would have pulled in billions of users if
| they started off how they are now.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Couldn't have said it better.
|
| Nothing is a social network anymore.
|
| Everything is a content-consumer a platform now.
|
| People just want to scroll and scroll
| kbrkbr wrote:
| People want to scroll and scroll, because social media
| make them miserable [1, 2, 3]
|
| Perfect storm.
|
| [1] https://time.com/4882372/social-media-facebook-
| instagram-unh... [2]
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-
| media-... [3]
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/navigating-the-
| maze/...
| 7952 wrote:
| My hunch is that instant messaging is slowly taking over
| that space. If you actually want to connect with people
| you can without needing much of a platform.
| smeej wrote:
| There was an even briefer moment where there was no such
| thing as status updates. You didn't have a "wall." The
| point wasn't to post about your own life. You could go
| leave public messages on other people's profiles. And you
| could poke them. And that was about it.
|
| I remember complaining like hell when the wall came out,
| that it was the beginning of the end. But this was before
| publicly recording your own thoughts somewhere everyone
| could see was commonplace, so I did it by messaging my
| friends on AIM.
|
| And then when the Feed came out? It was received as creepy
| and stalkerish. And there are now (young) _adults_ born in
| the time since who can 't even fathom a world without
| ubiquitous feeds in your pocket.
|
| Call me nostalgic, but we were saner then.
| figassis wrote:
| Oh wow, I'd even forgotten about pokes. Thanks for that
| trip down memory lane.
| smeej wrote:
| I made the mistake of sending a Gen Z (adult) friend a
| poking finger emoji to try to remind him about something.
|
| It wasn't the first time I've had a generational digital
| (ha) communication failure, but it was the first time
| I've had one because _I 'm_ old and out of touch with
| what things mean these days!
| alexthehurst wrote:
| Still a supported feature! You can find it if you dig
| around in the menus long enough.
| fivestones wrote:
| Unless I'm remembering wrong, posting a public message on
| someone else's profile _was_ posting on their wall. Or
| was it called something else before it was somebody's
| wall?
| smeej wrote:
| It didn't have a name. It wasn't really a "feature." You
| just went and posted on their "page" I guess I would call
| it.
|
| The change to being able to post things on your _own_
| page and expecting other people to come to your page and
| read them (because, again, no Feed) wasn 't received well
| at first.
|
| Keep in mind, smartphones didn't exist yet, and the first
| ones didn't have selfie cameras even once they did. And
| the cameras on flip phones were mostly garbage, so if you
| wanted to show a picture, you had to bring a camera with
| you, plug it in, and upload it. So at first the Wall
| basically replaced AIM away messages so you could tell
| your friends which library you were going to go study in
| and how long. And this didn't seem problematic, because
| you were probably only friends with people in your school
| (it was only open to university students, and not many
| schools at first), and nobody was mining your data,
| because there were no business or entity pages.
|
| Simpler, simpler days.
| dcrazy wrote:
| I joined Thefacebook in 2005. The place on your page
| where posts from other people appeared was called the
| "wall" then.
| smeej wrote:
| Yeah, that's about when it changed. The lack of a wall
| was a very early situation. I joined in 2004, back when
| it was only open to Ivy League and Boston-area schools.
| djmips wrote:
| It was still acceptable to write on someone else's wall
| when they came to be called that. You can still do that
| now I think but it's quite uncommon and how it works is
| now complicated but settings.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| The wall was released maybe 6 months after Facebook
| launched. I think it was still called "The Facebook" at
| the time.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| They were stealing your contacts from wherever they could
| get them. There was never a time when they didn't abuse
| their users.
| safety1st wrote:
| I mean let's be clear on the history and not romanticize
| anything, Zuck created Facebook pretty much so he could spy
| on college girls. He denies this of course, but it all
| started with his Facemash site for ranking the girls, and
| then we get to the early Facebook era and there's his quote
| about the "4,000 dumbfucks trusting him with their photos"
| etc.
|
| There is no benevolent original version of FB. It was a toy
| made by a college nerd who wanted to siphon data about
| chicks. It was more user friendly back then because he
| didn't have a monopoly yet. Now it has expanded to
| siphoning data from the entire human race and because
| they're powerful they can be bigger bullies about it. Zuck
| has kind of indirectly apologized for being a creeper
| during his college years. But the behavior of his company
| hasn't changed.
| distances wrote:
| Very true! I was annoyed by the loss of the "is" pattern
| and basically stopped using Facebook when the chronological
| feed was removed.
| labster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They didn't even have algorithmic feeds from beginning, so
| no.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| There was a sweet spot right after the first big redesign
| and before the wall feed changed where things felt good. I
| was in high school still too, and lived in another state
| during the summer, so even if I didn't use it A LOT, it
| still really helped me keep up with some of my friends.
| Interestingly though, my best friends basically never
| posted anything.
| arizen wrote:
| 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.
| blibble wrote:
| I don't think it's AI
|
| the problem with meta is three fold:
|
| 1. zuckerberg is completely misaligned
|
| 2. facebook has hundreds of billions dollars of resources
|
| 3. zuckerberg has total control of facebook
|
| normally a company with this level of resources would not
| be under the total control of a single individual
|
| other shareholders would have pushed back on the obviously
| bad ideas of "metaverse" and "training AI on private photos
| of children"
|
| but with facebook: misaligned zuckerberg is in total
| control, and no-one can stop him
|
| so the rest of the world has to suffer whatever this amoral
| asshole wants to inflict upon them this month
|
| now add AI into this, and zuckerberg can inflict even more
| damage onto society with fewer and fewer people to get in
| his way
|
| (the same applies to Google and Musk's empire too)
| IshKebab wrote:
| What delusional nonsense. What AI was Facebook using in 2005?
| npalli wrote:
| So Feb 4, 2004 (founding) to September 6, 2006 (newsfeed). LOL.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Thank you Anand - for the encouragement and joining the
| waitlist!
|
| It means really a lot to us.
|
| We are working on a better name and the site!
|
| I'll send you the welcome email manually soon!
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| new users will face the empty feed problem since by design
| one can't find anyone without their code.
|
| No "People you may know" or "select at least N interests or
| follow N accounts to continue".
|
| I think early adopters will invite their friends to join
| and that is the only way.
|
| Got any suggestions?
| vishalontheline wrote:
| Show 3 walls side by side: updates by friends,
| interactions by direct connections on shares by friends
| of friends, and public stories by those nearby
| (geographically). The latter could also turn into a way
| for local businesses to promote themselves. Keep the 3 in
| separate lanes in order to let the user decide how much
| they want to doom scroll.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughts.
|
| But we are not interested turning into Facebook. You will
| only see posts of your friends and nothing more.
|
| I was spending 8+ hours a day doom scrolling which led to
| this idea. I just want to see what my friends want me to
| see and that's it.
| vishalontheline wrote:
| Sure thing. Oh - maybe let people follow non-friends that
| they want to see public updates from, and make everyone
| follow you, so their walls won't be so empty on Day 1 ;).
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Thanks :)
|
| Few others have suggested the same. But it kind of
| defeats the purpose since the goal is to see updates from
| your close friends and have only private profils. Even
| though empty feed is not good, it's a feature in our
| platform. We want to see what users do when the feed is
| empty. Only real way to have a non empty feed without
| compromising the core idea is letting users invite
| friends.
|
| I am thinking along those lines!
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 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".
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| We don't let anyone find you on the site without your short
| secret code which they need to ask you for. The code can be
| changed anytime. You (the user) need to actively ask your
| friends' code to build up the network. This also keeps the
| network small since you won't go out of your way to ask
| someone their code unless you really know them.
|
| A really private place with only people that matter.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "We don't let anyone..."
|
| "A really private place with only people that matter."
|
| Including an unnecessary third party at the controls.
|
| Hmmm.
| motoxpro wrote:
| 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
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| These are very valid questions , thanks for asking them.
|
| > Group chat Group chats work when everyone in one know
| each other. I have N different circles which don't overlap
| so group doesn't chat makes sense. Messages in group chat
| are more "in the face" - everyone has to. I just wanted a
| place where I can dump my thoughts without feeling like
| seeking immediate attention.
|
| > Blog PostX is indeed something like a private blogging
| space. It's something I wanted for myself.
|
| Honestly I am not fully sure how it's going to be used by
| people but I have built something me and my friends like
| and use.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| I messed up the formatting. Below is the correct text
|
| > Blog
|
| PostX is indeed something like a private blogging space.
| It's something I wanted for myself.
|
| Honestly I am not fully sure how it's going to be used by
| people but I have bi uilt something me and my friends
| like and use.
| fivestones wrote:
| 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.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Thanks for the response
|
| Many early adopters have asked for photo support so we will
| be definitely supporting it in the next release.
|
| We are just trying to figure out how to do it without it
| turning into a clout-chasing machine.
| fivestones wrote:
| Awesome. I was going to say just don't have a way to like
| photos, but then I don't know if that solves the clout-
| chasing problem.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| True though. We will be adding support for images in the
| next release.
|
| We can add an option to export all data (in the pipeline)
| and let users delete account and data in one click
| (available on first release) but I don't know what else can
| be done.
|
| End to end encryption is hard and I am not a programmer
| capable of implementing it safe enough to stop NSA level
| threats.
|
| We will do what we can.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > I don't know what else can be done
|
| I don't think there's anything technical you can do. I
| think it would require:
|
| 1. A stable income stream that doesn't depend on
| something at odds with your goals (i.e. not like
| Mozilla).
|
| 2. Incorporate as a non-profit with rock-solid "we're
| never going to transition to for-profit" legal terms.
|
| I think Wikipedia is probably the closest thing we have
| to that, but even they don't have a reliable income
| source. I mean, they have more money than they know what
| to do with and waste most of it on outreach nonsense
| rather than putting it into an endowment... but it's not
| exactly a _reliable_ source of money.
| rglullis wrote:
| > 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
| xyst wrote:
| These days I treat Facebook as a marketplace for offloading
| lightly used items.
|
| Social media is dead to me.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| What a coincidence, I use it as a market for buying lightly
| used items.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Facebook marketplace has surprisingly large number of
| listings and in my country not even dedicated marketplaces
| can come close
| mrweasel wrote:
| Facebook marketplace killed or vastly reduced the size of
| other marketplace platforms in many countries. Strangely it
| also seems like the amount of fraud rose as people moved to
| Facebook Marketplace. I guess it was easier for scammers to
| work on Facebook, needing only one platform to commit fraud
| in multiple countries, rather than attempting to work on
| hundreds of local sites.
| danielbln wrote:
| > Social media is dead to me
|
| You know, HN is social media.
| robocat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Pop some terms into Google scholar and you'll find study
| after study after study both correlating social media use
| with worse mental health and demonstrating improvements
| from reducing use, in children and adults both.
|
| It varies by demographic, but yeah, social media are pretty
| universally awful for humans, and that's not just
| conjecture.
| robocat wrote:
| > correlating
|
| That's the issue, and it is what you attempted to answer.
|
| Causation is much harder to tease out from the noise.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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.
| figassis wrote:
| Would a friends and staying in touch social network even
| succeed today?
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Read Careless People. It was never about that.
| oulipo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Marketplace :/
| n1b0m wrote:
| Don't forget supercharging the spread of hate such as the
| harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar
| guicen wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway83094 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| iOS -> Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Photos -> Facebook ->
| Set limited access
| msgodel wrote:
| You'd have to block nearly every app from ever seeing any image
| you don't want Facebook getting ahold of including apps that
| are made by other companies. Almost everyone uses their
| libraries, they practically have a shell on your phone (which
| is funny because you're _not_ allowed that on your own device
| for "security.")
| hedora wrote:
| As much as I'm annoyed when my iPhone makes me do the dumb
| "give access to these photos to the app" dance, I'm happy
| they block that, at least.
|
| However, I wish they'd grow a pair and just outright block
| the FB and other similar dependencies that make such stuff
| necessary.
| ben_w wrote:
| > However, I wish they'd grow a pair and just outright
| block the FB and other similar dependencies that make such
| stuff necessary.
|
| When the giants fight, which one of them is an evil
| monopolist, and which is the defender of freedom?
|
| (This is why I actually like the iPhone approach more than
| the macOS approach these days; thought I do miss the late
| 90s when I didn't need to care because nothing had any
| mechanism to spy on me anyway).
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Argh... I didn't even think about that
| msgodel wrote:
| Neat-O.
|
| Maybe this will finally convince people to throw out their
| smartphones.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/27/facebook-is-asking-to-
| use-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494)
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Wonder if you could ddos it by taking selfies with ai generated
| faces in background.
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I heard something about meta glasses
| abhinavk wrote:
| They will sell a product that people will use to photograph
| random people doing stuff.
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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.
| xyst wrote:
| Data and people are the commodity in this Ai gold rush. Primary
| benefactors are big tech.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Beneficiaries
| Jackson__ wrote:
| Curious, is this really necessary? I'd assume the subtotal of
| _public_ images posted on meta services to be in the trillions.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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'
| squigz wrote:
| Shouldn't it have zero rights over your "camera roll
| images", which implies to me to be photos saved to a phone
| but not yet uploaded to Facebook?
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Probably for personalization.
| JimDabell wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > nobody cares
|
| Some people do but other people don't elect them.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >Some people do but other people don't elect them.
|
| So, the other people don't care.
| squigz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| windex wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_l wrote:
| 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.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Mmmmhm, which means the humans now understand that they
| should be callous and cold. If they're not rubber stamping
| rejections all the time then the AI isn't doing anything
| useful by making a feed of easy-to-reject applications.
|
| The system will become evil even if it has humans in it
| because they have been given no power to resist the
| incentives
| rglullis wrote:
| > humans now understand that they should be callous and
| cold
|
| Were humans working on health insurance claims previously
| known for being warm and tend to err on the side of the
| patient?
| lesuorac wrote:
| All you have to do is take an initial cost hit where you
| have multiple support staff review a case as a
| calibration phase and generate cohorts of say 3 reviews
| where 2 have the desired denial rate and 1 doesn't.
| Determine the performance of each cohort by how much in
| agreement they are and then rotate out whose in training
| over time and you'll achieve a target denial rate.
|
| There will always be people who "try to do their best"
| and actually read the case and decide accordingly. But
| you can drown them out with malleable people who come to
| understand if they deny 100 cases today then they're
| getting a cash bonus for alignment (with the other guy
| mashing deny 100 times).
|
| Technology solves technological problems. It does not
| solve societal ones.
| rglullis wrote:
| I am not disagreeing, and I am not arguing for AI.
|
| I am just saying that the perverse incentives already
| exist and that in this case AI-assisted evaluation (which
| defers to a human when uncertain) is not going to make it
| any better, but it is not going to make it any worse.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Actually it may, even if only slightly. Because now as
| the GP says, the humans know the only cases they're going
| to get are the ones the AI suspects are not worthy. They
| will look more skeptically.
|
| I totally agree that the injustices at play here are
| already long baked in and this is not the harbinger of
| doom, medical billing already sucks immense amounts of
| ass and this isn't changing it much? But it is changing
| it and worse, it's infusing the credibility of
| automation, even in a small way, into a system. "Our
| decisions are better because a computer made them" which
| doesn't deal at all with how we don't fully understand
| how these systems work or what their reasoning is for any
| particular claim.
|
| Insofar as we must have profit-generating investment
| funds masquerading as healthcare providers, I don't think
| it's asking a ton that they be made to continue employing
| people to handle claims, and customer service for that
| matter. They're already some of the most profitable
| corporations on the planet, are costs really needing
| cutting here?
| rglullis wrote:
| >"Our decisions are better because a computer made them"
|
| This is the root of the problem, and it is (relatively)
| easy to solve: make any decision taken by the computer
| directly attributed to the CEO. Let them have some Skin
| in The Game, it should be more than enough to align the
| risk and the rewards.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Were humans working on health insurance claims
| previously known for being warm and tend to err on the
| side of the patient?_
|
| I know that in the continuously audited FEP space, human
| claims processors were at 95%+ accuracy (vs audited
| correct results).
|
| Often with sub-2 min per claim processing times.
|
| The irony is that GP's system is _exactly_ how you would
| want this deployed into production. Fail safe, automate
| happy path, HITL on everything else.
|
| With the net result that those people can spend longer
| looking at more difficult claims. (For the same cost)
| ballenf wrote:
| The bot should have let ~5% of auto-accepted claims
| through to the humans. And then tracked their decision.
| p_l wrote:
| Actually the real issue for the humans was that it would
| mean possible reduction in employment which is why we had
| union block deployment for a time until a deal was
| brokered.
|
| It helps, as you can suspect from "union" comment, that
| it wasn't an american health care insurance company.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| How hard would it be tweak that model so that it decides
| between auto-paying and sending it to a different bot that
| hallucinates reasons to deny the claim? Eventually some
| super smart MBA will propose this innovative AI-first
| strategy that will boost profits.
| supplied_demand wrote:
| Funny enough, the large AI companies run by CEOs with
| MBAs (Alphabet and MSFT), seem to be slow-playing AI. The
| ones promising the most (Meta, Tesla, OpenAI, Nvidia) are
| led by strict technologists.
|
| Maybe it's time to adjust your internal "MBAs are evil"
| bias for something more dynamic.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| In what way is MSFT "slow-playing" AI?
| supplied_demand wrote:
| They are slow-playing the promise of what AI can, should,
| and will accomplish for us.
|
| Nadella said this yesterday at YC's AI Startup School:
|
| == "The real test of AI," Nadella said, "is whether it
| can help solve everyday problems -- like making
| healthcare, education, and paperwork faster and more
| efficient."
|
| "If you're going to use energy, you better have social
| permission to use it," he said. "We just can't consume
| energy unless we are creating social and economic
| value."==
|
| https://www.thehansindia.com/tech/satya-nadella-urges-ai-
| to-...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Thanks. I agree w the things Nadella said there. But it
| rings pretty hollow, given how hard every MSFT product is
| pushing AI. What would it look like if they weren't
| "slow-playing" it?
| bird0861 wrote:
| Right, I can't sustain for a moment the idea that the guy
| who fumbled Recall like a stack of wet fish dipped in
| baby oil is actually a wise sage full of caution. I
| permit myself one foolish idea a day and that's not going
| to be the one for any day of the week.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Indeed, it is often the case that what powerful people
| say is very different from what they do.
| thfuran wrote:
| Harder than just automatically rejecting every claim.
| molteanu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank God you didn't use Uranus.
| nelox wrote:
| Venus, in her naked glory, I could understand at a stretch, but
| Saturn?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Can't really see much nakedness through all those CO2 clouds.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Mystery is the font of desire.
| tclancy wrote:
| If you won't take to arms for Venus, when will you?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Venus needth not arms!
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo
| thfuran wrote:
| Looks like someone took arms to me.
| slazaro wrote:
| Somebody liked Saturn enough to put a ring on it.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Some Saturn photos you can find on duckduckgo look like a
| woman's breast if you're AI enough
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| The AI isn't even wrong, naked planets are bannable:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailor_Saturn
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Do you have a link to the picture, unmodified?
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| They were probably using a bloom filter in the backend
| nottorp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| According to the article they want to upload and process
| "selected pictures from your camera roll" to make suggestions.
|
| Now the definition may vary, but the camera roll is probably
| the list of images on your phone (which the app accesses when
| you pick an image to post), not a list of pictures you already
| posted privately...
| nottorp wrote:
| 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_reala wrote:
| Remember that you can delete your Meta accounts and have nothing
| to do with them. It's not hard to do.
| clcaev wrote:
| > 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_reala wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway83094 wrote:
| 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.
| herbst wrote:
| Meta owns your friendships?
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| 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
| herbst wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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_fr wrote:
| 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_fr wrote:
| Probably would have been a more fitting comment for
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494
| gorjusborg wrote:
| As commercial AI kills its food source (the internet) we'll see
| corporations doing desperate things to keep feeding it.
| pyman wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| I was going to say Instagram is much worse in terms of keeping
| you hooked but then I remembered who owns it.
| pyman wrote:
| 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.
| arccy wrote:
| 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
| jofla_net wrote:
| 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.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The best time to delete Facebook was many years ago. The second
| best time is now.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| whoisyc wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| On a forum, "you" is an anonymous username, so ridicule
| is meaningless. It doesn't follow you into the real
| world.
| whoisyc wrote:
| Facebook is used to coordinate real world events. Think
| weekend hikes, dog shows, garage sales, you name it. If
| you have to hide your real world identity to post on a
| forum, then it will not be able to replace Facebook.
| qoez wrote:
| 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
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| > 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!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Discord is fine as a active chat medium. It is absolutely
| awful as an information store. Even beyond the "can't be
| indexed by search engines" (which is catastrophically bad
| all by itself), it's just horrible for dealing with any
| information that isn't part of an active combination
| _right now_.
| spacemadness wrote:
| Yes, this makes me sad how so many hobby groups are trapped
| within FB. It's usually hobbies with an older demographic.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>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.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| deleted it in 2018. happy ever since. did not regret for a
| moment
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| mslansn wrote:
| All companies want you to give them more money no matter the
| cost.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| they don't want your money - they want your attention
| xrisk wrote:
| They want your attention because it makes them money. It's
| not attention for attention's sake.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| its not soley for money and thats not why attention is
| important and matters for a large platform
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-div wrote:
| 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.
| p2detar wrote:
| 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.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Cool. I gamble, use tobacco, alcohol and other drugs and
| occasionally use FB from time to time. I enjoy things.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| 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.
| whoisyc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ATechGuy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The AR glasses are also about the same... just get a lot of
| pictures so they can feed their AI.
| geor9e wrote:
| Hacker News users keep getting worked up about opt-in services
| they don't want to opt in to.
| sciencerobot wrote:
| I don't use meta products. Photos of me are on the camera rolls
| of people who do.
| labrador wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| puttycat wrote:
| 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
| huhkerrf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| puttycat wrote:
| Thanks for the good vibes. Did it occur to you that the
| original question might have been posted before the
| rejection?
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| demarq wrote:
| Question to the Meta engineers on here, do you ever speak out
| about this internally?
| StochasticLi wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not your computer, data not encrypted with keys you control, not
| your data.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Meta products are such a bad deal for users.
|
| I wish there was an alternative to Facebook and Instagram, even
| if it had no users. We, as users, can solve the "no users"
| problem for you. Facebook and Instagram became popular, contrary
| to popular belief, not because it had "critical mass" or some
| Hoffmanite bullshit like that, but because it had the _technical_
| community using them, and they brought their friends and family.
|
| Someone just needs to build it.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| 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?
| krapp wrote:
| 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."
| righthand wrote:
| 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.
| p2detar wrote:
| My impression about Fedi is that it's much bigger than most
| people think it is, but those who are in it don't like
| talking about it a lot.
| krapp wrote:
| The more people know about it, the faster it gets ruined.
| An unfortunate law of nature.
|
| Luckily the fediverse already seems to push away a lot of
| trolls, bigots and capitalists, but it's just a matter of
| time.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| 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
| bee_rider wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| windex wrote:
| 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.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| 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).
| righthand wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The world would be a better place without this shitty company.
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