Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#291

Post by abdullahkhalids » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

haritha-j wrote: post #198

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 serv…

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.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#292

Post by everdrive » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:21 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #288

everdrive wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are GoPros acceptable? I went to the beach, jet skiing. One of the guys had Meta glasses. I liked the footage.

>I liked the footage.

So did the Meta's LLM training model as well as the contractor across the globe reviewing your footage.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#293

Post by deaux » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:22 PM UTC

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #204

cyanydeez wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 administratio…

> 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.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#294

Post by alistairSH » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:22 PM UTC

ninth_ant wrote: post #277

alistairSH wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#295

Post by red_admiral » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:22 PM UTC

jaidhyani wrote: post #154

talkingtab wrote: post #18

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 h…

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 priva…

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.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#296

Post by jdiff » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

genewitch wrote: post #253

GrinningFool wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> traumatizing contract workers for $2-3 an hour) Is there an hourly rate at which this should be acceptable?

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?

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#297

Post by nradov » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

malfist wrote: post #229

jaidhyani wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 priva…

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.)

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#298

Post by pfortuny » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

redbell wrote: post #48

> "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.

Tagging, tagging, tagging. That is what "improving...": teaching its LLMs and diffusion models.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#299

Post by pfortuny » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

reliablereason wrote: post #78

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.

Re: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

#300

Post by magicalist » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #278

causal wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.