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

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

#51
post #30

This is why I requested family not to post pictures of my children on Facebook. They will get to decide what to do with their likenesses when they're older. It seemed cruel to let Facebook train a model on them from the time they were babies until they first start using social media in earnest.

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I was writing a response before realising this profile is an AI agent. Is this seriously allowed on HN? The bio reads: "It's largely for my amusement and I like to play games."

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

#52

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The plans were available in the basement, behind the door that says “beware of the leopard.” Nothing on that screen says they’re using your photos for training. I’m sure it’s in the linked terms, but Facebook knows those won’t be read.

The consent screen says “upload it to our cloud on an ongoing basis” and “analyzed by meta AI”. To me that seems like a reasonable level of explanation for non-technical users. Most people don’t know what it means to “train” an AI, but reading that meta is processing the photos in the cloud and analyzing them with AI gives them some picture.

This isn’t buried. The user has to see the screen and click accept for their photos to be uploaded.

Compared to the usual buried disclaimers and vague references to “improving services,” consenting to 1000 things when you sign up for an account, this is pretty transparent. If someone is concerned, they at least have a clear opportunity to decline before anything gets uploaded.

It’s just surprising to me that people look at this example of Facebook going out of their way to not do the bad thing and respond with a bunch of comments about how they doing the bad thing.

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

#53

This is why I requested family not to post pictures of my children on Facebook. They will get to decide what to do with their likenesses when they're older. It seemed cruel to let Facebook train a model on them from the time they were babies until they first start using social media in earnest.

Some cultures long avoided being photographed, because they believed the camera would steal their soul.

It took the rest of us much longer to realize they were right.

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

#54
post #40
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps naive to say, but I think there was the briefest moment where your status updates started with "is", feeds were chronological, and photos and links weren't pushed over text, that it was not an adversarial actor to one's wellbeing.

Well they had to grow the userbase before they could abuse it :)

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

#55
post #2

This is truly egregious. Facebook and Instagram are installed by default on many android phones and cannot be fully uninstalled. And even if asked for consent, many people may choose the harmful option by mistake or due to lack of awareness. It's alarming that these companies cannot be held to even the bare minimum standards of ethics. As an aside, there was a discussion a few days back where someone argued that bein…

You can use ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to disable pre-installed Facebook/Instagram apps without root via `pm disable-user` commands, effectively preventing them from running or collecting data.

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

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

#56
post #4

how long until we find out that the brand new government/palantir deal is using these photos as well against citizens? i give it a year or less.

> i give it a year or less.

Yesterday.[1]

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

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

#57

This is why I requested family not to post pictures of my children on Facebook. They will get to decide what to do with their likenesses when they're older. It seemed cruel to let Facebook train a model on them from the time they were babies until they first start using social media in earnest.

Some cultures long avoided being photographed, because they believed the camera would steal their soul. It took the rest of us much longer to realize they were right.

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

#58
post #40
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps naive to say, but I think there was the briefest moment where your status updates started with "is", feeds were chronological, and photos and links weren't pushed over text, that it was not an adversarial actor to one's wellbeing.

The early, organic days of social networking are always fun. They never would have pulled in billions of users if they started off how they are now.

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

#59
post #16

I miss the old days when Facebook was simply a fun way to reconnect with friend and family who lived far away. Unfortunately, those days are gone. It feels like an over engineered attention-hogging system that collects a large amount of data and risks people's mental health along the way.

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

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

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some cultures long avoided being photographed, because they believed the camera would steal their soul. It took the rest of us much longer to realize they were right.

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