Meta cancels the contract with the outsourcing company they contracted to classify smart glasses content after employees at the company whistleblow about serious privacy issues with the content they were paid to classify.
How else do you want companies to remove and prevent CSAM? It seems like you must have some human involvement to train and monitor.
It’s a terrible job, I wouldn’t want to do it, but someone needs to. Perhaps one day, AI will be accurate enough to not need it, but even then you need someone to process complaints and waivers (like someone’s home photos being inaccurately flagged).
> How else do you want companies to remove and prevent CSAM?
Different situation.
Facebook has to do CSAM moderation because it's a publishing platform. People will post CSAM on facebook, so they must do moderation.
And "just don't have facebook" isn't a solution because every publication of any sort has to deal with this problem; Any newspaper accepting mail has this problem. (Albeit to a much more scaled down version) People were nailing obscene things to bulletin boards for all recorded history.
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In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.
The downside would be "worse LLMs" or "LLMs being created later", which is a perfectly acceptable compromise.
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This is not to say that genuine content flagging firms have no reason to curate such data & build tools to automatically flag content before human moderators have to. (But then they also shouldn't be outsourcing this and traumatizing contract workers for $2-3 an hour)
But OpenAI is not such a firm. It's a general AI company.
There's no dollar amount but proper support during and after employment is a minimum, and a large paycheque will both offset some of the human cost and make it easier for people to be pushed to quit the job; Such that they aren't doing the job for too long.
The current support systems for police in this subject are already insufficient. Facebook's treatment of their moderation staff is abhorrent. The point of including the pay figure is to further illustrate just how damning this subcontracting practice is.
There is labor that is necessary for our societies to function, but a direct threat to the people doing the work. Someone has to do it, and it should be seen as a great service to society and rewarded accordingly. In a just world, we would be paying significantly extra for threats to health that come from work, in the one we are currently in we use threat of worse harm instead.
Someone has to do it, and it should be seen as a great service to society and rewarded accordingly
You are just too priviledge to understand people: many people would be glad do do it for the minimum wage, I would fight to have that oportunity (I live in west EU).
We have coal miners destroying their bodies and lungs, cobalt mining slavery, cocoa nut child labour and de facto slavery, sex workers, CPS investigators, first responders, and doctors with high rates of suicide…
Not only is there an acceptable market rate for trauma, it’s sometimes competitive and requires licensing.
There is one difference between first responders/doctors and the other classes (and the moderators under discussion here)
First responders/doctors/CPS investigators see the worst but they also have days where they make a difference. Save a life or multiple lives. I'm sure it's a huge part of what makes the job bearable, and to some meaningful.
I'm not discounting your point about high rates of suicide either. If anything, when you take away any good days, you're left, as a content moderator, with just seeing the worst of the world day in, day out, with nothing to make it meaningful. I'd suggest that's something we as a society should not tolerate as being an acceptable trade for the ability to share cat photos.
>First responders/doctors/CPS investigators see the worst but they also have days where they make a difference. Save a life or multiple lives. I'm sure it's a huge part of what makes the job bearable, and to some meaningful.
You think miners don't make a difference or save lives?
> You think miners don't make a difference or save lives?
Do you think miners mining is saving lives in the same way that doctors saving lives is saving lives?
To continue the parents point, do you think miners derive a deep or powerful satisfaction from some of their mining work which might offer some of the heavy cost it has on them physically and emotionally?
I think miners save more lives (through the supply of gas, energy, battery materials, pesticides, fertilizers, solar panel minerals, and ultimately electricity, computing materials, etc) than doctors do.
And I think what prevents miners to "derive a deep or powerful satisfaction from some of their mining work which might offset some of the heavy cost it has on them physically and emotionally" is not anything inherent in their work, but people thinking that only direct affect should be prestigious and satisfying and underapreciating the thankless background work to keep the lights on.
Same way people sneer at cleaning people or teachers and their meagre salaries and no respect, or domestic labor.
Emergency Department^ doctors, what do they make? give people who have to review the worst humanity has to offer and pay them that. and while we're at it, ambulance personnel should get a huge pay bump. Take it from nurses' pay.
^ i originally said "triage doctors" but i meant the resident ER doc.
OpenAI runs ChatGPT where users submit text and photos and OpenAI generates and sends text and photos back. So users could be submitting CSAM. And yes, OpenAI could be generating CSAM. It's not limited to being a pull operation. What am I missing?
What you're missing is that they're "separate" parts of the business.
The core Facebook product is users' posts. It's not possible to separate those two. Nor can one downscale Facebook in a way that stops the problem; The aforementioned "Facebook has had this problem because it's a problem we've had since the medieval days of a town bulletin board"
With OpenAI, the way ChatGPT was built and user submissions are separate things. The GPT models could have been have been trained without this mess. OpenAI could be more selective in what data it scrapes.
While OpenAI cannot stop users sending god knows what in their prompt text and images, OpenAI can choose to not interact with that data beyond the minimum legal retention, by e.g. not using it for training the next generation of models. This would massively downscale the problem.
AI output is another such problem, where A) Maybe this'd be less of a problem if they didn't recklessly include a bunch of CSAM into the training data by accident, and B) LLMs just aren't the kind of fundamental human right that "having a public opinion" is. It would be fine if they were less good, invented years later, or even not invented at all.
The main counterargument to the latter has been the "But China is inventing evil AI" spiel, which is fairly weak. If China builds an orphaned baby crushing machine, we do not need to build an orphaned baby crushing machine of our own. (And the reality is that China is only chasing AI so aggressively because the west does. They're reasonable people, it would have been entirely possible for both the west and China to make a mutual "no orphan crushing" agreement and just accept slower rollout of technology. This is exactly what has been done with human genetic engineering, and China did in fact enforce these norms.)
> In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.
You've just thrown the garbage over your fence.
Instead of OpenAI contracting Sama to classify CSAM, the "Curators" have to.
At the end of the day, someone needs to classify it. If you say the platforms need to, and they miss some, and it ends up in OAI training data, OAI is going to be the entity paying the prices.
> In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.
This is of course incredibly illegal, but megacorps (by valuation) and oligarchy members are above the law so who cares. I assume there could be a regulatory framework which can make this legal for an extremely specific purpose, but there is zero change that OpenAI was part of this/abiding by this in 2022, absolutely none.
CSAM exists on social media because they are so large that it's not possible to moderate them effectively. To me this is a a no-go. If a business is so large that it cannot respect laws, it needs to be shut down.
The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server. CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers.
Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.
Having tens of thousands of decentralized, independently moderated servers would result in an order of magnitude more CSAM being shared than having a few oligopolies. The abusers just have to find the weakest link, and that weakest link will have fewer resources than multi trillion dollar companies. You would also likely not hear many news stories about it, because they won't have the expertise to even detect it.
That's a tradeoff you can choose to make, but you need to enter into it with open eyes.
> Having tens of thousands of decentralized, independently moderated servers would result in an order of magnitude more CSAM being shared than having a few oligopolies.
It doesn't matter how many are shared but how many are viewed. On a small server community policing works just fine, bad actors are easier and faster to block and to top it off, the smaller reach of each server makes it unprofitable to target multiple serves, fish for their weak points. etc - the dirty jobs become unprofitable which is what matters most.
With the help of AI, small players can do a better job at removing CSAM.
>That's a tradeoff you can choose to make, but you need to enter into it with open eyes.
No it's not. It's certainly not my choice. No one asked me if it's okay for Facebook to distribute CSAM because you insist it would be worse if it didn't.
I don't really care if you classify it as a choice or not. One set of actions results in more CSAM than others. Just because you don't like the implication of there being tradeoffs doesn't mean there aren't tradeoffs.
In what regard is it incorrect that a single, larger entity that is at least notionally committed to avoiding the existence of any specific type of content on their platform is more likely to successfully avoid the existence of that type of content on their platform than smaller entities with less resources?
Now consider that some of those smaller entities might not be even notionally interested in avoiding the existence of that specific type of content on their platform, and are small enough for regulators to be unaware of its existence?
What your opponent is saying is, "there are mutually exclusive A and B". A being widespread CSAM and B being somebody need to look at CSAM to remove it.
Can you elaborate on what exactly is wrong there? Do you see the third alternative C and it's not the "whole choice"? Or are you saying A or B do not exist and therefore there's no choice? Please name C, or tell us why A or B don't exist (or aren't acceptable), or explain your view that doesn't fit into these options.
Some people are not okay with actively facilitating harm to people, even if inaction results in harm to other people. See: the trolley problem. This is totally okay, but the point made above is that
>That's a tradeoff you can choose to make
is not correct: It is a tradeoff that one specific person can choose to make, but not one that I or we can choose to make, because we don't control facebook. Mark Zuckerberg controls facebook. He alone can choose to make that tradeoff, or not, on behalf of society.
> Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server.
And therefore anything that is remotely questionable will be blocked. Not just kiddie porn. Pissed off a local business with a bad review? Blocked.
Child abusers are twisted people, and I really don’t care much what happens to them, but making it impossible for them to use the internet means sterilizing the whole thing.
>And therefore anything that is remotely questionable will be blocked. Not just kiddie porn. Pissed off a local business with a bad review? Blocked.
This is already the case. There is a lot of lawful, useful, medical or educational content that is actively censured on social medias because they include words or pictures of organs while same social medias actively encourage and develop algorithm to push underage girls (and possibly boys) posting pictures of themselves in sexual poses, attires and context.
Big tech and social media networks love and push CSAM, they just hide the genitals but the content really is the same.
> a lot of lawful, useful, medical or educational content
Like what? It’s all there on Wikipedia, and for all of Wiki’s faults, I have trouble imagining what kind of useful, educational, medical information you will find on social media that is better than that.
You are just saying that physical life doesn't function. People get banned or removed from all sorts of informal and formal groups all the time because of completely illegitimate reasons. That's just human politics embedded so deeply in our psychology it will never go away. They simply move to different groups - and similarly online they can move to a different federated server.
But that's not possible in today's oligopoly of social media. An invisible algorithm will ban you, and there is no way back, and few alternates. Big Social Media is way worse from a sanitizing perspective than some federated social media.
I have no deep problem with exclusion; as you say, that’s human nature and unfixable. Making mods personally legally liable for everything that appears on their board is just insane. How many minutes are acceptable for them to see and review content? Or does everything have to be pre-approved?
I know a local blog that pre-approves every comment. He lets a lot of stuff through, because he lets people be dumbasses. If he were personally liable, the conversation would get a lot quieter.
Also, if you've gone from zero to one of the biggest coroporations in the country, and have billions to throw at the 'metaverse', I find it hard to believe that removing CSAM is where you struggle.
No. It's a legitimately difficult problem because there not all naked pictures of kids are illegal. The false positive problem is bad for business, but also generally bad even if the big social media was benevolent.
Moderators need to actually understand the context of the picture/video, which requires knowledge of culture and language of the people sharing the pictures. It's really difficult to do that without hiring moderators from every culture in the world.
But small federated servers can often align along real world human social networks, so it's easier for the server admin to understand what should be removed.
The amount of CSAM online is completely out of control. There's already nation-level and sometimes international cooperation to catch any known images with perceptual hashing (think: the opposite of cryptographic hashing) as well as other automated and manual tools.
My impression is it would take Manhattan-Project levels of effort and funds to come close to "solving" this problem, especially without someone getting on a watchlist for having a telehealth-first primary care provider insurace plan and asking for advice on their toddler's chickenpox.
Human review? Meta has small armies worth of content moderators already that tend to burn out with psychological problems and have a suicide rate where you're probably better off going to fight in a real war. (This includes workers hired by Sama in Kenya, to link back to the OP.)
I will reluctantly grant Meta that they're up against a really hard problem here.
Yeah, I agree with you. Of course, it’s not Meta’s blame that the CSAM actually exists, but calling the problem of filtering it extremely difficult at Meta’s scale is a problem that is easily solvable but fundamentally requires changing how the platform works, and would likely require a lot more money to be spent.
Isn't this more about disincentivizing the posting of it in the first place by increasing the chances of getting banned? Once you have to remove it, it's too late.
> Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server.
So if you want to send someone to jail, just talk your way into joining their server, upload some illegal content, and report them for it?
> Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.
Why would someone join a server with active moderation if they wanted to share CSAM with their social media friends?
They would seek out one of those servers that was set up specifically for those groups, where it was known to be a safe space.
This is what many people don't get about federated networks: The people in those little servers DGAF if you block them. They want to be surrounded by their likeminded friends away from the rules of some bigger service like Facebook or Twitter. Federated social media is the perfect platform for them because they can find someone who set up a server in some other country with their own idea of rules and join that, not be subject to the regulations of mainstream social media.
right, and you have other users on fediverse that notice that server leaking, and if the content is bad enough, report the service to an authority. Having all of the pedophiles and other creeps on a tiny subset of servers, isloated islands of them; well, that ought make enforcement easier.
It also makes it relatively easy to avoid, as server admins share blocklists. I know a dozen servers offhand that i'd block if i ran another fediverse server.
Fosstodon fediverse server doesn't have this issue, for example.
I replied this way because the way you wrote it, it sounds like an indictment of a system that's designed to avoid advertisers getting user profiles, over all else.
The problem is the people who participate in this (the illegal and immoral), and not "the network."
Yep. If you cannot both safely and legally provide the thing you are selling you are no longer a legitimate company you are a criminal enterprise profiting off of exploitation.
Sure, then they can go demand said standards for social media platforms including expected amount per N post, just as car companies are not expected to have car fatality rates be 0.
The fact is that simple scale means that there will always be something, no matter how abhorrent. Small scale doesn't change this, it just concentrates it.
Do car companies sell cars without air bags, or seat belts? What about cars that haven't been crash tested? What happens to them if they don't do this do you think?
Would you drive a car optimized for profit that didn't have those safety features? How about on a highway? Daily?
Here it's said that it's the users fault. I disagree. Completely. Most of these companies, staying on topic many of these companies have laid off the employees who tried to prevent things like this,
When FORD dngaf with the Pinto and Corsair( like tech companies do not gaf), they deservedly got this same level of contempt/demand for oversite. A dude named Ralph Nader went on a huge crusade about it. And they got a ton more oversite, safety requirements, etc put on them.
I voted for Ralph Nader a few times, until he stopped appearing on ballots for whatever reason. For this reason, and many others. I don't remember any negative press about him, either. maybe he got out when mudslinging became defacto in elections.
I am not sold on the federated thing to solve CSAM or similar issues.
Actually companies should be bullied about privacy and copyright so they are unable to share any contents at a scale with 3rd parties. Thus they have to solve it on their own and forced to realize their business model is shit.
>CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers.
No it isn't. Small servers often don't have paid security or moderation, are run in anonymous fashion, and have no profit motive that can even be used to incentivize them against hosting illegal content.
That's visible when it comes to porn. There's a million bootleg porn sites on the internet hosted that show off illegal content. The only site that was ever forced to curate its content was Pornhub, because they're sufficiently large, work in a jurisdiction that has laws and can be held accountable. From a content moderation standpoint going after a million web forums is an absolute pain in the ass compared to going after Facebook.
Which is the first argument any decentralization advocate always brings up (and they're correct to do so), censorship is harder and evasion of law enforcement easier when dealing with a network of independent actors.
The one thing I will throw out here that I can add to this conversation is that I think the government simply does not care, either. It's mainly only in regard to mass public outrage, or when someone is a political target that it gets dealt with from a law enforcement level.
Anecdotally, when I was a young adult I was a volunteer moderator for a large forum. We got reports of CSAM several times a month and had a process for escalating and reporting it to the FBI IC3 - we retained a lot of information about the users that posted it.
One of the administrators of the website mentioned to me that over the years since the inception of the forum, they'd reported almost a thousand incidents of CSAM distribution - and the FBI followed up with them to get information less than 10 times in total.
The FBI is interested in busting perverts in closets. That's often how they work their way up the "supply chain" when it comes to CSAM. Consumers lead them to distributors, who lead them to producers.
A fair point. But it still seems reasonable that only about 1% of suspect posts lead to a formal inquiry. Doesn’t mean they aren’t taking the report into account. You have to figure that they already have leads on most of them.
Do we really have to give the benefit of the doubt to the agency that was literally running one of the largest CSAM distribution outlets in the world for years as a honeypot?
If you want ro argue that the FBI is a fundamentally flawed agency that on balance is a net negative, I won’t fight you that hard. But during the civil rights struggle, they were the only force that could be trusted at all.
Yes, that was 60 years ago. No one involved at that time is still there - and in fact, most of them have passed. I don't know why you think there's a shred of relevance there.
when i ran a fediverse server for myself and 3 people, but allowed public signups if someone came by; it was very easy to ban people, and very easy to null-route entire swaths of the fediverse, because i didn't want their content on my service.
That's more what i got from that pull-quote. I know a company that has hundreds of individual forums, and those are all moderated quickly and correctly (last i heard). They're moderated so effectively they often get DDoS by Russian IPs for banning users for scam posts from that country.
These workers prepare data for AI. I don't think the need for them will go away anyway soon.
Westeners are too expensive and unwilling to do it. AI is a business model that requires poverty and extreme inequality to function. Yes other businesses do that too, but they don't claim it's a solution to everything while it actually has very special human requirements.
There are more reasons why these jobs are located in developing countries, it's not only the price of labour. Imagine for a second, these annotations would have to be done in the US. The public outrage would probably be audible across the Atlantic. This is another form of imperialism.
I agree that there’s no good way to do this other than like… no user generated content ever or just ban everyone for their baby pics and etc….and nobody can post them.
Granted the latter is kinda happening distantly on YouTube where you can’t talk about “ suicide “ so everyone self censors…
you must be extremy priviledge to think that way, even as EU I would be glad to do it for the minimum salary. For your info, a terrible job for most human is a job that is extremly hard physically at the point of destroying your health. That said, like many people, I would find it much more interesting than many boring job. [If someone read this, please hire me for this, in exchange I would work the 5 first hour for free]
Isn't it more that tech companies are just more high profile and integral to political and social landscape than older companies; but reviewing the current political zeitgeist, they're in lockstep to what some, if not all, would just call fascism?
They are literal defense and offense contractors. They hang out at the Pentagon. They sell political data to sway elections. They give gifts to leaders for favors. It is technofacism.
Safety and user pain is a part of tech which seems largely ignored, even on sites like HN.
I really have no idea why this ignorance prevails; commenters seem to genuinely be unaware of what goes on in Trust and Safety processes.
I mean, most users would complain about content moderation, but their experience would be miles ahead of what most of humanity enjoys when it comes to responsiveness.
I believe this lack of knowledge, examples, and case history is causing a blind spot in tech centric conversations when it comes to the causes of the Techlash.
Unfortunately this backlash is also the perfect cover for authoritarian government action - they come across as responsive to voters while also reigning in firms that are more responsive to American citizens and government officers than their own.
Companies of the 20th century certainly weren't more ethical. (Though a few select tech companies seem to be intent on proving the opposite.)
But it's not really a fascism thing. While fascism does love the oppression of women, and the current crop of fascists have a notable connection to the Epstein case, this is a lot more boring.
Sam Altman's not a fascist, he's a wet noodle who sucks up to the Trump administration for money. He's not even good at it. The way his company handled CSAM does cast aspersions on Altman & the accusations from his sister, but all other evidence suggests he's just a moron acting recklessly. Not identifying the problem ahead of time, and acting poorly in response.
In the case of Meta. We know who Zuckerberg is. The company got it's start as, in crude terms, a sex pest website. The original "Facemash" website forcibly taken down by Harvard. This is not some new consequence of this turn to fascism, Zuckerberg's always been like this, and the actions taken against him were clearly not enough to avoid the company culture following his precedent.
> Companies of the 20th century certainly weren't more ethical.
Disagree, not on average. There was a non-trivially higher % of decisions made based on "what's good for the customer" or "what's good for the product" or "I would be ashamed to do this" and a lower % of decisions made based on "what maximizes profit in the next quarter". I think that is more ethical. To take it to an extreme, using slave labor because it's good for the customer is more ethical than using slave labor to maximize profit in the next quarter.
Sounds about right. If you know someone who uses these smart glasses, it's important not to tolerate them whatsoever. Don't speak with them, interact with them. I wouldn't even recommend being in their presence.
I'll grant you smartphones, but smart TVs usually don't have cameras/microphones. The problem with smart glasses is that they constantly capture video and upload it to $VENDOR like in this case.
A mostly-solitary sporting event (or one where you know all the other participants and can get their consent to record beforehand) seems like a reasonable use of these sorts of glasses. I wouldn’t personally give consent just as a sort of privacy reflex, but it really depends on your social circle.
The problem is there's places where you'd get noticed and probably removed for filming with a gopro, or even a smartphone. My local "wellness center" and pools have you deposit your smartphone before you exit the changing area into the showers.
The danger with creep glasses is that many people don't know what they are, they can be used with the LED disabled so they're perfect for filming people without their knowledge, and "these are prescription glasses" has a good chance of working. In a place with a "no recording devices" policy, "could you put that gopro away" has wide social acceptance/support, "take those glasses off" less so.
There's also nothing stopping us from stigmatizing the use of smartphones in public. Even a slight discouragement of it would be progress. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
I think smartphones are a lost cause. Even at the gym, there are guys in the locker room taking pics of themselves in the mirror. Meanwhile I'm walking ass-naked out of the shower. There is just no sensitivity to appropriate time and place anymore.
Many security cameras have the ability to record audio. Depending on where you are, it might be illegal to use it. All the cams I have purchased have it. That would include ReoLink and a recommended model from the Frigate site.
Because person wearing glasses usually can move and video surveillance cameras usually can't?
If that's not it then spell it out for me, please.
Also, why would i be deceptive in this discussion? I feel like I missed some ideological conflict.
Imagine someone pulling up a smartphone and then recording everything that happens around them. Contrast that with someone wearing smart glasses and doing that exact same thing.
On a separate note, (and this is a genuine question) are you by any chance aware the term Non-consensual intimate imagery / NCII?
I am beginning to suspect that the average HN goer isn’t aware of the scope and scale of the Trust and Safety problem.
Someone pulling up a smartphone on me would feel hostile because it's violating a social contract. Maybe I'd feel betrayed and attacked if it turned out someone was recording me using glasses, but I don't know, I don't care about dashcams and this is not that much different. I imagine it feels bad and scary for women when someone takes creepshots of them, and this tech does open opportunities for that. Maybe that would be enough for me to hate glasshats if I had a bit of empathy. But isn't the genie already out of the bottle with 'deep nude' models available for everyone forever?
No, i don't think I've heard about NCII before, and Trust and Safety sounds like some corporate PR whitewashing term to me.
1> Genie out of the bottle: Yes and no. Nudification is a growing problem, non consensual intimate imagery is a current problem. AI related tools for image gen still require some amount of skill, and that is reducing its blast radius.
2> NCII: Years ago, I was scoping reddit to identify content that was harmful from an Indian perspective. By far the largest category was NCII. This could range from morphed images, to intimate images reshared, to images from their socials reshared in thirst communities. This included images of underage children.
Removing NCII is rough. First the victim has to be willing to come forward and get over the shame. Then they have to deal with a near impossible system and get someone to help. The more conservative the nation, the less likely the support networks will be forgiving or helpful. Finally, once the data is out there, it’s going to be reflected across multiple sites which are in international jurisdictions.
This is one of the situations where, I fear, your life is simply hosed.
Korea is another country which has a severe problem with NCII, and I believe they even instituted laws against deepfaked porn.
>PR whitewashing: Heh. Well thats the division that deals with online safety, fraud, content moderation, policy and the rest. I believe eBay was the first firm to use that term when they were handling fraud.
They don't care. Or they refuse to realize that tech isn't the solution to it, but an amplifier of it's scale.
Can tell you that my urge to take photos/record drastically dips around other people. Particularly if it were meant for any sort of commercial exploitation. Stephenson called people wired for max indiscriminate data collection/processing "gargoyles". Personally I prefer glassholes.
Most people don't run around holding out their smartphone directly in front of them. It has to be pointed at the subject, and tends to be obvious.
Smart glasses, however, are always aimed at whatever the wearer is looking at. They may or may not be recording (note the reports of people hiding the LED indicators), and at a fair distance could easily be mistaken for a normal pair.
The general populace is much more likely to notice the former recording rather than the latter.
I've seen people keep their phone in their shirt pocket. The only reason it tends to be obvious is that most people aren't trying to be covert. Those aren't the ones you should be worried about.
Don’t forget that audio recording is a thing. The camera doesn’t have to be pointed at you to violate your privacy. Plus I bet you walk past 90% (or more) of all cameras without ever noticing them. You only notice someone’s glasses because they are novel, not because they are more likely to record you.
At everything on the opposite side of the screen, typically. There is a recording light for Meta glasses, but not one for iPhones, for example: the "recording" indicators are all user-side there.
When I'm on public transport, people generally face their phones in such a way that they'd only be filming your feet or the floor... They don't hold them up at head height in such a way that other people would be recorded. Maybe it's just a cultural thing
A Kenyan workers' organisation alleges Meta's decision was caused by the staff speaking out.
Meta says it's because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects ...
Well, yeah. If I went straight to the press to trash the reputation of my client's product, rather than communicating internally first to help them proactively address the issues, I would expect to get fired.
Not that I am remotely interested in defending Meta, or optimistic that they would proactively address privacy issues. But I don't feel that sympathetic to the outsourcing company here either.
I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I'm just going off what is said and not said in the article. If I were whistleblowing about something like this, I would take pains to describe what measures I took internally before going public. I didn't see any of that here.
EDIT: Look, to be clear, I think it's bad that naive or uninformed people are buying video recorders from Meta and unintentionally having their private lives intruded on by a company that, based on its history, clearly can't be trusted to be a helpful, transparent partner to customers on privacy. I think it's good that the media is giving people a reminder of this. I think it's good that the sources said something, even though the consequences they suffered seem inevitable. But to me, there is nothing essentially new to be learned here, and I don't know what can or should be done to improve the situation. I think for now, the best thing for people to do is not buy Meta hardware if they have any desire for privacy. Maybe there are laws that could help, but what should be in the laws exactly? It's not obvious to me what would work. I suspect that some of the reason people buy these products is for data capture, and that will sometimes lead to sensitive stuff being recorded. What should the rules be around this and who should decide? Personally I don't know.
What makes you think the outsourcing firm didn't raise these concerns in email or meetings? You think these people wanted to lose jobs and income? That's irrational.
Why reflexively defend a massive tech corporation caught repeatedly violating the law?
There are transgressions severe enough that your duty to stop them is heavier than your responsibility to "the reputation of your client's product." Amazing this needs to be stated, frankly.
More like a bright future being someone's fall guy. The ignorance to think that a large tech giant like Facebook would give a crap about any of those concerns makes this person too politically inept to make it anywhere
What specifically do you mean? It is by design that smart glasses see the things happening in front of their users? Yes, it is. That is why people buy them.
Huh. There you go again, thinking everyone else is an idiot. Capture of video data of users by Meta is never acceptable. It would not be acceptable for any phone, and it is not acceptable for any glass, ever.
Saving the data for any purpose other than allowing users to access it is bad enough; allowing Meta employees or contractors to view personal videos is on a whole new level.
I don't know why people buy smart glasses. Maybe they buy them for video capture. If so, the videos go to Meta's servers and Meta might do things with them. They might be criticized for not reviewing them in certain cases. That's one reason why I wouldn't buy Meta smart glasses.
The main issue here is Facebook employees viewing users' private video streams (including of user nudity) without the users' knowledge.
The secondary issue is that it's generally frowned upon to make your employees view nudity in the workplace. Are there extenuating circumstances here? No, we have no evidence there are any extenuating circumstances here.
> > Meta said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.
> Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.
It's total fantasy. I've worked in big tech. Casually uploading and providing company/contractor access to non-redacted intimate photos or pictures of the insides of people's homes vaguely "for the purpose of improving the customer experience" would not pass even a surface-level privacy or data-protection review anywhere I've ever worked. Do Meta even read what they are saying?
I’ve worked in trust and safety - for me this is stupid, but well below the threshold of impossible.
Hell, I know of a major firm that decided QA was not needed for their trust and safety process.
Another common issue will be SEA Arabic speakers tasked with labelling Middle Eastern Arabic content, because accents and cultural dialects are not a thing.
I’ve had people at FAANG firms cry on my shoulder, because they couldn’t get access to engineering resources at their own firms.
There was the famous case of meta executives overriding T&S policy and telling them that what content was news worthy during the Boston bombing. On a separate incident, they told their team that cartel violence was not newsworthy when friends in London complained about it.
When you say this is fantasy, what do you mean precisely?
What I mean is: I'm not sure what they base their statement that it's "a common practice among other companies" on. Unlikely they are talking about their peer companies. I suppose if you read the sentence literally, there surely exist one or more "other companies" in the broad universe of "other companies" that routinely do this kind of stuff. But I wouldn't think anywhere serious.
I mean, given this happened and it was sent to Sama it seems pretty clear that the images being generated from this were being sent to a labelling pipeline somewhere.
There’s probably an opt out / opt in clause somewhere in the terms and conditions, which makes it feasible for Meta (and other firms) to use this data.
Meta could at least pretend that they don't intend to capture people in their most intimate and vulnerable moments instead of slobbering on the sideline like "mm... Data..."
Well you gotta give out black mail material to the scam centers somehow. Otherwise they don't actually have leverage! Oh right... We don't want that happening.
I once read the manual of one of those small floor cleaning robots (Ecovacs Deebot U2 pro), and it basically said that by using it you were giving them a right to take pictures and send them to a remote server (to analyze issues or something like that)
What you should have read correctly was the Facebook terms of service. I still get strange responses when I tell people that I don't use WhatsApp. All Meta's properties are tainted such that I won't use them.
Are you conflating telemetry with literally live-streaming your life to Meta? Because that's what makes the statement weird.
edit 2: OK, I see what you mean. But I'm wondering if it should be possible to consent to this via T&C. Basically the same issue as with many online services, turned up to 11, sure. And it involves OTHER people, who have not consented.
Stuff like this used to be outrage fuel even when it was more of a social experiment, e.g. the documentary "We live in public" or the "Big brother" TV show. By now, I'm sure there have been millions of influencers doing similar things, but it's very much not considered normal?
Streaming to an unknown number of employees might be considered different from streaming to the public, sure.
But the core question here is whether there's informed consent, and, IMO also, if it should be possible to consent to this when the other party is a company like Meta and the pretext is not deliberately seeking attention (like influencers and streamers do).
Didn't watch it really, I just meant that at the time (early 2000s), the very idea of the show made people say it's unethical, even with consent.
It being scripted doesn't really change much, but yes, I think your tangent is correct.
I wanted to illustrate the shift in what's considered "normal", fully acknowledging that a scripted show catering to voyeurism is different from the situation discussed here. Completely different, just related.
The "outrage fuel" that I meant was that some people consider it immoral to incentivize people to overstep boundaries of privacy, decency and human dignity.
Staged or not, the selling point of the show was that it was about "regular people".
I'm aware that this small and short-lived public discussion seems antiquated today, that's why I mentioned it.
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification (and FTR I never watched either).
> some people consider it immoral to incentivize people to overstep boundaries of privacy, decency and human dignity
I'd be one of those people. Mr Beast is a cancer on our society and the fact that he is the most popular YouTuber says volumes about our society as a whole (again--never watched, but I've read enough). Though I imagine much of his stunts are staged as well, I think it just goes along with what you're saying about Big Brother.
I don't think this kind of public discussion is antiquated (assuming you're talking about this meta-discussion in this comment thread), I'd say it's just rare to see unless you look for it (HN for example). And I'd also argue that those who criticized pop culture were always in the minority (almost by definition). I think it's a good callout regardless.
Or maybe that people are wearing surveillance glasses while they fuck their partner? I know we need to push these companies to not be shitheads, but ultimately you can only be a shithead with the data people give to you (with the exception of things like Flock, who are shitheads with "public" surveillance data).
I know our culture is so supremely fucked at this point that wearing corporate surveillance goggles during intimate moments could somehow be normalized, but holy shit. How did people get so trusting?
well, this seems kinda like victim blaming, like when a bunch of celebrity phones got hacked and their nudes leaked to the public. Those were supposed to be for personal consumption/partners' eyes only, but they ended up on the web because some assholes decided the whole world was entitled to those photos. like, should those celebrities have uploaded their intimate photos the the cloud? probably not, but it doesn't mean that Google or Apple should be able to do whatever they want with those photos.
but i do agree that people just have become too trusting with our tech overlords, and its that trust that makes them continue to do shit like this over and over.
So already, this person wearing these glasses are already agree with that Meta can monitor them. They also probably trust Meta when they say "When the glasses are off, nothing is recording", for better or worse. So with that perspective in mind, it's not far fetched to assume these same people will willingly be naked into front of these recording devices they believe to be off.
Of course, anyone who opened a newspaper in the last 10 years or so would know better, but I can definitively see some people not giving a fuck about it.
There are "content creators" who intentionally record people without any sort of consent. At least when they point cameras, one can notice the cameras and take action. With these sorts of glasses, no one in view has consented, nor have they agreed to any sort of terms & conditions.
I never understood the appeal of upskirt pictures. But I think that taking videos of non-consenting participants/victims is the current version of the upskirt photo craze.
> I never understood the appeal of upskirt pictures
i think its a mixture of fetish (panty-fetish is a whole craze in some parts of the world...) and voyeurism, like the appeal _is_ the lack of consent. I recently saw on reddit there was a whole deluge of non-consensual porn being uploaded to a certain site and once that news broke, visits to that site spiked. I think that just says a lot about society as a whole.
I believe the tricky privacy and security issues around smart glasses (and other "personal" tech) can be navigated successfully enough by a thoughtful, diligent, responsive company.
Which is why I'd never touch a person tech device from Meta.
Their entire DNA is written to exploit their users for profit. In my judgement, they literally cannot and will never consider those issues as anything other than something to obscure to keep people unaware of the depth of the exploitation.
Unlikely. That would be extremely expensive in bandwidth, storage and compute. Deciding to build the product like that would be an engineering decision that i would fire someone for.
If you want to read more about how unsavory aspects of AI-training are off-loaded onto poor workers in third-world countries, would recommend Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". These workers are paid pennies an hour for unstable jobs that expose them to some horrific material.
The thing that really gets me is that internally there are 4 levels of data 1 being public domain shit (the sky is blue) up to 4 which is private user data, or something that is sensitive if leaked or shared.
I was told that by default all user data is level 4, as in if you do anything without decent approval, you're insta fired. There are many stories about at least one person a month during boot camp accessing user data and getting escorted out of the building within hours.
The part where I worked, in visual research, we had to jump through a years worth of legal hoops to get permission to record videos in public. We had to build an anonymisation pipeline, bullet proof audit trail, delete as much data as possible, with auto delete if something went wrong.
We had rigid rule about where that data could be stored and _who_ could access it. We were not allowed to share "wild" footage (ie data that might have the hint of anyone who hadn't signed a contract) for annotation because it would be given to a third party. THe public datasets we released all had traceable people, locations all with legal waivers signed.
Then I hear they just started fucking hosing private data to annotators to _train_ on? without any fucking basic controls at all? Just shows that whenever Zuck or monetsization want something, the rules don't apply.
I look forward to that entire industry collapsing in on it's self.
> I was told that by default all user data is level 4, as in if you do anything without decent approval, you're insta fired. There are many stories about at least one person a month during boot camp accessing user data and getting escorted out of the building within hours.
Given the size and nature of Meta's business, I would assume they would have better systems in place. SWEs should only have access to PII with explicit consent from users/customers e.g. support tickets.
Especially someone going through boot camp. Do they have access to de-anonymized user data during training?
Shit, at my last company I had to jump through so many hoops to access user data even with consent from the customer.
> I would assume they would have better systems in place.
They did when I was there. every time you got close to user data an "interstitial" would pop up asking you for a ticket number and justification. There were a bunch of tools that ran searching for people accessing user data.
For example in boot camp you'd create a page that pulled your profile details. this was to introduce the idea of "ents" (the API that manages the social graph) and mercurial. You could, if you wanted to then traverse your friend graph. as soon as you did that, it'd trigger one the automated rules and your account would be suspended and you'd be yeeted within hours.
The point was, if you were doing something legitimate it was fine, but if you stepped out of line, the automated systems would find out and fire you on the stop.
also as everything is done through remote dev boxes, _everything_ is recorded (along with all the files on your laptop, and the regular screenshots, plus all the browser history and keystrokes) Data exfiltraition is super hard, hence why there are hardly any "angry nerd extorts girl" type stories. Its not because meta isn't full of angry nerds, it because its really really difficult to get at user data without getting caught.
This is bogus. Meta doesn't have bootcampers escorted out of the building for accessing PII all the time. PII is locked down behind ACLs which are not auto-granted for just anyone asking.
have always wondered about this especially post Cambridge Analytica where Meta imposed really stringent requirements for API use even for personal things while it was blatantly obvious that internally it was a different story
But thats the thing internally it wasn't. The user dat controls were really quite good.
Its not a mistake that this data got into contractor hands, it was a decision that took lots of time, numerous legal reviews and signoff from Zuck himself.
One of the bigger commercial niches for smart glasses is filming POV porn, so it is hardly surprising that sort of content ended up in the moderation queue. The project should have planned to account for that use case.
And I do appreciate how awkward it is for Meta to admit that use case exists. Even in the Oculus Go days there were a bunch of polite euphemisms internally to avoid mentioning "our device has to ship with a browser so people can watch porn on it"
This is my question too. I get moderating things that people are posting. Being not familiar with the device and how it works, I'd assume that all footage is posted to the user's cloud account even if not publicly posted. This being cloud storage, Meta is "moderating" the footage to ensure CSAM or other restricted footage type is not being stored on their (Meta's) platform. That's my very generous take on it, not that I believe it
The article itself is ambiguous on this point: "At the time of the publication, Meta admitted subcontracted workers might sometimes review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI."
That could be moderation, or it could be labelling new examples for training/validation
This feels like an instance of weasel words. One can scarcely imagine any reason to do content moderation over people’s own private and personally consumed data.
The key phrase from the article is "review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI". I take that to mean the user took some action to actively share the footage with Meta (although knowing Meta, that could also mean they just didn't opt out)
This headline reminds me that “row” is one of these words I’ve been mispronouncing almost my whole life (I just learned the correct pronunciation this year). In this context row rhymes with cow,¹ now dough.
⸻
1. The first rhyme that came to mind was bow, but I realized there was a problem with that example.
It's a source of jokes in the UK at least. Most Americans don't know the difference. As the saying goes, "two countries separated by a common language."
That's amazing. I've also been mispronouncing it incorrectly my entire life. Thanks for this info! I'm a native English speaker and my language continues to surprise me.
At this scale, this sound like some insider joke contract made up only to make some hustle on the side capitalizing with stock options on the possibility of adhoc news trading bots glitching out on the keyword, here "x.com/sama" signals.
Yeah, I think it's more of a British English thing. It can also mean things like "in a fight". Like: "those two guys had a big row outside the pub the other night"
Why do they even need workers to classify naked content? They could filter some content prior to passing it to workers. They already have models to moderate explicit content.
I think Meta, like all companies, doesn’t want its subcontractors creating bad press for them.
So it doesn’t surprise me that Meta didnt renew/cancelled a contract that is a net negative for them. Arguing over the reason seems fruitless as no reason is needed per the terms of the contract (I assume since breach of contract wasn’t brought up by the sub).
Why? What's the difference between that and one of the many, many concealed camera options that you don't even notice? Just that it's noticeable? I don't think that's a good enough reason for yet-more-regulation. You're already being recorded everywhere you go in public by the authorities, and often by people standing right next to you unnoticed, so just act accordingly.
Because they will be popular and lots of people will buy them and use them all the time, leading to much more generalized surveillance than the concealed options that only a tiny tiny fraction of people would buy or use (and that we should also regulate)
> What's the difference between that and one of the many, many concealed camera options that you don't even notice?
The latter is literally illegal, at least in my country and I hope in any civilized country. If your point is that there's no difference between glasses and other forms of creep cams and the glasses should be illegal too, I concur!
The owner of the private space generally has authority to deny this already, there's no need for an additional law.
In the US at least, any private homeowner/renter can deny entry to their property, barring legal warrants and exceptional circumstances. A business can have a policy, and is generally legally protected as long as the policy is 1) equally applied, and 2) does not violate ADA... A court would have to weigh in if glasses are allowed or not for ADA... but I suspect there's already a case where a movie theater banned such glasses and they would probably(?) win, since such individuals could be expected to have non-recording glasses.
While technically "there is no expectation of privacy in public space." I do see a categorical difference between creating a stored, AI processed record of random people and "people can see what you do while you're out and about". That argument was valid before the mass automation we see now, but now it is more a fig leaf than an argument.
I do not remember every single person I see on the street. What makes it Ok for some guy who will also forget me to create a stored, persistent, AI processed set of videos of me?
I do find the idea of a glasses version of an action cam quite cool, but we are talking about smart glasses from Meta here, which is a different thing.
We are talking about a network of streaming cameras moving around, filming.These videos are stored, still without any specifics about a purpose or when the data will be deleted.
Besides, the filmed people do not choose or consent to be filmed, they might not even be aware that they are filmed. This is not like a phone where you at least have a chance to see it. The person doing the filming chooses to film. Or they might not be aware they are still filming. They might also be one update away from always on. If Amazon did it with Alexa, Meta can do it with the glasses.
Of course, there are CCTV, but, at least in Europe, their use is very specific. You have to be informed about who to contact about the data, as well as the purpose of the recording and how long it will be stored. There too the scope is much more limited than a random guy filming people without their consent.
The collection is one problem. The usage is another. We know they are used to train AI for unspecified use, generative AI? Something else? Under the GDPR the purpose of the collection should be known, but in that context it is extremely murky.
Based on existing technology, it would be possible for them to use facial recognition on these videos to track individuals, building profiles as they go, including location. These profiles could even be linked to the identity of people who have been tagged in photos before. While it might be extremely difficult now, it might be possible later. Making it possible might even be what the AI training is about. The data exist, and it is unclear how long it will be kept, or whether the purpose of processing will change.
It would be bad enough if it was any company, but we are talking about Meta, a company that brought us the Cambridge analytica scandal. A company that knowingly let its users be scammed by ads for profit. Profit over ethics has been part of their DNA from the start, not an exception.
The most important real use case of devices like this is as accessibility tech. Blind people everywhere are talking about devices like this.
It's the same with phones. I know blind people who have been harassed for holding their phones up to things as though they are taking pictures, but in fact they're using the camera on their phone to render signage legible to them, or having their phone (or a person on the other end) read it.
Banning this in a way that doesn't in practice cause problems for visually impaired people would be difficult. It might also be difficult to do in a way that doesn't harm, for instance, accountability for cops who are acting in public.
The impulse to "ban" is sometimes a bit naive imo.
It seems the issue is not the glasses users, but the people that the glasses users were having sex with. Did meta get their consent before redistributing this content?
I’d like to know the well paying and non-morally bankrupt companies. What company out there has a flawless reputation and is paying $400k/yr for senior eng in SV?
I think it's the excitement because it's a morally bankrupt organization. Some people really get off on knowing that the sum total of everything they do professionally is bent around making kids depressed to the point of suicide, and angry to the point of shooting up their school.
I assume that every single person who still works at Meta has done that personal calculus and decided that they fall on the "this is fucking amazing, important work" side.
I don't even trust the webcam electrical shutter of my laptop to the point I ran tape over it. Why people trust tech giants with their private data so much? What do they think of when they hear "private data"? Like trivial things such as their names, their mother's maiden names, what they ate this morning, posts they saw on Facebook? Because that have to be the case when I see someone flushing with an app on their phone and yells "Siri, play a seductive song to get me and my wife Julie in the mood? Turn it off after 10 minutes. Also don't record us during our hot love making!".
Meta said the contracting "did not meet (meta's) standards". I am sure that is true. meta's "standard" is not to reveal the illegal, immoral, unethical things meta does. No matter what the harm.
Maybe a company with those standards should not get our business. Oops, no wait, maybe they mean the Friedman Doctrine standards? In that case they are entitled to do any and every thing to make a profit. No matter what the harm.
I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.
So that when I say that they really do have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using their internal systems to violate user privacy, it's not because I'm eager to defend them. It's just true (at least, it was when I was there). There are internal systems dedicated to making sure you have access to what you need to do your job, and absolutely nothing else. All content you interact with through internal tools is monitored and logged. If you get caught trying to use whatever access your job gives you for anything other than doing your job, security immediately escorts you out of the building. This is drilled into new hires early and often. For everything Meta gets wrong, they really do take this seriously.
These contractors were hired to view this data. Your defense of Meta here doesn't make sense. Meta fired them for speaking out about the data Meta collects, not because they saw the data they were hired to look at.
Meta didn't fire individual independent contractors, they terminated a contract with a vendor. It's possible they did so because some of the vendor's employees spoke out but we don't know the real reason.
(I do think these smart glasses are super creepy and I'm not defending Meta's data collection practices.)
We know the course of events. We have brains and can reason. You really expect Meta to come out and say "Yep, we fired them because they whistleblowed"
> I'm not defending Meta's data collection practices
No but you certainly seem to be over here quibbling about epistemology in the defense of Meta
The problem is that your comment and the one you're responding to can both be true: Just because the rules are heavily enforced does not mean the right rules are in place, starting with the fact that Meta is collecting this data to begin with.
> starting with the fact that Meta is collecting this data to begin with.
But that can't be the problem. They're collecting the data that users send them. To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable.
And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?
> To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable.
> And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?
This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to "recognize it as untouchable"; they're all untouchable).
If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.
> This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to "recognize it as untouchable"; they're all untouchable).
No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect, you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.
> No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect, you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.
That was in reference to the original story, that human annotation is happening on videos that no one knew were getting reviewed. If you want to talk about not collecting at all, well:
> If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.
Ok, let’s see that consent form and how explicitly it states that random call center people will possibly look at anything you record. I’ll bet you a crisp $50 it was a form designed to be as click-through-worthy as possible, being sure to not trigger the “wait, should I do this?” reflex in users, and also not loudly disclosing that you could still use the device without agreeing, if you even can, while still technically “””disclosing””” this information. The tech world has turned consent into a fucking joke.
Right. The whole point is that click-through consent forms get users’ ”clear“ ”consent” legally, but not morally. They’re deliberately opaque about the implications (ask 10 users if they consider recording a video on a device voluntarily ‘sharing’ it with anybody and I’ll bet 9 will say no,) are pretty inscrutable to regular people, are designed to not raise suspicions like a social engineering attack, often mean not being able to use the product they just bought if they don’t consent, (which is manipulative as hell when you’re talking about inessential functionality like telemetry,) and extremely consequential. The only evidence you need for that is how pissed off people get when they find out what these companies actually do with that consent.
There's no allegation that these workers abused their access. The allegation is that their routine work reviewing footage included private content. The revelation is that USERS are using meta glasses non-consensually.
Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.
If Facebook were designed with a different set of incentives that prioritized the user, fostered positive engagement, and better respected individual's privacy and data sovereignty - setting a better standard for the whole industry - I feel there wouldn't be all this fuss today about banning social media accounts.
Indeed, on this one point, Meta has higher standards than the NSA used to - Snowden mentioned that employees tracked their current wives/girlfriends so often it unofficially got the codename LOVEINT.
Same for "Meta reads your E2E whatsapp messages". Meta does many things, is probably massively net negative for civilisation, but it doesn't do that.
Anecdotal of course, but I heard that this wasn't at all the case circa 2006 and that (then) FB employees would routinely read private messages and such. Obviously it wasn't a big company yet and probably didn't have those policies yet... (clearly the policies are there for a reason...)
That’s my recollection too - there were some high profile cases and so institutional safeguards were established. They very well may be at the forefront of it - however, it’s a side issue to what’s being discussed.
As someone who worked for a contractor which had Meta as a client, I disagree.
All advertiser support agents were given super-read on all profiles & pages, and I never once observed a CSR being questioned on their use of this access in any way.
> I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.
You're still on the koolaid, as many replies here accurately point out. Saying it's not because you're eager to defend them is lying to yourself, because you're smart enough to think of most of these replies yourself. Primarily the fact that these are contractors whose entire job is to watch smart glasses footage and the point your bringing up - even if we believe it at face value - is completely irrelevant to this post.
If you truly want to atone for your sins, you have a long way to go. I don't blame you for having worked there, I've worked at places that are only a little better than Meta (which is hard considering Meta is at the absolute bottom of the entire ladder, including Peter Thiel companies, thanks to Meta's sheer scale of carnage). But its time to completely come to terms with the reality, rather than stopping halfway to try and feel better about your resume.
Yea but no. Meta is a defense contractor that hires out to 3rd parties exactly to do this. so you guys don't get to do that, but a lot of other people are. I hope that helped you sleep at night while you were there. But yea, it all gets bought and sold at the end of the day.
The irony is meta wants to implement verification to protect kids. Meanwhile it's doing everything it can to exploit them most at every single level for profit and for the love of the game. Billions of dollars, the world's most advanced computers all dedicated for it
> At the time of the publication, Meta admitted subcontracted workers might sometimes review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI.
They just got fired for "piercing the veil". They committed the sin of bringing attention to the invasion of privacy.
If you don’t disable the glasses they could continue to share content. The article describes the glasses being left on a dresser and then sharing content of people without their consent, which could easily parallel into showing a sexual encounter or other privacy-sensitive scenarios.
Sure, and the same is true with my iPhone or my Olympus. Except the former encrypts the video and the latter isn't internet-connected.
The problem here (other than Meta being Meta) is people assuming Meta isn't permanently operating in bad faith. I'm just surprised anybody into tech to the extent they'd buy first-gen VR glasses would be surprised at Meta doing Meta things. That's all, I guess.
Unfortunately in today’s world where organizations are larger than many a country’s GDP, they really only have to face responsibility towards shareholders and maximizing profits is the thing they usually care about.
That's not what the Friedman Doctrine is, technically. It is that management should obey moral, ethical, and legal frameworks in the operation of the business for the benefit of its investors; and specifically NOT take actions which are outside of that narrow scope.
Does that include trying to influence moral, ethical, and legal frameworks to the benefit of the investors as well? Because if it does it is kind of a moot point.
Yes, although as the Koch Brothers point out in their book: you have to play by the rules that exist, not the rules you want.
If you read, eg, Buffet, he makes the point that a manager donating to a political cause, whether the Heritage Foundation or, God forbid, something as far right as the SPLC, makes that donation with money that otherwise accrues to the shareholders. The manager therefore creates an agency problem, where he might pursue his own interests at the expense of the owners.
If they are aligned, the manager can retain the earnings and create a dividend for the owners, such that they can then make the donation directly. If they are not aligned with the owners, they are redistributing wealth.
I am not surprised that the Left advocates for backdoor wealth redistribution, but I would prefer they be honest about it.
> I am not surprised that the Left advocates for backdoor wealth redistribution, but I would prefer they be honest about it.
I'm pretty sure it's not just the Left team that advocates for bribes (sorry lobbying) to politicians. I don't think that's a very commonly held understanding of wealth redistribution either...but this argument you present isn't very coherent which is somewhat expected so I guess keep on keeping on..
Is it illegal or immoral? Having Meta review this material has to be approved by users and has their consent.
There was an example in the article where a user’s glasses kept recording the user’s wife after he took them off. That’s bad but on the user, not Facebook.
Seems similar to a situation where someone takes nudes of someone without their consent and then sends them off to a lab to be printed. The lab isn’t doing anything illegal or unethical printing them when they ask the user “are these legal” and the user replies “yes.” Unless you want to stop photo printers from ever printing nudes, I think the responsibility is on the user, not the firm.
Facebook may have to rename itself into NaughtyBook or SpyBook
or Pr0nBook. They really want people to help them spy on other
people here - including their sex life. Expect new sexy videos
in 3 ... 2 ...
> and was a common practice among other companies.
Meta isn’t lying, you should assume other companies are doing it too, Tesla did it with their cameras, and assume others like any company has access to your camera, I would even assume CCTV cameras too. It’s why for anything sensitive, try to use open source stacks, you might lose some of the features, but it’s a needed compromise.
So I've never had a smart speaker in my house (Alexa, Apple, Google). I've just never been comfortable with the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Not because I thought these companies would deliberately start listening and recording in my house but because they will likely be careless with that data and it'll open the door for law enforcement to request it. Consider the Google Wi-fi scraping case from STreetView.
Or they might start scanning for "problematic" behavior, a bit like the Apple CSAM fingerprinting initiative.
So not one part of me would ever buy Meta glasses (or the Snap glasses before that). You simply don't have sufficient control over the recordings and big tech companies can't be trusted, as we've witnessed from outsourced workers sharing explicit images. And I bet that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would get these and trust Meta to manage the risks.
That is to say nothing of the new technological use cases that could develop from the already existing technology. They just haven’t been thought of developed yet.
Things like audio scanning your living space using those Alexa smart speakers with ultrasonics to get an image of not only everything in your space, but where you are in that space as well.
That technological use case only came out within the last five or so years, maybe closer to eight. Either way I could see that coming before it became a thing just because ultrasound imaging of your unborn child is a thing ultrasound imaging of the sea floor is a thing so why wouldn’t ultrasound imaging of your living space be a thing by a company who wants to know what you buy.
I never ever ever had Alexa I only ever had a Google home because I got it for free with GPM but I almost never used it because I hated the idea of it always listening.
I already regret Wi-Fi because they figured out now how to look through walls with that.
About the "they asked us to view it and then fired us for it". Having worked in their RL division(I don't work at meta anymore) this story is quite weird for two reasons:
1. Meta AFAIR paid/compensated people — contractors or recruited via ads — to have them submit their data. There are strict privacy protocol and reviews in place to distinguish data use in these cases vs gen public. This is not to say the process is perfect, but if these users are gen public, I would be very shocked.
2. Hiring contractors to submit data is a more controlled environment VS recruitment of gen pub via ads to submit data, but the former has more well understood privacy disclosures than the latter. This means in practice asking contractors to wear glasses and "move around their surroundings naturally and do things" goes well with basically the privacy practice "the data your are submitting we can view and use all of it for purpose X and nothing but X". BUT this framing is with ad based recruited people — which are general users who willingly submit data — is much much harder. My suspicion is they are running ad based recruiting in general public and while those users may have signed a privacy statement it is very surprising that they did not tighten the privacy practices around the use of the data and who has access.
I can find no incentivized people or contractors collecting data in this story. Just normal users who had their data siphoned up and reviewed by the contractors in this report. I don't understand where your view of this story is coming from given the article.
Meta cancels the contract with the outsourcing company they contracted to classify smart glasses content after employees at the company whistleblow about serious privacy issues with the content they were paid to classify.
"Fun" bonus fact: This isn't the first time Sama (the outsourcing company) has had these problems.
OpenAI had them classify CSAM, so Sama fired them as a client back in 2022. https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
We're 4 years on, 3 years since that report broke. Not a single thing has improved about how tech companies operate.
How else do you want companies to remove and prevent CSAM? It seems like you must have some human involvement to train and monitor.
It’s a terrible job, I wouldn’t want to do it, but someone needs to. Perhaps one day, AI will be accurate enough to not need it, but even then you need someone to process complaints and waivers (like someone’s home photos being inaccurately flagged).
> How else do you want companies to remove and prevent CSAM?
Different situation.
Facebook has to do CSAM moderation because it's a publishing platform. People will post CSAM on facebook, so they must do moderation.
And "just don't have facebook" isn't a solution because every publication of any sort has to deal with this problem; Any newspaper accepting mail has this problem. (Albeit to a much more scaled down version) People were nailing obscene things to bulletin boards for all recorded history.
---
In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.
The downside would be "worse LLMs" or "LLMs being created later", which is a perfectly acceptable compromise.
---
This is not to say that genuine content flagging firms have no reason to curate such data & build tools to automatically flag content before human moderators have to. (But then they also shouldn't be outsourcing this and traumatizing contract workers for $2-3 an hour)
But OpenAI is not such a firm. It's a general AI company.
> traumatizing contract workers for $2-3 an hour)
Is there an hourly rate at which this should be acceptable?
There's no dollar amount but proper support during and after employment is a minimum, and a large paycheque will both offset some of the human cost and make it easier for people to be pushed to quit the job; Such that they aren't doing the job for too long.
The current support systems for police in this subject are already insufficient. Facebook's treatment of their moderation staff is abhorrent. The point of including the pay figure is to further illustrate just how damning this subcontracting practice is.
There is labor that is necessary for our societies to function, but a direct threat to the people doing the work. Someone has to do it, and it should be seen as a great service to society and rewarded accordingly. In a just world, we would be paying significantly extra for threats to health that come from work, in the one we are currently in we use threat of worse harm instead.
Someone has to do it, and it should be seen as a great service to society and rewarded accordingly
You are just too priviledge to understand people: many people would be glad do do it for the minimum wage, I would fight to have that oportunity (I live in west EU).
We have coal miners destroying their bodies and lungs, cobalt mining slavery, cocoa nut child labour and de facto slavery, sex workers, CPS investigators, first responders, and doctors with high rates of suicide…
Not only is there an acceptable market rate for trauma, it’s sometimes competitive and requires licensing.
There is one difference between first responders/doctors and the other classes (and the moderators under discussion here)
First responders/doctors/CPS investigators see the worst but they also have days where they make a difference. Save a life or multiple lives. I'm sure it's a huge part of what makes the job bearable, and to some meaningful.
I'm not discounting your point about high rates of suicide either. If anything, when you take away any good days, you're left, as a content moderator, with just seeing the worst of the world day in, day out, with nothing to make it meaningful. I'd suggest that's something we as a society should not tolerate as being an acceptable trade for the ability to share cat photos.
>First responders/doctors/CPS investigators see the worst but they also have days where they make a difference. Save a life or multiple lives. I'm sure it's a huge part of what makes the job bearable, and to some meaningful.
You think miners don't make a difference or save lives?
> You think miners don't make a difference or save lives?
Do you think miners mining is saving lives in the same way that doctors saving lives is saving lives?
To continue the parents point, do you think miners derive a deep or powerful satisfaction from some of their mining work which might offer some of the heavy cost it has on them physically and emotionally?
I think miners save more lives (through the supply of gas, energy, battery materials, pesticides, fertilizers, solar panel minerals, and ultimately electricity, computing materials, etc) than doctors do.
And I think what prevents miners to "derive a deep or powerful satisfaction from some of their mining work which might offset some of the heavy cost it has on them physically and emotionally" is not anything inherent in their work, but people thinking that only direct affect should be prestigious and satisfying and underapreciating the thankless background work to keep the lights on.
Same way people sneer at cleaning people or teachers and their meagre salaries and no respect, or domestic labor.
Emergency Department^ doctors, what do they make? give people who have to review the worst humanity has to offer and pay them that. and while we're at it, ambulance personnel should get a huge pay bump. Take it from nurses' pay.
^ i originally said "triage doctors" but i meant the resident ER doc.
Why take from other workers when it can be siphoned from upper management and shareholders?
you're right, it's a personal failing that i must snip at nurses whenever the word appears in my head. Apologies.
ER triage is usually done by a nurse, at least in England.
Rookie police officers in my country are paid 2500 euro per month and they have to deal with the underbelly of society.
They have access to better counselling and are ostensibly trained for the job. But there are still suicides.
OpenAI runs ChatGPT where users submit text and photos and OpenAI generates and sends text and photos back. So users could be submitting CSAM. And yes, OpenAI could be generating CSAM. It's not limited to being a pull operation. What am I missing?
What you're missing is that they're "separate" parts of the business.
The core Facebook product is users' posts. It's not possible to separate those two. Nor can one downscale Facebook in a way that stops the problem; The aforementioned "Facebook has had this problem because it's a problem we've had since the medieval days of a town bulletin board"
With OpenAI, the way ChatGPT was built and user submissions are separate things. The GPT models could have been have been trained without this mess. OpenAI could be more selective in what data it scrapes.
While OpenAI cannot stop users sending god knows what in their prompt text and images, OpenAI can choose to not interact with that data beyond the minimum legal retention, by e.g. not using it for training the next generation of models. This would massively downscale the problem.
AI output is another such problem, where A) Maybe this'd be less of a problem if they didn't recklessly include a bunch of CSAM into the training data by accident, and B) LLMs just aren't the kind of fundamental human right that "having a public opinion" is. It would be fine if they were less good, invented years later, or even not invented at all.
The main counterargument to the latter has been the "But China is inventing evil AI" spiel, which is fairly weak. If China builds an orphaned baby crushing machine, we do not need to build an orphaned baby crushing machine of our own. (And the reality is that China is only chasing AI so aggressively because the west does. They're reasonable people, it would have been entirely possible for both the west and China to make a mutual "no orphan crushing" agreement and just accept slower rollout of technology. This is exactly what has been done with human genetic engineering, and China did in fact enforce these norms.)
> In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.
You've just thrown the garbage over your fence. Instead of OpenAI contracting Sama to classify CSAM, the "Curators" have to.
At the end of the day, someone needs to classify it. If you say the platforms need to, and they miss some, and it ends up in OAI training data, OAI is going to be the entity paying the prices.
Not really different. They would need to report CSAM if it is ever uploaded by a user.
Any website that allows user to upload videos needs some sort of service that can identify and report CSAM.
> In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.
This is of course incredibly illegal, but megacorps (by valuation) and oligarchy members are above the law so who cares. I assume there could be a regulatory framework which can make this legal for an extremely specific purpose, but there is zero change that OpenAI was part of this/abiding by this in 2022, absolutely none.
CSAM exists on social media because they are so large that it's not possible to moderate them effectively. To me this is a a no-go. If a business is so large that it cannot respect laws, it needs to be shut down.
The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server. CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers.
Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.
Having tens of thousands of decentralized, independently moderated servers would result in an order of magnitude more CSAM being shared than having a few oligopolies. The abusers just have to find the weakest link, and that weakest link will have fewer resources than multi trillion dollar companies. You would also likely not hear many news stories about it, because they won't have the expertise to even detect it.
That's a tradeoff you can choose to make, but you need to enter into it with open eyes.
> Having tens of thousands of decentralized, independently moderated servers would result in an order of magnitude more CSAM being shared than having a few oligopolies.
It doesn't matter how many are shared but how many are viewed. On a small server community policing works just fine, bad actors are easier and faster to block and to top it off, the smaller reach of each server makes it unprofitable to target multiple serves, fish for their weak points. etc - the dirty jobs become unprofitable which is what matters most.
With the help of AI, small players can do a better job at removing CSAM.
> With the help of AI, small players can do a better job at removing CSAM.
Chicken/egg. How do you expect that AI to be able to detect CSAM without appropriate training, which requires appropriately classified training data?
This isn't an either or. X isn't the only place CSAM is, there are gazillions of other sources. It I'd probably the easiest place to find it tho.
>That's a tradeoff you can choose to make, but you need to enter into it with open eyes.
No it's not. It's certainly not my choice. No one asked me if it's okay for Facebook to distribute CSAM because you insist it would be worse if it didn't.
I don't really care if you classify it as a choice or not. One set of actions results in more CSAM than others. Just because you don't like the implication of there being tradeoffs doesn't mean there aren't tradeoffs.
You classified it as a choice, not me.
> or not
So you don't care that you're wrong? Not a surprise coming from someone handwaving away the mess Meta made.
In what regard is it incorrect that a single, larger entity that is at least notionally committed to avoiding the existence of any specific type of content on their platform is more likely to successfully avoid the existence of that type of content on their platform than smaller entities with less resources?
Now consider that some of those smaller entities might not be even notionally interested in avoiding the existence of that specific type of content on their platform, and are small enough for regulators to be unaware of its existence?
Trying so hard not to say child porn.
What your opponent is saying is, "there are mutually exclusive A and B". A being widespread CSAM and B being somebody need to look at CSAM to remove it.
Can you elaborate on what exactly is wrong there? Do you see the third alternative C and it's not the "whole choice"? Or are you saying A or B do not exist and therefore there's no choice? Please name C, or tell us why A or B don't exist (or aren't acceptable), or explain your view that doesn't fit into these options.
Some people are not okay with actively facilitating harm to people, even if inaction results in harm to other people. See: the trolley problem. This is totally okay, but the point made above is that
>That's a tradeoff you can choose to make
is not correct: It is a tradeoff that one specific person can choose to make, but not one that I or we can choose to make, because we don't control facebook. Mark Zuckerberg controls facebook. He alone can choose to make that tradeoff, or not, on behalf of society.
He can't do it alone because Facebook is under US jurisdiction.
Yes, facebook is under US jurisdiction.
Yes, he alone can make the choice. Not you or I.
> Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server.
And therefore anything that is remotely questionable will be blocked. Not just kiddie porn. Pissed off a local business with a bad review? Blocked.
Child abusers are twisted people, and I really don’t care much what happens to them, but making it impossible for them to use the internet means sterilizing the whole thing.
>And therefore anything that is remotely questionable will be blocked. Not just kiddie porn. Pissed off a local business with a bad review? Blocked.
This is already the case. There is a lot of lawful, useful, medical or educational content that is actively censured on social medias because they include words or pictures of organs while same social medias actively encourage and develop algorithm to push underage girls (and possibly boys) posting pictures of themselves in sexual poses, attires and context.
Big tech and social media networks love and push CSAM, they just hide the genitals but the content really is the same.
> a lot of lawful, useful, medical or educational content
Like what? It’s all there on Wikipedia, and for all of Wiki’s faults, I have trouble imagining what kind of useful, educational, medical information you will find on social media that is better than that.
You don't necessarily reach the same population and some people, believe it or not, are afraid, unable or have difficulties to read yet are online.
Afraid to read Wikipedia? Unable to? What hellhole are you describing?
20% of adults in the USA read below a 5th-grade level.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
You are just saying that physical life doesn't function. People get banned or removed from all sorts of informal and formal groups all the time because of completely illegitimate reasons. That's just human politics embedded so deeply in our psychology it will never go away. They simply move to different groups - and similarly online they can move to a different federated server.
But that's not possible in today's oligopoly of social media. An invisible algorithm will ban you, and there is no way back, and few alternates. Big Social Media is way worse from a sanitizing perspective than some federated social media.
I have no deep problem with exclusion; as you say, that’s human nature and unfixable. Making mods personally legally liable for everything that appears on their board is just insane. How many minutes are acceptable for them to see and review content? Or does everything have to be pre-approved?
I know a local blog that pre-approves every comment. He lets a lot of stuff through, because he lets people be dumbasses. If he were personally liable, the conversation would get a lot quieter.
Also, if you've gone from zero to one of the biggest coroporations in the country, and have billions to throw at the 'metaverse', I find it hard to believe that removing CSAM is where you struggle.
No. It's a legitimately difficult problem because there not all naked pictures of kids are illegal. The false positive problem is bad for business, but also generally bad even if the big social media was benevolent.
Moderators need to actually understand the context of the picture/video, which requires knowledge of culture and language of the people sharing the pictures. It's really difficult to do that without hiring moderators from every culture in the world.
But small federated servers can often align along real world human social networks, so it's easier for the server admin to understand what should be removed.
The amount of CSAM online is completely out of control. There's already nation-level and sometimes international cooperation to catch any known images with perceptual hashing (think: the opposite of cryptographic hashing) as well as other automated and manual tools.
My impression is it would take Manhattan-Project levels of effort and funds to come close to "solving" this problem, especially without someone getting on a watchlist for having a telehealth-first primary care provider insurace plan and asking for advice on their toddler's chickenpox.
Human review? Meta has small armies worth of content moderators already that tend to burn out with psychological problems and have a suicide rate where you're probably better off going to fight in a real war. (This includes workers hired by Sama in Kenya, to link back to the OP.)
I will reluctantly grant Meta that they're up against a really hard problem here.
>I will reluctantly grant Meta that they're up against a really hard problem here.
It is a problem of their own making.
They created the concept of CSAM?
No, being so large that it's such a problem for them.
Seems like your blame is quite misplaced.
It certainly is not.
Yeah, I agree with you. Of course, it’s not Meta’s blame that the CSAM actually exists, but calling the problem of filtering it extremely difficult at Meta’s scale is a problem that is easily solvable but fundamentally requires changing how the platform works, and would likely require a lot more money to be spent.
Exactly, no one put a gun to Meta's head and ordered them to make Facebook.
So what would satisfy you?
Them to actually undertake meaningful efforts to reduce the child porn on their platform. Crazy, I know.
Isn't this more about disincentivizing the posting of it in the first place by increasing the chances of getting banned? Once you have to remove it, it's too late.
> Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server.
So if you want to send someone to jail, just talk your way into joining their server, upload some illegal content, and report them for it?
> Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.
Why would someone join a server with active moderation if they wanted to share CSAM with their social media friends?
They would seek out one of those servers that was set up specifically for those groups, where it was known to be a safe space.
This is what many people don't get about federated networks: The people in those little servers DGAF if you block them. They want to be surrounded by their likeminded friends away from the rules of some bigger service like Facebook or Twitter. Federated social media is the perfect platform for them because they can find someone who set up a server in some other country with their own idea of rules and join that, not be subject to the regulations of mainstream social media.
right, and you have other users on fediverse that notice that server leaking, and if the content is bad enough, report the service to an authority. Having all of the pedophiles and other creeps on a tiny subset of servers, isloated islands of them; well, that ought make enforcement easier.
It also makes it relatively easy to avoid, as server admins share blocklists. I know a dozen servers offhand that i'd block if i ran another fediverse server.
Fosstodon fediverse server doesn't have this issue, for example.
I replied this way because the way you wrote it, it sounds like an indictment of a system that's designed to avoid advertisers getting user profiles, over all else.
The problem is the people who participate in this (the illegal and immoral), and not "the network."
> well, that ought make enforcement easier.
Because of course the people congregating to do illegal stuff online are going to do it in your jurisdiction where prosecution is guaranteed
Yep. If you cannot both safely and legally provide the thing you are selling you are no longer a legitimate company you are a criminal enterprise profiting off of exploitation.
If car manufacturers cannot bring car related deaths to zero, they too should no longer be legitimate companies.
A better comparison would be that if a car company can’t meet preexisting crash/safety standards, they need to shut down.
These are pretty clear laws established by a democratic government with a pretty good record for rule of law.
Sure, then they can go demand said standards for social media platforms including expected amount per N post, just as car companies are not expected to have car fatality rates be 0.
The fact is that simple scale means that there will always be something, no matter how abhorrent. Small scale doesn't change this, it just concentrates it.
Do car companies sell cars without air bags, or seat belts? What about cars that haven't been crash tested? What happens to them if they don't do this do you think?
Would you drive a car optimized for profit that didn't have those safety features? How about on a highway? Daily?
We're talking about CSAM right? Which all platforms remove proactively, build models to remove and essentially always respond to when informed.
Demanding some perfect immediate magic response there is the equivalent of asking car manufacturers to prevent all deaths.
Do they remove it and respond really though?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f...
Here it's said that it's the users fault. I disagree. Completely. Most of these companies, staying on topic many of these companies have laid off the employees who tried to prevent things like this,
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/meta-layoffs-ai.html
https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-ai-safety-institute-will-be...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dqd54wpEfjKJsJBk6/xai-s-grok...
The list of not even trying anymore goes on and on. Mechahitler was also fun
When FORD dngaf with the Pinto and Corsair( like tech companies do not gaf), they deservedly got this same level of contempt/demand for oversite. A dude named Ralph Nader went on a huge crusade about it. And they got a ton more oversite, safety requirements, etc put on them.
So yes, yes, let's do like we did with cars.
I voted for Ralph Nader a few times, until he stopped appearing on ballots for whatever reason. For this reason, and many others. I don't remember any negative press about him, either. maybe he got out when mudslinging became defacto in elections.
I am not sold on the federated thing to solve CSAM or similar issues.
Actually companies should be bullied about privacy and copyright so they are unable to share any contents at a scale with 3rd parties. Thus they have to solve it on their own and forced to realize their business model is shit.
>CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers.
No it isn't. Small servers often don't have paid security or moderation, are run in anonymous fashion, and have no profit motive that can even be used to incentivize them against hosting illegal content.
That's visible when it comes to porn. There's a million bootleg porn sites on the internet hosted that show off illegal content. The only site that was ever forced to curate its content was Pornhub, because they're sufficiently large, work in a jurisdiction that has laws and can be held accountable. From a content moderation standpoint going after a million web forums is an absolute pain in the ass compared to going after Facebook.
Which is the first argument any decentralization advocate always brings up (and they're correct to do so), censorship is harder and evasion of law enforcement easier when dealing with a network of independent actors.
What stops Humbert Humbert from joining hundreds of small servers?
You now have 100x the total human effort for mods to review and ban him.
The one thing I will throw out here that I can add to this conversation is that I think the government simply does not care, either. It's mainly only in regard to mass public outrage, or when someone is a political target that it gets dealt with from a law enforcement level.
Anecdotally, when I was a young adult I was a volunteer moderator for a large forum. We got reports of CSAM several times a month and had a process for escalating and reporting it to the FBI IC3 - we retained a lot of information about the users that posted it.
One of the administrators of the website mentioned to me that over the years since the inception of the forum, they'd reported almost a thousand incidents of CSAM distribution - and the FBI followed up with them to get information less than 10 times in total.
That seems reasonable though. The FBI isn’t interested in busting one perv in a closet, they want the ones making the stuff.
The FBI is interested in busting perverts in closets. That's often how they work their way up the "supply chain" when it comes to CSAM. Consumers lead them to distributors, who lead them to producers.
A fair point. But it still seems reasonable that only about 1% of suspect posts lead to a formal inquiry. Doesn’t mean they aren’t taking the report into account. You have to figure that they already have leads on most of them.
Do we have to figure that?
Do we really have to give the benefit of the doubt to the agency that was literally running one of the largest CSAM distribution outlets in the world for years as a honeypot?
If you want ro argue that the FBI is a fundamentally flawed agency that on balance is a net negative, I won’t fight you that hard. But during the civil rights struggle, they were the only force that could be trusted at all.
Of course, that was 60 years ago.
Wasn't the FBI doing some pretty questionable stuff with regards to MLK during said civil rights movement?
Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
I guess "other forces were worse" can certainly be true, but then how low are we holding the bar?
As I said just above, I am not a fan. They are nor completely evil, though.
Yes, that was 60 years ago. No one involved at that time is still there - and in fact, most of them have passed. I don't know why you think there's a shred of relevance there.
If I didn’t mention it, someone would complain that I was ignoring the one time they were on the side of the angels.
> Banning people is way easier on small servers
Big “citation needed” here. My bet is that Meta have far better moderation systems than any other social media company on the planet.
when i ran a fediverse server for myself and 3 people, but allowed public signups if someone came by; it was very easy to ban people, and very easy to null-route entire swaths of the fediverse, because i didn't want their content on my service.
That's more what i got from that pull-quote. I know a company that has hundreds of individual forums, and those are all moderated quickly and correctly (last i heard). They're moderated so effectively they often get DDoS by Russian IPs for banning users for scam posts from that country.
These workers prepare data for AI. I don't think the need for them will go away anyway soon.
Westeners are too expensive and unwilling to do it. AI is a business model that requires poverty and extreme inequality to function. Yes other businesses do that too, but they don't claim it's a solution to everything while it actually has very special human requirements.
This is the swedish newspaper report quoted in the sumitted article: https://www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/metas-ai-smart-glasses-and-data-...
There are more reasons why these jobs are located in developing countries, it's not only the price of labour. Imagine for a second, these annotations would have to be done in the US. The public outrage would probably be audible across the Atlantic. This is another form of imperialism.
I agree that there’s no good way to do this other than like… no user generated content ever or just ban everyone for their baby pics and etc….and nobody can post them.
Granted the latter is kinda happening distantly on YouTube where you can’t talk about “ suicide “ so everyone self censors…
t’s a terrible job
you must be extremy priviledge to think that way, even as EU I would be glad to do it for the minimum salary. For your info, a terrible job for most human is a job that is extremly hard physically at the point of destroying your health. That said, like many people, I would find it much more interesting than many boring job. [If someone read this, please hire me for this, in exchange I would work the 5 first hour for free]
I don't understand why their size is an excuse for them to not remove and prevent CSAM.
Couldn't you just use multiple classifiers? Like "is a minor" classifier coupled with "is sexual content" classifier?
How would you test that that works?
There are databases of known child porn available for this kind of work.
> Sama (the outsourcing company)
If script writers gave the company this name in a fictionalization it would be rejected as too on the nose.
Isn't it more that tech companies are just more high profile and integral to political and social landscape than older companies; but reviewing the current political zeitgeist, they're in lockstep to what some, if not all, would just call fascism?
They are literal defense and offense contractors. They hang out at the Pentagon. They sell political data to sway elections. They give gifts to leaders for favors. It is technofacism.
Yes and no.
Safety and user pain is a part of tech which seems largely ignored, even on sites like HN.
I really have no idea why this ignorance prevails; commenters seem to genuinely be unaware of what goes on in Trust and Safety processes.
I mean, most users would complain about content moderation, but their experience would be miles ahead of what most of humanity enjoys when it comes to responsiveness.
I believe this lack of knowledge, examples, and case history is causing a blind spot in tech centric conversations when it comes to the causes of the Techlash.
Unfortunately this backlash is also the perfect cover for authoritarian government action - they come across as responsive to voters while also reigning in firms that are more responsive to American citizens and government officers than their own.
Companies of the 20th century certainly weren't more ethical. (Though a few select tech companies seem to be intent on proving the opposite.)
But it's not really a fascism thing. While fascism does love the oppression of women, and the current crop of fascists have a notable connection to the Epstein case, this is a lot more boring.
Sam Altman's not a fascist, he's a wet noodle who sucks up to the Trump administration for money. He's not even good at it. The way his company handled CSAM does cast aspersions on Altman & the accusations from his sister, but all other evidence suggests he's just a moron acting recklessly. Not identifying the problem ahead of time, and acting poorly in response.
In the case of Meta. We know who Zuckerberg is. The company got it's start as, in crude terms, a sex pest website. The original "Facemash" website forcibly taken down by Harvard. This is not some new consequence of this turn to fascism, Zuckerberg's always been like this, and the actions taken against him were clearly not enough to avoid the company culture following his precedent.
> Companies of the 20th century certainly weren't more ethical.
Disagree, not on average. There was a non-trivially higher % of decisions made based on "what's good for the customer" or "what's good for the product" or "I would be ashamed to do this" and a lower % of decisions made based on "what maximizes profit in the next quarter". I think that is more ethical. To take it to an extreme, using slave labor because it's good for the customer is more ethical than using slave labor to maximize profit in the next quarter.
Sounds about right. If you know someone who uses these smart glasses, it's important not to tolerate them whatsoever. Don't speak with them, interact with them. I wouldn't even recommend being in their presence.
There's a name for these people, glassholes
> I wouldn't even recommend being in their presence.
Great! Now do people with smart TVs and people with smart phones
I'll grant you smartphones, but smart TVs usually don't have cameras/microphones. The problem with smart glasses is that they constantly capture video and upload it to $VENDOR like in this case.
Don’t we already hate the invasive ad tech industry?
Aren’t there already posts and articles on how to ensure that TVs don’t farm information from us?
I want to get the Oakley Meta ones so I can record bike rides easier, should I not be tolerated?
Wear a GoPro on your helmet like the rest so you can be shunned.
If you insist on the glasses, wear a fake GoPro.
A mostly-solitary sporting event (or one where you know all the other participants and can get their consent to record beforehand) seems like a reasonable use of these sorts of glasses. I wouldn’t personally give consent just as a sort of privacy reflex, but it really depends on your social circle.
No. Fuck off
Are GoPros acceptable?
I went to the beach, jet skiing. One of the guys had Meta glasses.
I liked the footage.
The problem is there's places where you'd get noticed and probably removed for filming with a gopro, or even a smartphone. My local "wellness center" and pools have you deposit your smartphone before you exit the changing area into the showers.
The danger with creep glasses is that many people don't know what they are, they can be used with the LED disabled so they're perfect for filming people without their knowledge, and "these are prescription glasses" has a good chance of working. In a place with a "no recording devices" policy, "could you put that gopro away" has wide social acceptance/support, "take those glasses off" less so.
I get the problem.
I don't think ostracizing users of Meta Glasses (or Google Glass before that) is the answer.
But I get the problems of hidden cameras.
>I liked the footage.
So did the Meta's LLM training model as well as the contractor across the globe reviewing your footage.
People with GoPros are more likely to send, resulting in entertainment value.
Also make sure to avoid people with smartphones and places with video surveilence.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
There's also nothing stopping us from stigmatizing the use of smartphones in public. Even a slight discouragement of it would be progress. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
I think smartphones are a lost cause. Even at the gym, there are guys in the locker room taking pics of themselves in the mirror. Meanwhile I'm walking ass-naked out of the shower. There is just no sensitivity to appropriate time and place anymore.
> Meanwhile I'm walking ass-naked out of the shower
is this a Western/American thing about no shame regarding one's body in public places in the presence of other people, be it male or female?
I can never imagine this happening in my country.
Which part? The shirtless posing for the camera in the locker room mirror, or the stepping out of the shower naked?
I mean it's a locker room... it's a space meant for changing clothes and showering.
> stepping out of the shower naked?
i'd never step out to a place where a stranger could see me, without a towel or wet shorts covering my private bits.
Man I don't even want to know how many photos I'm in.
And the people who act annoyed because you are disturbing their film set as if they are James Cameron are the funniest.
Is this an honest argument? Surely you can think of how glasses might be ... in a different league than the two items you mention?
Unless you are using these during sex I consider a microphone to be 10x more privacy intruding than a camera.
Security cameras afaik usually don't record audio, but all phones can. And they don't even need to be pointed in any specific direction.
Many security cameras have the ability to record audio. Depending on where you are, it might be illegal to use it. All the cams I have purchased have it. That would include ReoLink and a recommended model from the Frigate site.
Because person wearing glasses usually can move and video surveillance cameras usually can't? If that's not it then spell it out for me, please. Also, why would i be deceptive in this discussion? I feel like I missed some ideological conflict.
Imagine someone pulling up a smartphone and then recording everything that happens around them. Contrast that with someone wearing smart glasses and doing that exact same thing.
On a separate note, (and this is a genuine question) are you by any chance aware the term Non-consensual intimate imagery / NCII?
I am beginning to suspect that the average HN goer isn’t aware of the scope and scale of the Trust and Safety problem.
Someone pulling up a smartphone on me would feel hostile because it's violating a social contract. Maybe I'd feel betrayed and attacked if it turned out someone was recording me using glasses, but I don't know, I don't care about dashcams and this is not that much different. I imagine it feels bad and scary for women when someone takes creepshots of them, and this tech does open opportunities for that. Maybe that would be enough for me to hate glasshats if I had a bit of empathy. But isn't the genie already out of the bottle with 'deep nude' models available for everyone forever?
No, i don't think I've heard about NCII before, and Trust and Safety sounds like some corporate PR whitewashing term to me.
1> Genie out of the bottle: Yes and no. Nudification is a growing problem, non consensual intimate imagery is a current problem. AI related tools for image gen still require some amount of skill, and that is reducing its blast radius.
2> NCII: Years ago, I was scoping reddit to identify content that was harmful from an Indian perspective. By far the largest category was NCII. This could range from morphed images, to intimate images reshared, to images from their socials reshared in thirst communities. This included images of underage children.
Removing NCII is rough. First the victim has to be willing to come forward and get over the shame. Then they have to deal with a near impossible system and get someone to help. The more conservative the nation, the less likely the support networks will be forgiving or helpful. Finally, once the data is out there, it’s going to be reflected across multiple sites which are in international jurisdictions.
This is one of the situations where, I fear, your life is simply hosed.
Korea is another country which has a severe problem with NCII, and I believe they even instituted laws against deepfaked porn.
>PR whitewashing: Heh. Well thats the division that deals with online safety, fraud, content moderation, policy and the rest. I believe eBay was the first firm to use that term when they were handling fraud.
Have you heard the term non consensual intimate fantasies? I've heard it's an even bigger problem.
Well, you would fortunately be wrong. Fantasies are commonplace and well studied in society, psychology and even in the law.
The issue is when you go from fantasy to actually enacting it, which is usually when you earn the epithet of “Creep”.
Also, why make a throwaway for this line? I take it you haven’t heard of NCII?
They don't care. Or they refuse to realize that tech isn't the solution to it, but an amplifier of it's scale.
Can tell you that my urge to take photos/record drastically dips around other people. Particularly if it were meant for any sort of commercial exploitation. Stephenson called people wired for max indiscriminate data collection/processing "gargoyles". Personally I prefer glassholes.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-borg-of...
I admit it's hard to care for what you people can't even articulate
Why dont you state what it is you think isn’t clear?
That way we can figure out what it is that’s confusing or unclear and then see it you find it has any moral moral significance.
Not meaningfully. Anyone holding a smartphone might be recording you. You’d better avoid them if you don’t want to be recorded.
Most people don't run around holding out their smartphone directly in front of them. It has to be pointed at the subject, and tends to be obvious.
Smart glasses, however, are always aimed at whatever the wearer is looking at. They may or may not be recording (note the reports of people hiding the LED indicators), and at a fair distance could easily be mistaken for a normal pair.
The general populace is much more likely to notice the former recording rather than the latter.
I've seen people keep their phone in their shirt pocket. The only reason it tends to be obvious is that most people aren't trying to be covert. Those aren't the ones you should be worried about.
Don’t forget that audio recording is a thing. The camera doesn’t have to be pointed at you to violate your privacy. Plus I bet you walk past 90% (or more) of all cameras without ever noticing them. You only notice someone’s glasses because they are novel, not because they are more likely to record you.
This line makes a valid point. People record strangers all the time. In an obvious way or trying to be sneaky.
Just because you don’t notice it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
However, this is still a different thing than smart glasses which can further be segmented into who designed the smart glasses.
Someone has to hold smartphone and point it at you.
If somebody was pointing a camera on me all the time? I would definitely avoid them.
People do that on my subway all the time.
It's the camera of their smartphone.
Not sure if it's ON though.
They point the camera of their smartphone directly at you?
At everything on the opposite side of the screen, typically. There is a recording light for Meta glasses, but not one for iPhones, for example: the "recording" indicators are all user-side there.
When I'm on public transport, people generally face their phones in such a way that they'd only be filming your feet or the floor... They don't hold them up at head height in such a way that other people would be recorded. Maybe it's just a cultural thing
Examples:
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/922925/view/three-people-...
https://www.istockphoto.com/nl/foto/happy-woman-using-smart-...
Usually they are pointed at the ground when they're reading off them.
Mark Zuckerberg and disrespect for user privacy.
Name a more iconic duo.
Whistleblower protection is key for any working society. Only dictatorships and oligarchies protect criminals while shaming whistleblowers.
I do not care which country the outsourcing company is in. When criminals go global, protection whistleblowers should go global too.
> the content they were paid to classify
Well, yeah. If I went straight to the press to trash the reputation of my client's product, rather than communicating internally first to help them proactively address the issues, I would expect to get fired.
Not that I am remotely interested in defending Meta, or optimistic that they would proactively address privacy issues. But I don't feel that sympathetic to the outsourcing company here either.
I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I'm just going off what is said and not said in the article. If I were whistleblowing about something like this, I would take pains to describe what measures I took internally before going public. I didn't see any of that here.
EDIT: Look, to be clear, I think it's bad that naive or uninformed people are buying video recorders from Meta and unintentionally having their private lives intruded on by a company that, based on its history, clearly can't be trusted to be a helpful, transparent partner to customers on privacy. I think it's good that the media is giving people a reminder of this. I think it's good that the sources said something, even though the consequences they suffered seem inevitable. But to me, there is nothing essentially new to be learned here, and I don't know what can or should be done to improve the situation. I think for now, the best thing for people to do is not buy Meta hardware if they have any desire for privacy. Maybe there are laws that could help, but what should be in the laws exactly? It's not obvious to me what would work. I suspect that some of the reason people buy these products is for data capture, and that will sometimes lead to sensitive stuff being recorded. What should the rules be around this and who should decide? Personally I don't know.
What makes you think the outsourcing firm didn't raise these concerns in email or meetings? You think these people wanted to lose jobs and income? That's irrational.
Why reflexively defend a massive tech corporation caught repeatedly violating the law?
> Why reflexively defend a massive tech corporation caught repeatedly violating the law?
Because it is the natural expansion of the quote attributed to Upton Sinclair:
> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires
There are transgressions severe enough that your duty to stop them is heavier than your responsibility to "the reputation of your client's product." Amazing this needs to be stated, frankly.
Beautifully and succinctly put.
You would help conceal a crime against the people just because it's good business??
Congratulations, you have a bright future in politics and/or tech CEOing.
More like a bright future being someone's fall guy. The ignorance to think that a large tech giant like Facebook would give a crap about any of those concerns makes this person too politically inept to make it anywhere
Proactively address the issues? Are you kidding me? This is not an issue that just happened to slip by; it is 100% by design. You're fooling no one.
What specifically do you mean? It is by design that smart glasses see the things happening in front of their users? Yes, it is. That is why people buy them.
Huh. There you go again, thinking everyone else is an idiot. Capture of video data of users by Meta is never acceptable. It would not be acceptable for any phone, and it is not acceptable for any glass, ever.
Saving the data for any purpose other than allowing users to access it is bad enough; allowing Meta employees or contractors to view personal videos is on a whole new level.
I don't know why people buy smart glasses. Maybe they buy them for video capture. If so, the videos go to Meta's servers and Meta might do things with them. They might be criticized for not reviewing them in certain cases. That's one reason why I wouldn't buy Meta smart glasses.
If only we had the technology to record video without sending it to Meta's servers.
Main character syndrome? Lots of people seem to act like they are in a 24/7 live stream with 50 million followers.
The main issue here is Facebook employees viewing users' private video streams (including of user nudity) without the users' knowledge.
The secondary issue is that it's generally frowned upon to make your employees view nudity in the workplace. Are there extenuating circumstances here? No, we have no evidence there are any extenuating circumstances here.
> "We see everything - from living rooms to naked bodies," one worker reportedly said.
> Meta said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.
Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.
> > Meta said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.
> Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.
It's total fantasy. I've worked in big tech. Casually uploading and providing company/contractor access to non-redacted intimate photos or pictures of the insides of people's homes vaguely "for the purpose of improving the customer experience" would not pass even a surface-level privacy or data-protection review anywhere I've ever worked. Do Meta even read what they are saying?
I’ve worked in trust and safety - for me this is stupid, but well below the threshold of impossible.
Hell, I know of a major firm that decided QA was not needed for their trust and safety process.
Another common issue will be SEA Arabic speakers tasked with labelling Middle Eastern Arabic content, because accents and cultural dialects are not a thing.
I’ve had people at FAANG firms cry on my shoulder, because they couldn’t get access to engineering resources at their own firms.
There was the famous case of meta executives overriding T&S policy and telling them that what content was news worthy during the Boston bombing. On a separate incident, they told their team that cartel violence was not newsworthy when friends in London complained about it.
When you say this is fantasy, what do you mean precisely?
What I mean is: I'm not sure what they base their statement that it's "a common practice among other companies" on. Unlikely they are talking about their peer companies. I suppose if you read the sentence literally, there surely exist one or more "other companies" in the broad universe of "other companies" that routinely do this kind of stuff. But I wouldn't think anywhere serious.
I mean, given this happened and it was sent to Sama it seems pretty clear that the images being generated from this were being sent to a labelling pipeline somewhere.
There’s probably an opt out / opt in clause somewhere in the terms and conditions, which makes it feasible for Meta (and other firms) to use this data.
Meta could at least pretend that they don't intend to capture people in their most intimate and vulnerable moments instead of slobbering on the sideline like "mm... Data..."
Well you gotta give out black mail material to the scam centers somehow. Otherwise they don't actually have leverage! Oh right... We don't want that happening.
With lawyers like these, …
Read Careless People it tells you all you need to know.
I once read the manual of one of those small floor cleaning robots (Ecovacs Deebot U2 pro), and it basically said that by using it you were giving them a right to take pictures and send them to a remote server (to analyze issues or something like that)
> What you should have read correctly was the Facebook terms of service.
I'm reminded of Bo Burnham's wonderful "That Funny Feeling" from 2021's "Inside", where one of the absurd examples he offers in the lyrics is:
How is this weird? People have been trading away their privacy for the smallest possible gains in convenience for a long time.
Are you conflating telemetry with literally live-streaming your life to Meta? Because that's what makes the statement weird.
edit 2: OK, I see what you mean. But I'm wondering if it should be possible to consent to this via T&C. Basically the same issue as with many online services, turned up to 11, sure. And it involves OTHER people, who have not consented.
Stuff like this used to be outrage fuel even when it was more of a social experiment, e.g. the documentary "We live in public" or the "Big brother" TV show. By now, I'm sure there have been millions of influencers doing similar things, but it's very much not considered normal?
Streaming to an unknown number of employees might be considered different from streaming to the public, sure.
But the core question here is whether there's informed consent, and, IMO also, if it should be possible to consent to this when the other party is a company like Meta and the pretext is not deliberately seeking attention (like influencers and streamers do).
edit, clarified social media comparison
Tangential but I always thought reality shows like Big Brother were mostly staged. Like not scripted, but definitely not natural.
Yes, they are "lightly scripted."
Didn't watch it really, I just meant that at the time (early 2000s), the very idea of the show made people say it's unethical, even with consent.
It being scripted doesn't really change much, but yes, I think your tangent is correct.
I wanted to illustrate the shift in what's considered "normal", fully acknowledging that a scripted show catering to voyeurism is different from the situation discussed here. Completely different, just related.
The "outrage fuel" that I meant was that some people consider it immoral to incentivize people to overstep boundaries of privacy, decency and human dignity.
Staged or not, the selling point of the show was that it was about "regular people".
I'm aware that this small and short-lived public discussion seems antiquated today, that's why I mentioned it.
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification (and FTR I never watched either).
> some people consider it immoral to incentivize people to overstep boundaries of privacy, decency and human dignity
I'd be one of those people. Mr Beast is a cancer on our society and the fact that he is the most popular YouTuber says volumes about our society as a whole (again--never watched, but I've read enough). Though I imagine much of his stunts are staged as well, I think it just goes along with what you're saying about Big Brother.
I don't think this kind of public discussion is antiquated (assuming you're talking about this meta-discussion in this comment thread), I'd say it's just rare to see unless you look for it (HN for example). And I'd also argue that those who criticized pop culture were always in the minority (almost by definition). I think it's a good callout regardless.
Tagging, tagging, tagging. That is what "improving...": teaching its LLMs and diffusion models.
Meta is a defense contractor. They see the world a little differently from everyone else.
Not sure which is worse here - that Meta are recording video from customers' smart glasses, or that they are firing people who talk about it.
The latter, as they can't even claim to have done so by accident, or "it was just bug".
wow, right call, this all feels wrong, and hardly anyone knows
Everything having to do with Meta, starting with its very name, has been evil from the start.
Did you know that after being an angel investor in facebook, Peter Thiel personally mentored Zuckerberg for couple of years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP7Z_Eqxhxk
Or maybe that people are wearing surveillance glasses while they fuck their partner? I know we need to push these companies to not be shitheads, but ultimately you can only be a shithead with the data people give to you (with the exception of things like Flock, who are shitheads with "public" surveillance data).
I know our culture is so supremely fucked at this point that wearing corporate surveillance goggles during intimate moments could somehow be normalized, but holy shit. How did people get so trusting?
well, this seems kinda like victim blaming, like when a bunch of celebrity phones got hacked and their nudes leaked to the public. Those were supposed to be for personal consumption/partners' eyes only, but they ended up on the web because some assholes decided the whole world was entitled to those photos. like, should those celebrities have uploaded their intimate photos the the cloud? probably not, but it doesn't mean that Google or Apple should be able to do whatever they want with those photos.
but i do agree that people just have become too trusting with our tech overlords, and its that trust that makes them continue to do shit like this over and over.
People upload videos of themselves having sex for anyone to see. Some people just don’t care about privacy the way you do.
Can I squeeze in the just a teeny tiny bit of… why the hell are you wearing an internet camera on you while naked and/or having sex?
… although I really extend that to why are you wearing an internet connected camera that is obviously going to be monitored by Meta.
So already, this person wearing these glasses are already agree with that Meta can monitor them. They also probably trust Meta when they say "When the glasses are off, nothing is recording", for better or worse. So with that perspective in mind, it's not far fetched to assume these same people will willingly be naked into front of these recording devices they believe to be off.
Of course, anyone who opened a newspaper in the last 10 years or so would know better, but I can definitively see some people not giving a fuck about it.
There are "content creators" who intentionally record people without any sort of consent. At least when they point cameras, one can notice the cameras and take action. With these sorts of glasses, no one in view has consented, nor have they agreed to any sort of terms & conditions.
I never understood the appeal of upskirt pictures. But I think that taking videos of non-consenting participants/victims is the current version of the upskirt photo craze.
> I never understood the appeal of upskirt pictures
i think its a mixture of fetish (panty-fetish is a whole craze in some parts of the world...) and voyeurism, like the appeal _is_ the lack of consent. I recently saw on reddit there was a whole deluge of non-consensual porn being uploaded to a certain site and once that news broke, visits to that site spiked. I think that just says a lot about society as a whole.
The Ray-Ban stays ON during sex!
even when i had very expensive designer prescription eyewear i never wore them during sex, that's just weird.
Voyeurism
I believe the tricky privacy and security issues around smart glasses (and other "personal" tech) can be navigated successfully enough by a thoughtful, diligent, responsive company.
Which is why I'd never touch a person tech device from Meta.
Their entire DNA is written to exploit their users for profit. In my judgement, they literally cannot and will never consider those issues as anything other than something to obscure to keep people unaware of the depth of the exploitation.
I wonder under what circumstances footage from the glasses are uploaded for classification.
Probably this is people asking the glasses something about what they see and the glasses uploading video for classification to generate an answer.
People think it is "just AI" so are not very concerned about privacy.
Always by default I assume.
Unlikely. That would be extremely expensive in bandwidth, storage and compute. Deciding to build the product like that would be an engineering decision that i would fire someone for.
Well, say a frame per second. Also: how many of these are there today?
You can discard them after tagging+using them for learning.
If you want to read more about how unsavory aspects of AI-training are off-loaded onto poor workers in third-world countries, would recommend Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". These workers are paid pennies an hour for unstable jobs that expose them to some horrific material.
Which examples did they cover in the book?
Ex Meta employee here (yes you are right to boo):
The thing that really gets me is that internally there are 4 levels of data 1 being public domain shit (the sky is blue) up to 4 which is private user data, or something that is sensitive if leaked or shared.
I was told that by default all user data is level 4, as in if you do anything without decent approval, you're insta fired. There are many stories about at least one person a month during boot camp accessing user data and getting escorted out of the building within hours.
The part where I worked, in visual research, we had to jump through a years worth of legal hoops to get permission to record videos in public. We had to build an anonymisation pipeline, bullet proof audit trail, delete as much data as possible, with auto delete if something went wrong.
We had rigid rule about where that data could be stored and _who_ could access it. We were not allowed to share "wild" footage (ie data that might have the hint of anyone who hadn't signed a contract) for annotation because it would be given to a third party. THe public datasets we released all had traceable people, locations all with legal waivers signed.
Then I hear they just started fucking hosing private data to annotators to _train_ on? without any fucking basic controls at all? Just shows that whenever Zuck or monetsization want something, the rules don't apply.
I look forward to that entire industry collapsing in on it's self.
> I was told that by default all user data is level 4, as in if you do anything without decent approval, you're insta fired. There are many stories about at least one person a month during boot camp accessing user data and getting escorted out of the building within hours.
Given the size and nature of Meta's business, I would assume they would have better systems in place. SWEs should only have access to PII with explicit consent from users/customers e.g. support tickets.
Especially someone going through boot camp. Do they have access to de-anonymized user data during training?
Shit, at my last company I had to jump through so many hoops to access user data even with consent from the customer.
> I would assume they would have better systems in place.
They did when I was there. every time you got close to user data an "interstitial" would pop up asking you for a ticket number and justification. There were a bunch of tools that ran searching for people accessing user data.
For example in boot camp you'd create a page that pulled your profile details. this was to introduce the idea of "ents" (the API that manages the social graph) and mercurial. You could, if you wanted to then traverse your friend graph. as soon as you did that, it'd trigger one the automated rules and your account would be suspended and you'd be yeeted within hours.
The point was, if you were doing something legitimate it was fine, but if you stepped out of line, the automated systems would find out and fire you on the stop.
also as everything is done through remote dev boxes, _everything_ is recorded (along with all the files on your laptop, and the regular screenshots, plus all the browser history and keystrokes) Data exfiltraition is super hard, hence why there are hardly any "angry nerd extorts girl" type stories. Its not because meta isn't full of angry nerds, it because its really really difficult to get at user data without getting caught.
This is bogus. Meta doesn't have bootcampers escorted out of the building for accessing PII all the time. PII is locked down behind ACLs which are not auto-granted for just anyone asking.
have always wondered about this especially post Cambridge Analytica where Meta imposed really stringent requirements for API use even for personal things while it was blatantly obvious that internally it was a different story
But thats the thing internally it wasn't. The user dat controls were really quite good.
Its not a mistake that this data got into contractor hands, it was a decision that took lots of time, numerous legal reviews and signoff from Zuck himself.
One of the bigger commercial niches for smart glasses is filming POV porn, so it is hardly surprising that sort of content ended up in the moderation queue. The project should have planned to account for that use case.
And I do appreciate how awkward it is for Meta to admit that use case exists. Even in the Oculus Go days there were a bunch of polite euphemisms internally to avoid mentioning "our device has to ship with a browser so people can watch porn on it"
Why is there even a “ moderation queue”? Isn’t this people’s private recordings?
This is my question too. I get moderating things that people are posting. Being not familiar with the device and how it works, I'd assume that all footage is posted to the user's cloud account even if not publicly posted. This being cloud storage, Meta is "moderating" the footage to ensure CSAM or other restricted footage type is not being stored on their (Meta's) platform. That's my very generous take on it, not that I believe it
Yes but also we don't want people live streaming murder and suicide, so there's detection and moderation in place.
Private recordings aren't public live streams.
I’m betting this is going to some ML / Data labelling pipeline.
Yeah, moderation may instead be labelling in this case. Its likely the same type of firm handles both sorts of work on behalf of FAANG
Sounds plausible.
We could also toss vibe coded mess on top of this and probably get closer to the truth.
The article itself is ambiguous on this point: "At the time of the publication, Meta admitted subcontracted workers might sometimes review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI."
That could be moderation, or it could be labelling new examples for training/validation
This feels like an instance of weasel words. One can scarcely imagine any reason to do content moderation over people’s own private and personally consumed data.
How do you moderate what people do? You send someone to stop them from having sex because it was streamed to your servers?
The key phrase from the article is "review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI". I take that to mean the user took some action to actively share the footage with Meta (although knowing Meta, that could also mean they just didn't opt out)
This headline reminds me that “row” is one of these words I’ve been mispronouncing almost my whole life (I just learned the correct pronunciation this year). In this context row rhymes with cow,¹ now dough.
⸻
1. The first rhyme that came to mind was bow, but I realized there was a problem with that example.
You will appreciate: https://youtu.be/uZV40f0cXF4
:)
It's a source of jokes in the UK at least. Most Americans don't know the difference. As the saying goes, "two countries separated by a common language."
That's amazing. I've also been mispronouncing it incorrectly my entire life. Thanks for this info! I'm a native English speaker and my language continues to surprise me.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/row#dictionary-en...
Row as in rowdy
https://archive.ph/ubWba
Bigtech and the race to the bottom of the ethical pitt. We can still go lowerrrr!
Meta ended its contract with Sama
At this scale, this sound like some insider joke contract made up only to make some hustle on the side capitalizing with stock options on the possibility of adhoc news trading bots glitching out on the keyword, here "x.com/sama" signals.
Absolutely no way I'd buy anything from Meta that has a camera built-in.
What does "in row" mean? For us non-English English speakers.
“a noisy argument or fight”, from the Cambridge dictionary. I believe it’s primarily used in British English.
To add to the other replies, when it's an argument, it's pronounced like "how" not like "no".
Hence "rowdy"
I never made that connection before!
A row in this context is like a dispute or argument
It's also pronounced r-ow (ow, as in I hurt myself) in this context, instead of r-oh, in case that helps the OP
"in a row"; the headline eliminated the "a" which contributes to the possible confusion.
in an argument
"row" means "an argument"
Yeah, I think it's more of a British English thing. It can also mean things like "in a fight". Like: "those two guys had a big row outside the pub the other night"
I always remembered it from Phantom Tollbooth "a DREADFUL Rauw"
Why do they even need workers to classify naked content? They could filter some content prior to passing it to workers. They already have models to moderate explicit content.
I think Meta, like all companies, doesn’t want its subcontractors creating bad press for them.
So it doesn’t surprise me that Meta didnt renew/cancelled a contract that is a net negative for them. Arguing over the reason seems fruitless as no reason is needed per the terms of the contract (I assume since breach of contract wasn’t brought up by the sub).
Unfortunately this news will have no impact, neither on customer behavior, neither on policy, neither on Meta's behavior.
Not a fan of regulation in general, but would love to see a ban of cameras on glasses used in public spaces.
Why? What's the difference between that and one of the many, many concealed camera options that you don't even notice? Just that it's noticeable? I don't think that's a good enough reason for yet-more-regulation. You're already being recorded everywhere you go in public by the authorities, and often by people standing right next to you unnoticed, so just act accordingly.
“You're already being recorded everywhere you go in public by the authorities”
You are the frog being boiled.
Because they will be popular and lots of people will buy them and use them all the time, leading to much more generalized surveillance than the concealed options that only a tiny tiny fraction of people would buy or use (and that we should also regulate)
> What's the difference between that and one of the many, many concealed camera options that you don't even notice?
The latter is literally illegal, at least in my country and I hope in any civilized country. If your point is that there's no difference between glasses and other forms of creep cams and the glasses should be illegal too, I concur!
The problem is if it becomes socially normalized. If you're using a concealed camera and someone notices, you're a creep/asshole.
Yet more regulation? We have regulation for these glasses already?
Aren’t there countries that make it mandatory to blot out faces of people on videos if they didn’t consent?
If anything they should be banned in private spaces, like if someone wearing them enters someone's home etc.
There is no expectation of privacy in public.
The owner of the private space generally has authority to deny this already, there's no need for an additional law.
In the US at least, any private homeowner/renter can deny entry to their property, barring legal warrants and exceptional circumstances. A business can have a policy, and is generally legally protected as long as the policy is 1) equally applied, and 2) does not violate ADA... A court would have to weigh in if glasses are allowed or not for ADA... but I suspect there's already a case where a movie theater banned such glasses and they would probably(?) win, since such individuals could be expected to have non-recording glasses.
While technically "there is no expectation of privacy in public space." I do see a categorical difference between creating a stored, AI processed record of random people and "people can see what you do while you're out and about". That argument was valid before the mass automation we see now, but now it is more a fig leaf than an argument.
I do not remember every single person I see on the street. What makes it Ok for some guy who will also forget me to create a stored, persistent, AI processed set of videos of me?
I do find the idea of a glasses version of an action cam quite cool, but we are talking about smart glasses from Meta here, which is a different thing.
We are talking about a network of streaming cameras moving around, filming.These videos are stored, still without any specifics about a purpose or when the data will be deleted.
Besides, the filmed people do not choose or consent to be filmed, they might not even be aware that they are filmed. This is not like a phone where you at least have a chance to see it. The person doing the filming chooses to film. Or they might not be aware they are still filming. They might also be one update away from always on. If Amazon did it with Alexa, Meta can do it with the glasses.
Of course, there are CCTV, but, at least in Europe, their use is very specific. You have to be informed about who to contact about the data, as well as the purpose of the recording and how long it will be stored. There too the scope is much more limited than a random guy filming people without their consent.
The collection is one problem. The usage is another. We know they are used to train AI for unspecified use, generative AI? Something else? Under the GDPR the purpose of the collection should be known, but in that context it is extremely murky.
Based on existing technology, it would be possible for them to use facial recognition on these videos to track individuals, building profiles as they go, including location. These profiles could even be linked to the identity of people who have been tagged in photos before. While it might be extremely difficult now, it might be possible later. Making it possible might even be what the AI training is about. The data exist, and it is unclear how long it will be kept, or whether the purpose of processing will change.
It would be bad enough if it was any company, but we are talking about Meta, a company that brought us the Cambridge analytica scandal. A company that knowingly let its users be scammed by ads for profit. Profit over ethics has been part of their DNA from the start, not an exception.
We're talking about exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRELLH86Edo
The most important real use case of devices like this is as accessibility tech. Blind people everywhere are talking about devices like this.
It's the same with phones. I know blind people who have been harassed for holding their phones up to things as though they are taking pictures, but in fact they're using the camera on their phone to render signage legible to them, or having their phone (or a person on the other end) read it.
Banning this in a way that doesn't in practice cause problems for visually impaired people would be difficult. It might also be difficult to do in a way that doesn't harm, for instance, accountability for cops who are acting in public.
The impulse to "ban" is sometimes a bit naive imo.
> Meta's glasses have a light in the corner of the frames that is turned on when the built-in camera is recording.
Because nobody knows how to put a dot of nail polish on an led they don't want seen, right?
There is some detection for obstructing the LED. It's a little more clever than you assume.
Meta is so evil
Evil is the current meta
It seems the issue is not the glasses users, but the people that the glasses users were having sex with. Did meta get their consent before redistributing this content?
A question for the HN folks who work for Meta - Is the pay so good that it makes it worth working for such a morally bankrupt organization?
There are countless large, high paying, morally bankrupt companies out there. It’s no mystery that people continue to work for them.
I’d like to know the well paying and non-morally bankrupt companies. What company out there has a flawless reputation and is paying $400k/yr for senior eng in SV?
There certainly is no middle ground between morally bankrupt and flawless!
I think it's the excitement because it's a morally bankrupt organization. Some people really get off on knowing that the sum total of everything they do professionally is bent around making kids depressed to the point of suicide, and angry to the point of shooting up their school.
I assume that every single person who still works at Meta has done that personal calculus and decided that they fall on the "this is fucking amazing, important work" side.
It still blows my mind that anyone would volunteer to don these smart glasses, it's almost like some alien mindset to me.
Its a reverse They Live!
Eh, it is the same mindset as the Elon fanboys who constantly rave about Full Self Driving (Supervised). Plenty of that around here.
And the five or six HNers that bought the Apple goggles.
It would be refreshing for once to see the top comment to such articles to be
“Yes, we all know it, and we keep those app installed regardless“.
I don't even trust the webcam electrical shutter of my laptop to the point I ran tape over it. Why people trust tech giants with their private data so much? What do they think of when they hear "private data"? Like trivial things such as their names, their mother's maiden names, what they ate this morning, posts they saw on Facebook? Because that have to be the case when I see someone flushing with an app on their phone and yells "Siri, play a seductive song to get me and my wife Julie in the mood? Turn it off after 10 minutes. Also don't record us during our hot love making!".
Meta said the contracting "did not meet (meta's) standards". I am sure that is true. meta's "standard" is not to reveal the illegal, immoral, unethical things meta does. No matter what the harm.
Maybe a company with those standards should not get our business. Oops, no wait, maybe they mean the Friedman Doctrine standards? In that case they are entitled to do any and every thing to make a profit. No matter what the harm.
[edit: add last two sentences]
I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.
So that when I say that they really do have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using their internal systems to violate user privacy, it's not because I'm eager to defend them. It's just true (at least, it was when I was there). There are internal systems dedicated to making sure you have access to what you need to do your job, and absolutely nothing else. All content you interact with through internal tools is monitored and logged. If you get caught trying to use whatever access your job gives you for anything other than doing your job, security immediately escorts you out of the building. This is drilled into new hires early and often. For everything Meta gets wrong, they really do take this seriously.
These contractors were hired to view this data. Your defense of Meta here doesn't make sense. Meta fired them for speaking out about the data Meta collects, not because they saw the data they were hired to look at.
Meta didn't fire individual independent contractors, they terminated a contract with a vendor. It's possible they did so because some of the vendor's employees spoke out but we don't know the real reason.
(I do think these smart glasses are super creepy and I'm not defending Meta's data collection practices.)
This is some real weird defense going on here.
> but we don't know the real reason.
We know the course of events. We have brains and can reason. You really expect Meta to come out and say "Yep, we fired them because they whistleblowed"
> I'm not defending Meta's data collection practices
No but you certainly seem to be over here quibbling about epistemology in the defense of Meta
The problem is that your comment and the one you're responding to can both be true: Just because the rules are heavily enforced does not mean the right rules are in place, starting with the fact that Meta is collecting this data to begin with.
> starting with the fact that Meta is collecting this data to begin with.
But that can't be the problem. They're collecting the data that users send them. To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable.
And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?
> To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable.
> And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?
This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to "recognize it as untouchable"; they're all untouchable).
If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.
> This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to "recognize it as untouchable"; they're all untouchable).
No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect, you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.
> No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect, you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.
That was in reference to the original story, that human annotation is happening on videos that no one knew were getting reviewed. If you want to talk about not collecting at all, well:
> If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.
Ok, let’s see that consent form and how explicitly it states that random call center people will possibly look at anything you record. I’ll bet you a crisp $50 it was a form designed to be as click-through-worthy as possible, being sure to not trigger the “wait, should I do this?” reflex in users, and also not loudly disclosing that you could still use the device without agreeing, if you even can, while still technically “””disclosing””” this information. The tech world has turned consent into a fucking joke.
I can't say anything about the consent form. The privacy policy for the glasses is here: https://www.meta.com/legal/ray-ban-stories/facebook-view-pri...
It incorporates by reference the general Facebook privacy policy. The relevant subsection is here: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy?subpage=4.subpage.12...
Facebook reserves the right to share any information they have about you with their contractors, for purposes including but not limited to:
- investigating suspicious activity
- improving the functionality of their products
- providing technical infrastructure services
- analyzing how their products are used
- conducting research
Right. The whole point is that click-through consent forms get users’ ”clear“ ”consent” legally, but not morally. They’re deliberately opaque about the implications (ask 10 users if they consider recording a video on a device voluntarily ‘sharing’ it with anybody and I’ll bet 9 will say no,) are pretty inscrutable to regular people, are designed to not raise suspicions like a social engineering attack, often mean not being able to use the product they just bought if they don’t consent, (which is manipulative as hell when you’re talking about inessential functionality like telemetry,) and extremely consequential. The only evidence you need for that is how pissed off people get when they find out what these companies actually do with that consent.
There's no allegation that these workers abused their access. The allegation is that their routine work reviewing footage included private content. The revelation is that USERS are using meta glasses non-consensually.
Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.
If Facebook were designed with a different set of incentives that prioritized the user, fostered positive engagement, and better respected individual's privacy and data sovereignty - setting a better standard for the whole industry - I feel there wouldn't be all this fuss today about banning social media accounts.
It's likely they wouldn't be as profitable too though, and their mandate to shareholders is to make number go up.
Indeed, on this one point, Meta has higher standards than the NSA used to - Snowden mentioned that employees tracked their current wives/girlfriends so often it unofficially got the codename LOVEINT.
Same for "Meta reads your E2E whatsapp messages". Meta does many things, is probably massively net negative for civilisation, but it doesn't do that.
It's kind of weird to have a subthread about "Meta doesn't do these other unrelated things" in a thread about a thing Meta is doing.
They don't boil live kittens either, I believe. Doesn't seem relevant though.
Anecdotal of course, but I heard that this wasn't at all the case circa 2006 and that (then) FB employees would routinely read private messages and such. Obviously it wasn't a big company yet and probably didn't have those policies yet... (clearly the policies are there for a reason...)
That’s my recollection too - there were some high profile cases and so institutional safeguards were established. They very well may be at the forefront of it - however, it’s a side issue to what’s being discussed.
As someone who worked for a contractor which had Meta as a client, I disagree.
All advertiser support agents were given super-read on all profiles & pages, and I never once observed a CSR being questioned on their use of this access in any way.
It’s often the case that employees are much more locked down than contractors, simply because the company is more liable for employee actions.
Except when Zuck decides it's profitable to violate the rules.
The man is without any redeeming qualities.
> I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.
When did FaceBook make the world not-worse?
@jaidhyani I hate to burst your bubble, but there are major privacy violations here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226756
@jaidhyani I hate to burst your bubble, but there are major privacy violations here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47225130
You're still on the koolaid, as many replies here accurately point out. Saying it's not because you're eager to defend them is lying to yourself, because you're smart enough to think of most of these replies yourself. Primarily the fact that these are contractors whose entire job is to watch smart glasses footage and the point your bringing up - even if we believe it at face value - is completely irrelevant to this post.
If you truly want to atone for your sins, you have a long way to go. I don't blame you for having worked there, I've worked at places that are only a little better than Meta (which is hard considering Meta is at the absolute bottom of the entire ladder, including Peter Thiel companies, thanks to Meta's sheer scale of carnage). But its time to completely come to terms with the reality, rather than stopping halfway to try and feel better about your resume.
Yea but no. Meta is a defense contractor that hires out to 3rd parties exactly to do this. so you guys don't get to do that, but a lot of other people are. I hope that helped you sleep at night while you were there. But yea, it all gets bought and sold at the end of the day.
The irony is meta wants to implement verification to protect kids. Meanwhile it's doing everything it can to exploit them most at every single level for profit and for the love of the game. Billions of dollars, the world's most advanced computers all dedicated for it
Meta and their employees have spent years breaking the public’s trust over and over again. Why should we trust anything they say?
> At the time of the publication, Meta admitted subcontracted workers might sometimes review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI.
They just got fired for "piercing the veil". They committed the sin of bringing attention to the invasion of privacy.
Were/are video recordings from the glasses advertised as being E2E encrypted?
Mostly, I'm just surprised that anybody would be naive enough to take a camera provided by Facebook into a sexual encounter and expect anything else.
If you don’t disable the glasses they could continue to share content. The article describes the glasses being left on a dresser and then sharing content of people without their consent, which could easily parallel into showing a sexual encounter or other privacy-sensitive scenarios.
Sure, and the same is true with my iPhone or my Olympus. Except the former encrypts the video and the latter isn't internet-connected.
The problem here (other than Meta being Meta) is people assuming Meta isn't permanently operating in bad faith. I'm just surprised anybody into tech to the extent they'd buy first-gen VR glasses would be surprised at Meta doing Meta things. That's all, I guess.
Yeah, why the hell is Meta wa5tching people's videos either? Why PAY a company to invade our privacy and watch our videos? It's flipping BIZARRE.
Isn’t that obvious from the article? They’re labeling content for training AIs, something which is happening all over the world constantly.
Yep gotta bake in that personal data into generative models so it can be reproduced later for profit.
Why generative? Or has it been decided that only generative models are “AI”?
What kind of model "reproduce"s things later for profit that is not generative?
Classification? Image recognition? Surveillance? There’s plenty of non-generative use cases, not everything needs to be generative.
Surveillance models.
And then people are shocked that no one wants the data centers for this shit built in their backyard.
Unfortunately in today’s world where organizations are larger than many a country’s GDP, they really only have to face responsibility towards shareholders and maximizing profits is the thing they usually care about.
That's not what the Friedman Doctrine is, technically. It is that management should obey moral, ethical, and legal frameworks in the operation of the business for the benefit of its investors; and specifically NOT take actions which are outside of that narrow scope.
Does that include trying to influence moral, ethical, and legal frameworks to the benefit of the investors as well? Because if it does it is kind of a moot point.
Yes, although as the Koch Brothers point out in their book: you have to play by the rules that exist, not the rules you want.
If you read, eg, Buffet, he makes the point that a manager donating to a political cause, whether the Heritage Foundation or, God forbid, something as far right as the SPLC, makes that donation with money that otherwise accrues to the shareholders. The manager therefore creates an agency problem, where he might pursue his own interests at the expense of the owners.
If they are aligned, the manager can retain the earnings and create a dividend for the owners, such that they can then make the donation directly. If they are not aligned with the owners, they are redistributing wealth.
I am not surprised that the Left advocates for backdoor wealth redistribution, but I would prefer they be honest about it.
> I am not surprised that the Left advocates for backdoor wealth redistribution, but I would prefer they be honest about it.
I'm pretty sure it's not just the Left team that advocates for bribes (sorry lobbying) to politicians. I don't think that's a very commonly held understanding of wealth redistribution either...but this argument you present isn't very coherent which is somewhat expected so I guess keep on keeping on..
I value correctness in my argumentation, not popularity. What part of it don’t you understand?
Is it illegal or immoral? Having Meta review this material has to be approved by users and has their consent.
There was an example in the article where a user’s glasses kept recording the user’s wife after he took them off. That’s bad but on the user, not Facebook.
Seems similar to a situation where someone takes nudes of someone without their consent and then sends them off to a lab to be printed. The lab isn’t doing anything illegal or unethical printing them when they ask the user “are these legal” and the user replies “yes.” Unless you want to stop photo printers from ever printing nudes, I think the responsibility is on the user, not the firm.
Is there explicit approval? Or is it buried in the legal agreements?
Legal agreements are explicit.
Lol
Why would anyone trust Meta with their personal data! After a while it's just natural selection.
i don't think smart glasses itself is a good idea
this may be the greatest title i've seen on hacker news in a decade
who on earth is buying these things and why
People have sex with their glasses on?
I'm guessing at least some of these cases are where the glasses are sitting on a nightstand and still recording
Are their partners even consenting to glasses with cameras??
Well they would be right up in your face in some positions, I can't imagine they don't know.
And people do record porn for personal viewing. They probably didn't know it was being viewed by meta employees as well.
Facebook may have to rename itself into NaughtyBook or SpyBook or Pr0nBook. They really want people to help them spy on other people here - including their sex life. Expect new sexy videos in 3 ... 2 ...
Good. Anyone who works for such a company is immoral in my opinion.
> and was a common practice among other companies.
Meta isn’t lying, you should assume other companies are doing it too, Tesla did it with their cameras, and assume others like any company has access to your camera, I would even assume CCTV cameras too. It’s why for anything sensitive, try to use open source stacks, you might lose some of the features, but it’s a needed compromise.
So I've never had a smart speaker in my house (Alexa, Apple, Google). I've just never been comfortable with the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Not because I thought these companies would deliberately start listening and recording in my house but because they will likely be careless with that data and it'll open the door for law enforcement to request it. Consider the Google Wi-fi scraping case from STreetView.
Or they might start scanning for "problematic" behavior, a bit like the Apple CSAM fingerprinting initiative.
So not one part of me would ever buy Meta glasses (or the Snap glasses before that). You simply don't have sufficient control over the recordings and big tech companies can't be trusted, as we've witnessed from outsourced workers sharing explicit images. And I bet that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would get these and trust Meta to manage the risks.
That is to say nothing of the new technological use cases that could develop from the already existing technology. They just haven’t been thought of developed yet.
Things like audio scanning your living space using those Alexa smart speakers with ultrasonics to get an image of not only everything in your space, but where you are in that space as well.
That technological use case only came out within the last five or so years, maybe closer to eight. Either way I could see that coming before it became a thing just because ultrasound imaging of your unborn child is a thing ultrasound imaging of the sea floor is a thing so why wouldn’t ultrasound imaging of your living space be a thing by a company who wants to know what you buy.
I never ever ever had Alexa I only ever had a Google home because I got it for free with GPM but I almost never used it because I hated the idea of it always listening.
I already regret Wi-Fi because they figured out now how to look through walls with that.
You were wise enough to avoid this, unfortunately for most people “shiny tech!”.
This is what happens when you buy a camera from the "they trust me, dumb fucks" guy and put it on your face.
But aren't the users wearing glasses while nude or having sex dumb fucks though?
I can imagine there's a use case for these glasses during sex. It would make for pretty exciting footage :)
These users probably didn't know where it would end up.
I got a paywall, first time I've seen that on BBC.
Oops! Oh, too late. And another nail in the heart of smart glasses…
Can we boycott meta yet? I am sick of this company.
I bet the victims had their socks on too
About the "they asked us to view it and then fired us for it". Having worked in their RL division(I don't work at meta anymore) this story is quite weird for two reasons:
1. Meta AFAIR paid/compensated people — contractors or recruited via ads — to have them submit their data. There are strict privacy protocol and reviews in place to distinguish data use in these cases vs gen public. This is not to say the process is perfect, but if these users are gen public, I would be very shocked.
2. Hiring contractors to submit data is a more controlled environment VS recruitment of gen pub via ads to submit data, but the former has more well understood privacy disclosures than the latter. This means in practice asking contractors to wear glasses and "move around their surroundings naturally and do things" goes well with basically the privacy practice "the data your are submitting we can view and use all of it for purpose X and nothing but X". BUT this framing is with ad based recruited people — which are general users who willingly submit data — is much much harder. My suspicion is they are running ad based recruiting in general public and while those users may have signed a privacy statement it is very surprising that they did not tighten the privacy practices around the use of the data and who has access.
You seem to misunderstand the situation. These contractors were reviewing sensitive customer data, not collecting data of their own.
The contractors in the report are separate from the incentivized people or contractors typically used to collect data.
I can find no incentivized people or contractors collecting data in this story. Just normal users who had their data siphoned up and reviewed by the contractors in this report. I don't understand where your view of this story is coming from given the article.