Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms

> The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I only heard it from them.

Option A: The Nest camera not only listened to the conversation and picked out "Airport Grade Tar" and decided it needed to show adverts about it to people, but the camera also identified you to the point it could isolate your FB account in order to serve you those adverts.

(I'm making some assumptions but...)

Option B: Your brother had done various searches for airport grade tar from his home (in order to know how expensive it was). You, whilst visiting his home, were on his Wifi and therefore shared the same external IP address, your phone did enough activity whilst at his house (FB app checked in to their servers in the background, or used Messenger, etc) to get the "thinking of buying airport grade tar" associated with his external IP address associated with your FB account that was temporarily on that IP.

I had a friend who was convinced that some device in his house was listening in on his conversations with his wife as he kept on getting adverts for things they'd been talking about buying the day before but he hadn't searched for. (But she was searching for it from their home wifi, which is why it appeared in his adverts afterwards.)

Eternal September started before I was on the internet, but there have been several similar shifts since then.

It gets continually worse. Agentic AI is another Eternal September. For example, we now have dimwits sending dozens of unsolicited and unreviewed slop PRs to open source projects. Every search result is an affiliate marketing listicle obviously written by a robot.

You've quoted out of context, eliminating:

"The state has no business listening in on private citizen's communication."

So yes, the concept of privacy is so primary that the it requires an entire legal framework for the state to listen in.

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In terms of the rest of your post, even though you quoted out of context, what you're saying is fine. But the people noticing things on the street, have nothing to do with those who maintain the roads. You really don't want corporations to have algorithms which mean they have to report trigger words to the police or state.

Instead, as I said, empower the parents. Legal guardians. It's their job to watch.

Why do you dislike the Internet?

We used to believe in freedom of speech and freedom of association.

Since the dawn of the Internet era, we've had a legal principle that platforms are relatively shielded from liability for what their users do.

It's the Internet. There's sexual content and sketchy characters on it. Occasionally people will encounter them -- even if they're under 18.

Anyone who grew up in the mid-1990s or later, think back to your own Internet usage when you were under 18. You probably found something NSFW or NSFL, dealt with it, and came out basically OK after applying your common sense. Maybe it was shocking and mildly traumatizing -- but having negative experience is how we grow. Part of growing up is honing one's sense of "that link is staying blue" or "I'm not comfortable with this, it's time to GTFO". And it seems a lot safer if you encounter the sketchy side of humanity from the other side of a screen. Think about how a young person's exposure to the underbelly of humanity might have gone in pre-Internet times: Get invited to a party, find out it's in the bad part of town and there are a bunch of sketchy people there -- well, you're exposed to all kinds of physical risks. You can't leave the party as easily as you can put your phone down.

I stopped logging onto Facebook regularly around 2009; I only log in a couple times a year. I hate what Facebook has become in the past decade and a half.

But giving a site with millions of users a multi-hundred-million-dollar fine because some of those users behave badly seems...asinine.

If your kid is old enough and responsible enough to be given unsupervised Internet access, you'd better teach them how to deal with the skeevy stuff they might encounter.