How else do you want companies to remove and prevent CSAM? It seems like you must have some human involvement to train and monitor.

It’s a terrible job, I wouldn’t want to do it, but someone needs to. Perhaps one day, AI will be accurate enough to not need it, but even then you need someone to process complaints and waivers (like someone’s home photos being inaccurately flagged).

> Sama (the outsourcing company)

If script writers gave the company this name in a fictionalization it would be rejected as too on the nose.

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?

There's a name for these people, glassholes

Are GoPros acceptable?

I went to the beach, jet skiing with a dude with Meta glasses.

I liked the footage.

> I wouldn't even recommend being in their presence.

Great! Now do people with smart TVs and people with smart phones

I want to get the Oakley Meta ones so I can record bike rides easier, should I not be tolerated?

Also make sure to avoid people with smartphones and places with video surveilence.

What makes you think the outsourcing firm didn't raise these concerns in email or meetings? You think these people wanted to lose jobs and income? That's irrational.

Why reflexively defend a massive tech corporation caught repeatedly violating the law?

You would help conceal a crime against the people just because it's good business??

Congratulations, you have a bright future in politics and/or tech CEOing.

There are transgressions severe enough that your duty to stop them is heavier than your responsibility to "the reputation of your client's product." Amazing this needs to be stated, frankly.

Proactively address the issues? Are you kidding me? This is not an issue that just happened to slip by; it is 100% by design. You're fooling no one.

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.

With lawyers like these, …

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?

> 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 ...

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

So already, this person wearing these glasses are already agree with that Meta can monitor them. They also probably trust Meta when they say "When the glasses are off, nothing is recording", for better or worse. So with that perspective in mind, it's not far fetched to assume these same people will willingly be naked into front of these recording devices they believe to be off.

Of course, anyone who opened a newspaper in the last 10 years or so would know better, but I can definitively see some people not giving a fuck about it.

There are "content creators" who intentionally record people without any sort of consent. At least when they point cameras, one can notice the cameras and take action. With these sorts of glasses, no one in view has consented, nor have they agreed to any sort of terms & conditions.

I never understood the appeal of upskirt pictures. But I think that taking videos of non-consenting participants/victims is the current version of the upskirt photo craze.

The Ray-Ban stays ON during sex!

This is my question too. I get moderating things that people are posting. Being not familiar with the device and how it works, I'd assume that all footage is posted to the user's cloud account even if not publicly posted. This being cloud storage, Meta is "moderating" the footage to ensure CSAM or other restricted footage type is not being stored on their (Meta's) platform. That's my very generous take on it, not that I believe it

Yes but also we don't want people live streaming murder and suicide, so there's detection and moderation in place.

I’m betting this is going to some ML / Data labelling pipeline.

It's also pronounced r-ow (ow, as in I hurt myself) in this context, instead of r-oh, in case that helps the OP

Yeah, I think it's more of a British English thing. It can also mean things like "in a fight". Like: "those two guys had a big row outside the pub the other night"

“You're already being recorded everywhere you go in public by the authorities”

You are the frog being boiled.

Because they will be popular and lots of people will buy them and use them all the time, leading to much more generalized surveillance than the concealed options that only a tiny tiny fraction of people would buy or use (and that we should also regulate)

> What's the difference between that and one of the many, many concealed camera options that you don't even notice?

The latter is literally illegal, at least in my country and I hope in any civilized country. If your point is that there's no difference between glasses and other forms of creep cams and the glasses should be illegal too, I concur!

The problem is if it becomes socially normalized. If you're using a concealed camera and someone notices, you're a creep/asshole.

Yet more regulation? We have regulation for these glasses already?

Aren’t there countries that make it mandatory to blot out faces of people on videos if they didn’t consent?

The owner of the private space generally has authority to deny this already, there's no need for an additional law.

In the US at least, any private homeowner/renter can deny entry to their property, barring legal warrants and exceptional circumstances. A business can have a policy, and is generally legally protected as long as the policy is 1) equally applied, and 2) does not violate ADA... A court would have to weigh in if glasses are allowed or not for ADA... but I suspect there's already a case where a movie theater banned such glasses and they would probably(?) win, since such individuals could be expected to have non-recording glasses.

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.

There's no allegation that these workers abused their access. The allegation is that their routine work reviewing footage included private content. The revelation is that USERS are using meta glasses non-consensually.

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.

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.

Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.

If Facebook were designed with a different set of incentives that prioritized the user, fostered positive engagement, and better respected individual's privacy and data sovereignty - setting a better standard for the whole industry - I feel there wouldn't be all this fuss today about banning social media accounts.

Anecdotal of course, but I heard that this wasn't at all the case circa 2006 and that (then) FB employees would routinely read private messages and such. Obviously it wasn't a big company yet and probably didn't have those policies yet... (clearly the policies are there for a reason...)

As someone who worked for a contractor which had Meta as a client, I disagree.

All advertiser support agents were given super-read on all profiles & pages, and I never once observed a CSR being questioned on their use of this access in any way.

> 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.

When did FaceBook make the world not-worse?

@jaidhyani I hate to burst your bubble, but there are major privacy violations here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226756

@jaidhyani I hate to burst your bubble, but there are major privacy violations here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47225130

Yea but no. Meta is a defense contractor that hires out to 3rd parties exactly to do this. so you guys don't get to do that, but a lot of other people are. I hope that helped you sleep at night while you were there. But yea, it all gets bought and sold at the end of the day.

The irony is meta wants to implement verification to protect kids. Meanwhile it's doing everything it can to exploit them most at every single level for profit and for the love of the game. Billions of dollars, the world's most advanced computers all dedicated for it

You're still on the koolaid, as many replies here accurately point out. Saying it's not because you're eager to defend them is lying to yourself, because you're smart enough to think of most of these replies yourself. Primarily the fact that these are contractors whose entire job is to watch smart glasses footage and the point your bringing up - even if we believe it at face value - is completely irrelevant to this post.

If you truly want to atone for your sins, you have a long way to go. I don't blame you for having worked there, I've worked at places that are only a little better than Meta (which is hard considering Meta is at the absolute bottom of the entire ladder, including Peter Thiel companies, thanks to Meta's sheer scale of carnage). But its time to completely come to terms with the reality, rather than stopping halfway to try and feel better about your resume.

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.

Isn’t that obvious from the article? They’re labeling content for training AIs, something which is happening all over the world constantly.

Does that include trying influence moral, ethical, and legal frameworks to the benefit of the investors as well? Because if it does it is kind of a moot point.

Is there explicit approval? Or is it buried in the legal agreements?