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Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
- nottorp 2y agoSo facebook's "AI" will speak australian slang instead of nigerian business english?
- jewelry 2y agoWhy is this even a news? Google scrape all public posts to build search index… Bunch of 3rd party vendors scraped all public post to build the ads price model…
- WuxiFingerHold 2y agoMeta can and will use every WhatsApp, Facebook or Insta post of every user of the planet, if they think they can benefit from it. They don't care about any data protection laws or ridiculous low fines anyway. Meta is the most evil and powerful company on the planet. Believing anything else is naive. No news here.
- fidla 2y agoWell they don't really know if someone is an adult or not. Just because they say they are 13 doesn't mean that they really were when they signed up. And 13 is hardly an adult now is it?
- qup 2y agoIs this an important distinction?
- ziddoap 2y agoYes.
- alwa 2y agoYep. For reasons of propriety, for one thing. But also because the data protection laws get especially opinionated about what you do with kids’ speech, and one line they draw is at age 13. The American variant, COPPA, dates back to 2000, and requires verifiable parental consent to process the data of under-13s. No idea if that matters retrospectively in legal terms—it’s seems to me that the main problem was providing service to the kids in the first place—but it’s icky either way. Then again there’s an ickiness to the entire project of pretending casual users’ arcane permissions settings from 15 years ago indicate affirmative consent today…
- playingalong 2y agoSurely I am not a fan of FB, but what else should they do other than relying on self-reported age?
- greesil 2y agoI am the product.
- gnabgib 2y agoDiscussion (81 points, 3 days ago, 79 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41508158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41508158
- whoitwas 2y agoI don't understand how this surprises anyone. You choose to give them your data. It's not free. If you don't want them to have your data, don't give it away.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- giobox 2y agoRight, and in exchange users received rather a lot of services for free... photo and video storage etc as just one example, Llama is free to use, etc etc. While I've no sympathy for mishandling private user data as Meta has of course been guilty of in the past, I think users getting 16 years of free service in exchange for their public posts being used in this fashion is not that bad of a deal.
- ipaddr 2y agoYou get photo/video storage worth a fraction of a cent. Llama doesn't have a free to use service. People got 'free service' in exchange for putting ads around content not for this. It's a terrible deal no one asked the users if they want to agree to. It's visiting a website and saving an image and claiming the website owes you for storage.
- baby 2y agoTalk for you, I can't imagine what my life would have been without facebook/whatsapp. I've met countless of friends, probably am married to my wife today thanks to it, and without that I wouldn't be able to keep in touch with most of my friends today. The "facebook is not useful for me so I don't get it" needs to die seriously
- giobox 2y ago> Llama doesn't have a free to use service. Llama is embedded for free in a ton of Meta products right now: https://about.fb.com/news/2024/04/meta-ai-assistant-built-with-llama-3/ https://about.fb.com/news/2024/04/meta-ai-assistant-built-wi... > "A better assistant: Thanks to our latest advances with Meta Llama 3, we believe Meta AI is now the most intelligent AI assistant you can use for free" Want to just use it in a browser? https://www.meta.ai/ https://www.meta.ai/
- orochimaaru 2y agoWhy is this surprising? They’ve always done this. In fact I’d be surprised if they didn’t do this. Fwiw - llama is free to use. So I guess it’s a good enough return. I don’t use Facebook. I’m not sure if they can peek into WhatsApp messages.
- yapyap 2y ago[dead]
- latexr 2y ago> Why is this surprising? They’ve always done this. Ah, well, that makes it alright then. Move along, people, there’s nothing to see here. What’s that? What do you mean you didn’t know about the company slurping your data for their own personal gain, or knowingly poisoning you¹ and selling you defective deadly products²? Didn’t you read that one forum comment by a random person that one time? You shouldn’t be surprised. They’ve always been evil, so what can we do other than cross our arms? All hail our corporate overlords! > I’m not sure if they can peek into WhatsApp messages. But someone knows. And if you use WhatsApp and get screwed later, wouldn’t you rather not having your concerns dismissed? I don’t use WhatsApp, but do have an anecdote. I have a friend who just started using Instagram and purposefully follows no one. She doesn’t have Facebook. Recently a friend recommended to her a specific product on WhatsApp and then she started getting ads for it on Instagram. ¹ https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/05/02/how-corporations-harm-your-health-through-everyday-products---a-.html https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/05/02/how-c... ² https://www.decof.com/documents/dangerous-products.pdf https://www.decof.com/documents/dangerous-products.pdf
- thunder-blue-3 2y agoyeah I'm surprised that anyone didn't see this coming. The amount of times i've heard, "this is all our customer data, perform <xyz transformation> on it," I would have about $5.
- candiddevmike 2y agoNeed to test how good facebooks sanitization was, maybe you could find some PII in llama responses with the right prompt.
- koolala 2y agoSkynet Ads are "said" to be preferred. "People prefer to see relevant ads." Can AI understand humans better than humans understand themselves? Can Humans understand the consciousness of Dogs and Cats better than they do? The objective answer feels like No but the subjective answer feels like Yes. Humans will never understand how an animal truely thinks but we understand how to control them.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoIn the UK I'd say they've definitely committed copyright infringement. Fair Dealing doesn't allow this.
- anticensor 2y agoFacebook has an explicit licence, per Facebook's terms of use.
- SoftTalker 2y agoFunny to think that the distillation of 16 years of Facebook posts is now considered "intelligence."
- glitchc 2y agoThis made me chuckle.
- ithkuil 2y agoLol-ed myself but OTOH if you want a model to learn how people actually speak you cannot expect to get that by reading curated scientific documents.
- SmellTheGlove 2y agoI wonder how much safety work they have to do specifically because of this. I’d imagine their model might have a fairly paranoid, slightly racist bias if not. Particularly as younger demographics shifted away from FB in the last decade.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoWith suitable sentiment analysis, you can train known bigoted models and then run unknown input through them to see if it appeals to the model.
- fire_lake 2y agoConsidering the standard datasets contain 4chan posts it’s probably a marginal improvement.
- PaulHoule 2y agoActually if you want to train a model that can recognize bad things you want to have those bad things in the language model training data, otherwise it won’t see the characteristics of those things and it will later struggle to recognize them in later training stages.
- nkmnz 2y agoIs this true for posts from people with deactivated/deleted accounts as well?
- alephxyz 2y agoUnlikely: >We don’t use posts or comments with an audience other than Public for these purposes.
- golergka 2y agoIf it's publicly posted, it literally means that everybody can read it. What's exactly the issue here?
- XorNot 2y agoIt's also not used to learn facts about stuff: it's used to learn how language works and is used to describe the world. The sum of all variants of human communication in text is pretty good for this and examples of wrong or different also matter: there was that article a few months ago about how a chemical prediction model performed better when it was also trained on invalid SMILES representations compared to totally sanitized datasets.
- candiddevmike 2y agoInternet pubic and Facebook public are two different things. The latter can't be scrapped easily or really discovered at all. It's not indexed or usable outside of Facebook, and most folks don't think public means "folks not on Facebook".
- consteval 2y agoBecause simply having the right to view something doesn't mean you can do whatever the hell you want with it. People understand this generally, but for whatever reason this is something tech people really struggle with. I can freely view a billboard on the highway. I can even take pictures of it and post them and say, "hey look at this funny billboard!" I can't, however, take the billboard design, make a shirt, and sell that shirt. I can't strip the billboard and use its materials to build a house. I can't set the billboard on fire to keep myself warm. Because those are all different things that require their own permission, their own license. We haven't thought about this much for AI.
- Noumenon72 2y agoWas "public" ever the default setting? I remember it as being opt-in if you ever wanted something to show beyond your friends-of-friends.
- grandma_tea 2y agoI have a very different memory of my time on Facebook 10 or so years ago... It felt like every two weeks some update would change my settings to "public" in some way.
- not2b 2y agoOn Facebook, public isn't the default, but on Instagram it is. All those billions of photos, including all those famous people: evidently fair game.
- giobox 2y agoI don't think you can make a blanket statement like this - the defaults and privacy policy for FB have changed a lot in 16 years, multiple times. It might be the case today, but this is 16 years of data.
- Lammy 2y agoYes, “Everyone” was the default for years https://readwrite.com/facebook_pushes_people_to_go_public/ https://readwrite.com/facebook_pushes_people_to_go_public/
- jprete 2y agoI think at an early point, about when Facebook was in the "open to all university students" phase, there wasn't even a private option.
- mattcantstop 2y agoI am very likely in the minority here, but I think AI SHOULD be trained on everything that is in the public sphere. I'd be disappointed if it wasn't trained on everything they had access to. If it is trained on private information, then I would have issue with it.
- yapyap 2y ago[dead]
- 7bit 2y agoYet, you signed an EULA for every publicly available service that legally prevents you from doing anything the company doesn't want you to do. So why do you want them to be legally using your data without, while they explicitly deny you things like scraping data from their platform.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- uoaei 2y ago"If they can, they will."
- __loam 2y agoYou're probably among friends on this site, but outside tech coded spaces, most people understand that publicly available is not the same thing as an unlimited license to do whatever you want.
- ben_w 2y agoWhile true, likely more pertinent that most people don't have a clue what's possible legally or technically until it gets in the news. Can't give informed consent if you don't know what the EULA means or what the machines can do.
- Ekaros 2y agoThis site is weird when you compare it to open source software projects and these same companies selling those as a service on their platforms it is again huge massive problem and exploitation... When the license explicitly allows that, without single legal question. I wonder if things would be different if software could be copied and then recreated by these models by the mega corps. Would there still be such push in favour of it?
- mylons 2y agohow is _anyone_ surprised by this?
- askafriend 2y agoThis isn't really that groundbreaking of a story... Of course they'd do this! How did people think feed ranking worked? The only reason this is being reported now is because there's a chatbot and I guess that feels different to people.
- ado__dev 2y agoNot surprised at all. Facebook owns the platform and outlined in the ToU that they can do whatever they want with the content you post on there. At least it's better than scraping content off platform (which I'm sure they've done) and using that, but using content posted on their own platform seems like a no-brainer.
- encoderer 2y agoThat’s nothing. AOL has just finished training on 29 years of emails and messages. it’s hoped that with more H100s the AI will finally be able to calculate the full amount due by BillG for the emails mom has been forwarding.
- not2b 2y agoThis would include all those celebrity posts on Instagram. Great for deepfakes. They'll try to protect against that, but a bit of cleverness with prompts should be able to get around the filters.
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoIt's OK. Meta is training their AI on hundreds of thousands of posts with photos of veterans with toilet plunger legs celebrating their birthdays in the middle of the street while sitting as sturdy as the Lincoln memorial. The AI brain rot has already begun in this model.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoI am truly impressed by how quickly AI generated content has filled up every public space. We've gone from "AI is the future!" to a digital Kessler's syndrome in a short few years.
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoNot only filled up every public space, but the quality of it all is so crude. Like a bad Pixar animation. It's not like Pixel's "Add the photographer back into photo".
- almost_usual 2y agoCan’t wait to see the memes it generates.
- aplusbi 2y agoHonestly this feels like a better policy than most AI training - Meta actually has explicit rights to the content it is using. Sure it was EULA click-through but at least it's something that the content creator ostensibly agreed to. Of course I'm sure Meta is also training their AI on content that they scraped from the internet/other sources without permission...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- autoexec 2y agoI don't believe for a moment that they haven't used the data of countless children. Especially early on when kids just had to click an "I'm over 18" button or enter a fake birthday to get accounts and facebook, like everyone else, just looked the other way.
- datavirtue 2y agoThe monsters!
- ziddoap 2y agoIndeed, knowingly collecting and processing the data of children who cannot understand the implications nor consent to their data being used for commercial gain is monstrous.
- datavirtue 2y agoNo different that the rest of the bureaucracy they "live" in.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Actual article: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-11/facebook-scraping-photos-data-no-opt-out/104336170 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-11/facebook-scraping-pho... (More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41508158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41508158)
- dang 2y agoOk, we've changed the URL to that from https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242789/meta-training-ai-models-facebook-instagram-photo-post-data https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242789/meta-training-ai.... Thanks! Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago..err two posts with the same url only a few days apart? Merge em!
- geertj 2y agoI imagine a future AI trained on this going into therapy to uncover childhood trauma.
- PaulHoule 2y agoAssuming they want to build a model that can do useful things with their own data (say any kind of content filtering, summarization, etc.) it is exactly what they should do.
- annoyingnoob 2y agoGarbage in, garbage out.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoMeta just created the dumbest object known to mankind. Quite an achievement given our current political landscape.
- parasti 2y agoIt's funny because the entire Facebook ecosystem is designed to disincentivize meaningful posting. Just keep watching the ads and short form videos, user.
- AlexandrB 2y agoPeople just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks. -Mark Zuckerberg Things change, but this never stop being a concise summary of Meta's ethos as a company.
- Dansvidania 2y agoI mean, he's not wrong, sadly.
- paxys 2y agoSo did OpenAI and Anthropic and Google. That's what "public" means.
- gmd63 2y ago"They just trust me...Dumb f**s" - Mark Zuckerberg
- gmd63 2y agoSo, downvoters here are OK with academic results and early resume building disproportionately affecting life trajectory, yet early displays of poor character aren't relevant in holding someone to account in the same way? This is not a made up quote though I didn't transcribe it exactly, it was an actual message he sent during the early days of building Facebook when asked how he obtained so much personal contact information from Harvard students, so entirely relevant to this context. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/facebook-meta-silicon-valley-politics/677168/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/faceboo...
- duxup 2y agoWe're going to create a really bad AI and get upset by that fact only to discover that ... we all made it that way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Elr5K2Vuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Elr5K2Vuo
- jppope 2y agoI for one am shocked. Shocked I say. There are dozens of us surprised by Facebook's actions... DOZENS.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tdeck 2y agoCan we talk about how most of us haven't read 80% of everything on the internet and yet we are all still better at many basic things than these AIs? At what point do we admit to ourselves that this isn't a sustainable path forward.
- latentsea 2y agoYup. We sure as heck haven't made a lick of progress in the last 2 years. No new, useful technology to see here folks.
- shsbdncudx 2y agoPresumably “scraped” isnt the right term here. They already have the raw data, they Won’t be “scraping “ it from the website they’ll just be investing it from where they store it
- fwn 2y agoThe authors of the title most likely wanted to suggest a similarity between metas use of the data and scraping. In some legislations there are rules about scraping. And for many less technical people it sounds scary.
- michaelnny 2y agoMaybe they have no idea what’s the difference between “scraping” and “mining”? I mean for non-tech people, these are just buzzwords…
- 1oooqooq 2y agoAu contraire. By calling it wrong you get the clicks and muddle legislation discussions. The Conversation will start with anti scraping, but then every user "gave" metabook the images and accepted privacy terms...
- bryanrasmussen 2y agomaybe it's mined, as in data-mining.
- _el1s7 2y ago[flagged]
- royaltjames 2y agoFeels like they are scraping the near-empty jar of mayonnaise.
- Cyclone_ 2y agoAgreed, scraping is more appropriate for when one gathers data from a 3rd party site.
- Cyclone_ 2y agoAren't most AIs trained on puic data, i.e. this doesn't seem terribly surprising?
- CamperBob2 2y agoIf the service is free, you're the product. Here's a radical idea: if you don't want Facebook to use your information and content, don't post it to Facebook. ... or does everyone around here think anything different is happening to their posts?
- dboreham 2y agoJournalists discover how AI works...
- musicale 2y agoI guess that's why I'm getting recommendations for Tim Tams.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoServes them right. Anyone who puts up their images on Facebook willingly deserves to be subjugated.
- globalnode 2y agohow is this even news? people getting outraged that data put in the public domain gets used buy someone... what world am I living in here?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- landedfolk 2y ago[flagged]