I don't understand how a parent can be OK non-consenually uploading pictures of their children's real faces to an ad driven AI company famous for abusing people's data and manipulating children on their platforms.
It is because they don't understand the scope of the problem. People are inclined to think that other people who have treated them kindly mean well also in the long term.
Probably the majority of the planet share family photos on facebook, messenger, whatsapp or instagram - all meta properties. On the whole nothing much bad happens.
- the vast majority of people are not creeps and are not discreetly filming random people
- the vast majority of people are not interesting, and nobody is filming them
- today, in a public space, everybody already has lots or cameras pointing to them (e.g. anyone with a phone), without a way to know if they're being filmed. So this is not a new 'problem'.
- banning smart glasses doesn't make sense if you're not also banning all devices that can film discreetly (so, smartphones)
- 'creeps' use hidden miniature cameras, not glasses with an obvious camera right there on their very face
Incorrect points, there should be just first and the rest is just fluff.
Try taking a photo of somebody with your phone. Usage will definitely look like you are snapping a picture, nobody walks around with phones straight up. The result is, when you take pics with phone, most often its obvious. When you insult people by not asking, they see it and react negatively.
When you point to people with smart glasses, nobody knows do they and that seems to be the point. Or is it beeping and blinking some led to make everybody aware? I don't think so.
Also, we live in society where smart doorbell for which it shouldn't be technically possible to upload any pics to cloud due to not having subscription still did that, and from major manufacturer. Security is a moot point, quadruple that for facebook / meta who are consistent assholes regarding breaking security and privacy to scoop any possible data points for further advertising. The slaps on wrist they receive is just cost of doing business.
> Try taking a photo of somebody with your phone. Usage will definitely look like you are snapping a picture, nobody walks around with phones straight up.
I urge you to visit any big city and see for yourself how wrong you are. I see it at least every time every day just during my barely 20-25min subway commute to work.
And that's the most unremarkable the most uninteresting place and scenario here. Any big park, any even remotely touristy location, any public square, any concert/sports venue, and even an overwhelmingly large proportion of restaurants are like that.
> It's as creepy as Google Glass, yet we don't see the same pushback.
Didn't it come out that the pushback against google glasses was in part made by PR companies on behalf of their competition? I remember reading something along those lines.
>>But his latest defense puts forward an absurd definition of sexual harassment and effectively accuses women of reporting it to fit in with the cool crowd, while claiming he’s writing in “a spirit of healing.” There’s even a tasteless plug for his latest business venture. It’s one of the most disappointing responses we’ve seen to a sexual harassment complaint, which, after the past few weeks, is a fairly remarkable achievement.
He's scrubbed it from his blog and even Internet Archive, but it was well covered and widely quoted all over:
I think you're on to something! Maybe Meta paid Scoble to embarrass Google Glass, and now Google is paying him to embarrass Meta AI Smart Glasses too! Great work if you can get somebody to finance your serial sexual harassment scandals.
There are bubbles, you are obviously in one if you do not know any privacy concerned under 25. I know 15 year olds who are extreme privacy freaks, then I care about it so it might be easier to find those people. I do find that it is the people that I think are least likely are the one who are the most extreme.
You make a good point. I know a couple in there late 20s with kids who are pretty apathetic about their own privacy but who refuse to let Google or iCloud sync photos of their kids.
On the other hand, EVERY young person in my circle (my kids and their friends) is insanely privacy aware. All of that means ... we're not part of the young people anymore?
I'm pretty sure they care who takes pictures or videos of them.
Try going on a train and taking pictures of a young woman or man.
The only difference is these are less noticeable.
I’ve banned them from our office, for the same reason that I’d tell someone deliberately aiming their phone camera at the screen all day to knock it off. In an office setting, you have to treat these as industrial espionage tools, either by choice of the wearer or of a remote person controlling them.
Google Glass failed because they made the user look like they were wearing a high tech computer on their face ala Dragon Ball Z. It looked odd. Meta and Snap learned from this, but it had nothing to do with smartphone cameras not being part of daily life.
The first iPhone was 2007. Google Glass came out in 2013
It’s not a controversial viewpoint that a child can’t consent to their information being uploaded permanently to the internet, even by a parent. This is because, as an adult, I can’t retroactively remove my presence from the internet. Seems silly in trivial cases (school website), but is quite severe in others (bathtub photos).
It’s also not controversial to paint the harmful, profit-seeking actions of companies upon minors as “abusive” (e.g. tobacco firms).
If anything, your knee-jerk response at their rhetoric raises eyebrows: why would you go to bat for a company who by nearly all public measures is fundamentally evil in aim and structure?
If there's something wrong with how we've organized our society than we need to fix it on a societal level.
Evoking what the comment in question evokes over uploading pictures of your kid to the internet is not the way to convince people. It takes the thing you want people to care about and exaggerates it in a way that makes your view point trivial to dismiss.
I say this from the place of someone who deactivated their social media accounts over similar concerns. This is not the way to convince people.
Idk, agree to disagree in this case. Sometimes people do need to hear the stark words of those they disagree with to reconsider their weakly, or even deeply, held positions. Especially in this forum, where so many people of what I would figure is “higher intelligence” continue to turn a blind eye to the clearly unethical actions of their employers because $$$. Some of them even convince themselves that what they’re doing is somehow not unethical!
Consider the US in the late 2010s and where we are now. Making the (oversaturating) argument that X is basically Y is how we got here. The people who argee with you directtionally nod in agreement (because of course it is) and you alienate the ones who don't.
This is abuser rhetoric that’s become increasingly common in conservative circles, akin to “You’re making me do this to you!”
“Woke” individuals (i.e. people who are well-read and critically observant) have been sounding the alarm about warning signs for years, but their message was often twisted and lampooned, leaving an easy out for less critically-observant individuals to mark it as hysteria: “X is basically Y”.
You can find plenty of moderate “woke” voices dating back to the Bush administration warning about objectively concerning trends, especially with regards to the surveillance state and rights to privacy, which is why this thread exists in the first place.
Oh come on, this has nothing to do with being an abuser. You're doing the online millennial version of calling someone a dork. It's the way an entire generation of "left"ists (with no actual leftist principles) learned to bully the people they have a distaste for. Just call them an abuser, a facist, etc etc until the words mean nothing anymore and actual abusers and facists can get away with it in broad daylight.
No I stand by my careful choice of the word “abuser”. There’s quite literally an overarching movement of actions and rhetoric from conservatives since 2016 that is best analogized as an abusive partner.
You’re actually doing it again in your very comment, ironically, painting it as my fault that things are the way they are, despite the fact that all I’ve done is try to bring attention to things that I find troubling. Just like an abusive partner: “It’s your fault. You’re the reason I have to be violent with you.”
So yes, I will continue to call out actions and rhetoric that can be analogized to an abusive relationship because I believe it’s one of the core moral failings of the current reactionary movement in the US.
Edit: Also, isn’t “the boy who cried fascist” a relatively weak argument when the fascists actually do show up, during the exact political movement the boy was warning sounded fascist?
Tasteless to you, factually correct to me. Both correct actually.
Look, you do your kids, literally nobody in the world cares how great or messed up individuals they will become, the result always match the process so its pretty obvious.
But your freedom to do whatever stops when you start infringing rights of me and my family. Right to privacy is, where I live and most sane places, enforceable by law. Also, its called not being an asshole or similar rougher terms.
How exactly can a child consent to having their face analyzed and tracked, both by Facebook and its 10,000 ad partners, including ingestion into Government databases automatically, then used in countless AI algorithms, which may act against them.
They simply are not of sound mind to understand the consequences of such a transaction.
The same laws that let us record in public, also let us record law enforcement, which does give us a way to document abuse of power - something that happens all too often. If we start restricting recording in public, then we lose that right, and then law enforcement will become far more abusive with their power.
This makes me more sad than hopeful. Great they get use out of it, but there instead should be a medically approved HIPAA compliant device for this purpose built by scientists in the open for all to enjoy. Instead the disabled are coersed to give up all privacy of themselves and others around them both digitally and physically. And more importantly they have to give up their sovereignty over the means of their enhancement by it being closed off and eventually enshittified for customers yet opened up for exploitation by facebook and their corporate and government customers.
Sadly the disabled have no choice but to accept the status quo, and facbook gets to virtue signal while holding humanity back another cycle by not selling us an open platform that would actually help people at scale not just now but forever.
Unsupervised leanring has been around for years and is already how the current wave of models are trained. It doesn't mean no data, it means no human provided labels of the data. So you still need creative new human ideas to move LLMs forward. LLMs != intelligence.
Exactly this. Even frontier models like Opus 4.6 have absolutely zero understanding of the task at hand. If you give them problem they have not encountered in training data, they will not solve it. You can however, guide them to resolve the problem, but in that case these get reduced to merely an auto complete. Don't get me wrong - models are getting better and hide very well that they don't understand anything, you can almost get fooled now.
Popularity is irrelevant imo, it's a general purpose FOSS tool. Ignore Element and matrix.org, the open protocol is what matters. These features are useful even if matrix never gains any network effect:
1. talking among a small-ish specific group that needs sovereign communication, e.g. when forming a company or a tight knit in person friend group
2. only data limit is the size of my harddrive
3. bridge to every other popular protocol
4. personal bots and automation with no restrictions
5. Unlimited and customizable clients with no restrictions
6. Combinations of 1-5.
Can't speak for non-self hosters or people who aren't serious about chat, but for chat enthusiasts who can setup a server with bridges and bots, matrix is incredibly useful.
Yes. Nostr and ActivityPub are so easy too, I don't see much advantage to ATProto and so many disadvantages. It's as decentralized as a meme coin, just waiting for the rug pull.
To me something git-like with a peer review UI (a la pull requests) seems far more natural for distributed academic publications than a social media protocol though.
So I briefly touched on this in the blog post, but to expand a little... ATProto provides significantly more "batteries included" than ActivityPub in my view - if you use ATProto, it can handle both authentication and identity management, and effectively act as your back-end and CRUD operations (eg, oauth with your PDS, and then write/read from the network for your object creation based on your Lexicon).
ActivityPub, based on my understanding, really doesn't work like that - while you an oauth with your mastodon account, the expectation is you'll be handling identity and back-end bits, and then sharing events across the network (happy to be corrected).
Part of what kicked this off is seeing ATProto's new devrel person at a meetup and finding their vision pretty compelling.
But yes, ActivityPub is more "robust" and decentralised (hence also jankier)
One of the biggest reasons I still prefer to root my phone is to use acc https://github.com/VR-25/acc. It's criminal that you have to root to run code that reduces charging speed or shuts the phone down automatically. I have it shut down at 20% and charge to 80% except when I know I will need to be out for an extended period without a charger.
Despite the opt in limitation, I wonder if this interop capability will allow a bridge that doesn't require you to install whatsapp apk on a real device (unfortunately signal has the same problem). I fortunately kept an old android whose sole purpose is to keep these 2 apps installed. Not ideal, but works well.
Even better if we could ditch the phone number requirement. Many have said to me things like "I use whatsapp not SMS because I am not American", but of course everyone on WhatsApp uses SMS. To stay logged into WhatsApp you necessessarily must have an SMS enabled non-VOIP phone number that you are regularly paying a telecom provider for to receive auth codes.
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