Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

131–140 of 383 posts

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

#131
post #76
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.

I would love a source about the immigration form. That would at least make more sense. Weed is legal in half of the US. As a citizen, I find the story troubling.

The tweets just saying “drug use” and then you hear it’s weed is ridiculous. Why wouldn’t they just state that they lied on their immigration form about drug use?

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

#132
post #83
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Oh wow, I’d even forgotten about pokes. Thanks for that trip down memory lane.

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

#133
post #14

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.

In some countries (notably Poland) Facebook is so burned into people's brains that you can't avoid this, and if you try, people and institutions will consider you a tinfoil hat weirdo and put pressure on you. Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.

Same in Denmark. Some companies don't have websites, only a Facebook page, Facebook Marketplace has all but killed the local marketplace sites and pretty much anything related to organized sports and after school activities are coordinated on closed Facebook groups. The last one is the worst one. That's basically telling people that they will hold your child's social life hostage until you join Facebook.

LinkedIn was used in a similar manor, to coordinate meetups for our local Cloud Native meetups, but the LinkedIn algorithms are much much worse than Facebooks, so people would get "You might be interested in this meetup" two weeks after the event.

Facebook basically took over communication, no more mailing lists, no more updates on the website, if there even is a website. You just have to accept Facebook if you want to be notified about changes in scheduling, upcoming events or general information about your kids soccer practise.

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

#134
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.

Would a friends and staying in touch social network even succeed today?

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

#135
post #14

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.

In some countries (notably Poland) Facebook is so burned into people's brains that you can't avoid this, and if you try, people and institutions will consider you a tinfoil hat weirdo and put pressure on you. Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.

For real. I've been searching for a swimming school for our daughter in Poland. The one that looked promising had a contract with clause, giving the school full rights to post any pictures of her in the swimming pool to social media. Of course, parents are strictly prohibited from making ANY photos at all. Fuck them.

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

#136
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.

Read Careless People. It was never about that.

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

#137
post #14

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.

In some countries (notably Poland) Facebook is so burned into people's brains that you can't avoid this, and if you try, people and institutions will consider you a tinfoil hat weirdo and put pressure on you. Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.

Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.

Here (NL) we get a form at the beginning of each school year to mark which uses of photos we find acceptable. E.g. we allow photos in the school portal (which is private and not owned by big tech), but not on Facebook, etc. It's the way it should be done, because there is not much burden on the parents. If the school also wants to put photos on social media, the burden should be on them to make sure that kids for which they don' have an ack are not put there.

A bit harder was initially convincing my parents not to put pictures of their granddaughter on Facebook. They are understandably proud and want to show their friends. But they respect it.

I think in all her life there has only been two violations of our policy. In both cases we contacted the person who published the photo/video and they took it offline.

You just need enough 'weirdos' to make it normal. I know that there are other parents that agree, but not everyone has the gut to stand up to the social media tyranny, but will join if some people set an example.

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

#138
post #89

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…

> I imagine many people will react only to the headline and not read the article [...]

I saw this line in the article: "Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images."

It would seem important to share this with people who may 'not read the article'

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

#139

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.

I like this poetic way of putting it, though I don't agree with the message. In Holland we have a saying, what do you bring it your house is burning down? And most people said my photos. This was before the digital age and cloud obviously. We take photos because we care. Stuffing them into everyone else's face has also been a thing at birthday parties but outside that not so much.

Photography stealing someone’s soul is easy to discount as an obvious misconception, but if you think of “soul” as a shortcut metaphor for some difficult to describe sociopsychological phenomena then there is some food for thought in it.

First, for most of us in daily life, once you know you are being photographed you exit any context you were in and enter the new “I am being photographed” context. In some important way, you are stolen from the world around you for a period of time. Your body is still present, but you might be thinking about how this all would look at any later time. This does not apply when photography is specifically arranged by you (common in analog era), or if you are unaware of being a subject photographed (but there may be other concerns about that[0]).

Second, a photo/likeness of you is a proxy allowing other people to relate to you. Keeping in mind that we only ever relate to images/models that we build of each other in our minds (we have no “direct access” to other people), in this case a photo is a shallow (there is little other information than appearance) but weirdly high fidelity (for sighted people) model of you. This is not an issue if the photo is kept just by people you know (common in analog era) or after you are dead, but otherwise if published[1] it means people can somehow relate to “you” without the actual-you knowing or having met them. Some people may feel some sort of satisfaction from this, others it can make uncomfortable.

Third, as someone noted, soul could map to another nebulous concept: identity. It could range from problematic cases (someone pretending to be you to resell work you made) to twisted but benign (stories about people making fake profiles pretending to be successful SV employees come to mind).

[0] If you are secretly photographed[2], this can happen for a number of reasons. Some may imply a missing interaction (if that photographer could not photograph you, maybe they would talk to you instead). Some may be done with intent of sharing your photo in unknown context where again people may relate to you in specific ways that can be unpleasant (e.g., mockery).

[1] Now when generative models start to be trained on what we thought is our private photos, the idea of “published” is blurred.

[2] In most cases here “photo” can be swapped with “video”.

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

#140
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Only logical thing to do personally is to take it completely off your mobile devices. You still get caught in the dragnet if you have friends and family posting you. Also in many places WhatsApp is practically a requirement for daily life which is frustrating. What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.

What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.

GrapheneOS comes pretty close to that I think? You can put such apps in a separate profile and cut off a lot of permissions. You can also scope contacts, storage, etc.

Post reply on HN