Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 383 posts

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

#81

Post by cornfieldlabs »

d_watt wrote: post #40
msgodel wrote: 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.

Couldn't have said it better.

Nothing is a social network anymore.

Everything is a content-consumer a platform now.

People just want to scroll and scroll

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

#82

Post by aspenmayer »

tock wrote: post #51
pkkkzip wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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."

Neither bots nor generated comments are allowed on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747

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

#83

Post by smeej »

d_watt wrote: post #40
msgodel wrote: 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.

There was an even briefer moment where there was no such thing as status updates. You didn't have a "wall." The point wasn't to post about your own life. You could go leave public messages on other people's profiles. And you could poke them. And that was about it.

I remember complaining like hell when the wall came out, that it was the beginning of the end. But this was before publicly recording your own thoughts somewhere everyone could see was commonplace, so I did it by messaging my friends on AIM.

And then when the Feed came out? It was received as creepy and stalkerish. And there are now (young) adults born in the time since who can't even fathom a world without ubiquitous feeds in your pocket.

Call me nostalgic, but we were saner then.

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

#84

Post by heavyset_go »

kevingadd wrote: post #9

This seems like a liability nightmare. If they're just scanning all the image files on people's devices and using them for training, they're inevitably going to scoop up nudes without permission, not to mention the occasional CSAM or gore photo, right? Why would you want to risk having stuff like that sneak into your training set when you already have access to all people's public photos?

It's simple, they don't care.

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

#85

Post by sneak »

dangus wrote: post #27
sebmellen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

The way you prevent this is by deleting your facebook account and uninstalling the app.

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

#86

Post by idiotsecant »

xyst wrote: post #70
coef2 wrote: 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.

These days I treat Facebook as a marketplace for offloading lightly used items. Social media is dead to me.

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

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

#87

Post by chii »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #53
ants_everywhere wrote: post #6

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.

> the camera would steal their soul.

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

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

#88

Post by ashdksnndck »

basilgohar wrote: post #72
ashdksnndck wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a pretty generous take. You even highlight most people won't know what this means and then handwave away the concerns of people who DO know what it means and assert most people won't accept it if they did understand it.

> assert most people won't accept it if they did understand it

I didn’t make that assertion. I think most people don’t care if their photos are used to train an AI model as long as Facebook doesn’t post the photos publicly. Fundamentally, I care if people see my photos, and don’t care if computers see them. But I’m aware some people dislike AI and/or have strong beliefs about how data should be used and disagree. It makes sense to give those people an opportunity to say no, so it seems like a good thing that the feature is opt-in rather than an opt-out buried in a menu.

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

#89

Post by ipsum2 »

Jackson__ wrote: post #71

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

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

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

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

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

#90

Post by hedora »

blub wrote: post #76
Animats wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i give it a year or less. Yesterday.[1] [1] https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2025/06/26/jd-vance-me...

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

So, they engaged in behavior that’s legal at Facebook HQ?

In other news, FB has been using whatsapp metadata to coordinate genocide campaigns in Gaza. What’d all those dead civilians (including infants) do, again?

Presumably they signed a TOS, so it’s OK.

Post reply on HN