[redbell]

> "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.

[ryandrake]

> > 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.

It's total fantasy. I've worked in big tech. Casually uploading and providing company/contractor access to non-redacted intimate photos or pictures of the insides of people's homes vaguely "for the purpose of improving the customer experience" would not pass even a surface-level privacy or data-protection review anywhere I've ever worked. Do Meta even read what they are saying?

[intended]

I’ve worked in trust and safety - for me this is stupid, but well below the threshold of impossible.

Hell, I know of a major firm that decided QA was not needed for their trust and safety process.

Another common issue will be SEA Arabic speakers tasked with labelling Middle Eastern Arabic content, because accents and cultural dialects are not a thing.

I’ve had people at FAANG firms cry on my shoulder, because they couldn’t get access to engineering resources at their own firms.

There was the famous case of meta executives overriding T&S policy and telling them that what content was news worthy during the Boston bombing. On a separate incident, they told their team that cartel violence was not newsworthy when friends in London complained about it.

When you say this is fantasy, what do you mean precisely?

[ryandrake]

What I mean is: I'm not sure what they base their statement that it's "a common practice among other companies" on. Unlikely they are talking about their peer companies. I suppose if you read the sentence literally, there surely exist one or more "other companies" in the broad universe of "other companies" that routinely do this kind of stuff. But I wouldn't think anywhere serious.

[intended]

I mean, given this happened and it was sent to Sama it seems pretty clear that the images being generated from this were being sent to a labelling pipeline somewhere.

There’s probably an opt out / opt in clause somewhere in the terms and conditions, which makes it feasible for Meta (and other firms) to use this data.

[abustamam]

Meta could at least pretend that they don't intend to capture people in their most intimate and vulnerable moments instead of slobbering on the sideline like "mm... Data..."

[2ndorderthought]

Well you gotta give out black mail material to the scam centers somehow. Otherwise they don't actually have leverage! Oh right... We don't want that happening.

[finghin]

With lawyers like these, …

[SoftTalker]

Read Careless People it tells you all you need to know.

[DuncanCoffee]

I once read the manual of one of those small floor cleaning robots (Ecovacs Deebot U2 pro), and it basically said that by using it you were giving them a right to take pictures and send them to a remote server (to analyze issues or something like that)

[dotancohen]

  > Am I reading this correctly?!

What you should have read correctly was the Facebook terms of service. I still get strange responses when I tell people that I don't use WhatsApp. All Meta's properties are tainted such that I won't use them.

[falcor84]

> What you should have read correctly was the Facebook terms of service.

I'm reminded of Bo Burnham's wonderful "That Funny Feeling" from 2021's "Inside", where one of the absurd examples he offers in the lyrics is:

  There it is again, that funny feeling
  That funny feeling
  Reading Pornhub's terms of service ...

[chneu]

How is this weird? People have been trading away their privacy for the smallest possible gains in convenience for a long time.

[moritzwarhier]

Are you conflating telemetry with literally live-streaming your life to Meta? Because that's what makes the statement weird.

edit 2: OK, I see what you mean. But I'm wondering if it should be possible to consent to this via T&C. Basically the same issue as with many online services, turned up to 11, sure. And it involves OTHER people, who have not consented.

Stuff like this used to be outrage fuel even when it was more of a social experiment, e.g. the documentary "We live in public" or the "Big brother" TV show. By now, I'm sure there have been millions of influencers doing similar things, but it's very much not considered normal?

Streaming to an unknown number of employees might be considered different from streaming to the public, sure.

But the core question here is whether there's informed consent, and, IMO also, if it should be possible to consent to this when the other party is a company like Meta and the pretext is not deliberately seeking attention (like influencers and streamers do).

edit, clarified social media comparison

[abustamam]

Tangential but I always thought reality shows like Big Brother were mostly staged. Like not scripted, but definitely not natural.

[rdiddly]

Yes, they are "lightly scripted."

[moritzwarhier]

Didn't watch it really, I just meant that at the time (early 2000s), the very idea of the show made people say it's unethical, even with consent.

It being scripted doesn't really change much, but yes, I think your tangent is correct.

I wanted to illustrate the shift in what's considered "normal", fully acknowledging that a scripted show catering to voyeurism is different from the situation discussed here. Completely different, just related.

The "outrage fuel" that I meant was that some people consider it immoral to incentivize people to overstep boundaries of privacy, decency and human dignity.

Staged or not, the selling point of the show was that it was about "regular people".

I'm aware that this small and short-lived public discussion seems antiquated today, that's why I mentioned it.

[abustamam]

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification (and FTR I never watched either).

> some people consider it immoral to incentivize people to overstep boundaries of privacy, decency and human dignity

I'd be one of those people. Mr Beast is a cancer on our society and the fact that he is the most popular YouTuber says volumes about our society as a whole (again--never watched, but I've read enough). Though I imagine much of his stunts are staged as well, I think it just goes along with what you're saying about Big Brother.

I don't think this kind of public discussion is antiquated (assuming you're talking about this meta-discussion in this comment thread), I'd say it's just rare to see unless you look for it (HN for example). And I'd also argue that those who criticized pop culture were always in the minority (almost by definition). I think it's a good callout regardless.

[pfortuny]

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

[2ndorderthought]

Meta is a defense contractor. They see the world a little differently from everyone else.