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Context: - “Meta has a new stand-alone AI app. It lets you see what other people are asking.” https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ai-app-public-feed-warning-h
by thih9 1y ago
Context:
- “Meta has a new stand-alone AI app. It lets you see what other people are asking.” https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ai-app-public-feed-warning-how-2025-05?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ai-app-public-feed-warn... (may 2025)
- “People are seemingly accidentally publishing their AI chat histories with Meta’s new AI app” https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/05/05/meta-ai-chatbot-discover-feed-public-accident-publish/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/05/05/meta-ai-chatbot-discove... (may 2025)
Note that the first link states that conversations are private by default and that user error is likely involved[1]. Mozilla’s use of text emphasis almost implies otherwise[2].
[1]: “To be clear, your AI chats are not public by default — you have to choose to share them individually by tapping a share button. Even so, I get the sense that some people don't really understand what they're sharing, or what's going on.”
[2]: At least that’s how I understood “_Make all AI interactions private by default_ with no public sharing option unless explicitly enabled through informed consent.” at first glance.
- plasma_beam 1y agoIt blows my mind how many people still publicly post venmo payments, so this doesn’t surprise me actually.
- laweijfmvo 1y agowhy venmo even has a "feed" is unknown to me. are people actually doom scrolling that?
- triceratops 1y agoIf it's there people will use it like social media. "Ooh looks like Adrian went to La Bamba with Chilliwack, he paid them $50 for drinks there"
- 0xEF 1y agoEngagement. It's part of a dark pattern that triggers that little neuron tie our tendency to compare ourselves to others, a sort of "keeping up with the Joneses" type thing. It is also billed as a free advertising for businesses (e.g. hey, look where your friends shop!) which encourages more businesses to accept Venmo as a payment method. Anything for the sake of growth or perceived growth, up to and including privacy violations.
- ashdksnndck 1y agoI figure whatever they are trying to achieve probably doesn’t work. Otherwise Cash App would do it. But important decision makers are in too deep to admit they were wrong. Smells of turning the Magic Mouse upside down to charge it.
- Timothee 1y agoCollegeHumor, now Dropout, made a skit about this very question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWFLztKBrLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWFLztKBrLY
- libraryatnight 1y agoIf i put your information in a feed, you'll look really stupid when you cry privacy violation down the road as you realize what I've been doing with your information.
- layman51 1y agoIt is definitely odd. I think it started off as a KYC-kind of check. If there’s some weird, possibly illegal reason you type into the “what is this payment for?” input, I read that someone on behalf of Venmo will contact you to have you explain it further and to investigate if it should lead to the closure of your account.
- bee_rider 1y agoIt is unsurprising that Venmo has a log of transactions, right? That’s a necessary part of the job. Having it as something that can be presented as a social feed is the weird thing… It almost seems like a radical art project, philosophical statement, or social experiment around transparency. Like, hypothetically in some alternate universe if they did no KYC, and just published everybody’s transactions, your peers could inspect your transactions, the police could just look and see if you were transacting with criminals… sort of like open source transactions. Maybe that was the original idea? And then eventually they got some actual customers and said “shit we’re a real company now, let’s put the social experiment on the back burner, add an opt-out, and start doing in-house kyc.”
- burningChrome 1y agoI had no idea this was true until a buddy of mine who I play hockey with started putting super offensive notes on the payment, trying to trigger someone since it was a hot debate after one of our games if this actually occurred. After about five or six of these, someone did in fact contact him first via email, then actually called him and asked him to explain the notes and yes they do monitor these and yes, if its really suspect, the feds will be notified. Which then begs the obvious - if you're buying drugs, then don't put you're buying drugs or paying off your bookie.
- chihuahua 1y agoI guess it's law enforcement on the honor system - when you do something illegal, you're expected tell the police-monitored feed that you did it. We assume that no one is so unethical that they keep their illegal acts secret. For extra credit, let's put this stuff on the blockchain. Crime is solved!
- ensignavenger 1y agoSeems odd to me, I use the app and it has never once nudged me to share anything?
- recursive 1y agoPerhaps you're sharing things without knowing it.
- ensignavenger 1y agoI did a test to see how it works, the app make it pretty clear. You click share, it then shows you a preview of exactly what you are posting, and you have to hit a post button to actually post it.
- pryelluw 1y agoYou are a power user. How about the median meta user? Would they know? Is the app designed to alert them?
- warkdarrior 1y agoAre you pointing out an actual issue with this app? Or are your questions just hypotheticals about some mythical app that Meta may or may not have built?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gundmc 1y agoThank you for this. One of these links should really be the one in the submission. The Mozilla petition doesn't provide any useful context.
- pj_mukh 1y agoSidenote: How is Mozilla's comm's so bad? I had no idea what their petition was talking about. Thank you for your service.
- 9283409232 1y agoIt's honestly impressive how bad Mozilla is at communication and its been like this for years.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoEffective communication is quite humbling. It's been my experience that I need to take full responsibility for the effectiveness of my communications. A few years ago, I threw together a PowerPoint show, based on Randall Munroe's Communication comic[0]. I did it for an organization I participate in, that is full of some of the worst communicators I've ever encountered. It astounds me, how people that get paid to communicate, don't understand the fundamentals. [0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_VjLsW5IrYSOv3fWj9R5QEhWg https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V... (You need to view the slide notes, or it doesn't make any sense).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- skybrian 1y agoAnyone know how to show the speaker notes on mobile? It seems like the xkcd comic itself is pretty hard to follow. It would probably be better with dialog.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI'm not sure. It was originally a PP show, and I dumped it into Google Slides, for a friend. Probably doesn't matter. My experience is that most folks have no intentions of doing what it prescribes, so it's kind of wasted effort.
- raincole 1y agoHonestly, even after (quickly) reading the context, I still don't know why Mozilla had such a strong reaction to this.
- vegetable 1y agoMaybe one of their execs fat fingered and shared something embarrassingly.
- abeppu 1y agoI haven't used the app and likely won't but neither article shows the mechanism by which users opt into "sharing" their interactions. Is there a dark pattern involved? Like, in lots of other app contexts, you can hit "share" and then get a modal that gives you options (do you want to share it via WhatsApp or messages or email or ...) and only after you select a mode and a recipient does it actually get shared -- but if you make a "share" button whose behavior is "immediately publish", people might reasonably be surprised if they actually just want to share the results with a specific trusted person who they expected to select next in the interaction.
- btown 1y agoI'm not sure about this specific situation, but from Google Docs to ChatGPT to Notion, there's a clear distinction between "make this a shareable link to only those who have the link" and "also make that shareable link searchable/discoverable by the public." If Meta is turning that "searchability/discoverability" on by default when a share button is activated on an AI chat - or worse, if they're not even giving this industry-standard option - that would both explain the confusion, and be a terribly unexpected dark pattern. As the parent notes, the activation of a share icon is not informed consent.
- bigyabai 1y agoI don't think that is the case with ChatGPT: https://www.vice.com/en/article/chatgpt-users-report-being-able-to-see-random-peoples-chat-histories/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/chatgpt-users-report-being-a...
- btown 1y agoThat situation was a bug, with a detailed post-mortem: https://openai.com/index/march-20-chatgpt-outage/ https://openai.com/index/march-20-chatgpt-outage/ It is worth noting of course that per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185913 ChatGPT will now be required by law to retain a record of all chat history for courts and lawyers to review, but at least that data won't be made fully public. Both of those are different from a willing and intentional dark pattern of making things publicly discoverable!
- ensignavenger 1y agoI did a test in the app, and it is pretty obvious you are posting the chat. You click share, then you are given a preview, and you have to hit post to actually post it publicly.
- wheelerwj 1y agoThere’s a chance you’re overestimating a large percentage of the public.
- dumbfounder 1y agoThat context should be in there. Give me the facts or else it’s just whining.
- USeyller 1y agoThank you, the linked article was completely unclear and vague on what the issue was.
- ATechGuy 1y agoHas someone noticed a similar thing with ChatGPT and private Github repos? ChatGPT has recommended private repo links to me many times. Because they are not public, I get repo not found error. But ChatGPT can generate private code with no issues.
- nchmy 1y agoAre you sure the private repos exist, rather than just being hallucinations?
- fouc 1y agoYeah it's always been hallucinated repos. It's easy enough to verify - do a google search on the repo name itself and see if it's ever been mentioned or used anywhere and if it matches what ChatGPT thinks it was suggesting. And check to see if the owner of the repo exists and if they do, check their repositories to see which programming languages & topics they favor and see if it matches or not.
- maeil 1y agoGithub -> Microsoft sharing everything with OpenAI sadly sounds realistic. Or they don't exist in the first pLace, or they're now deleted repos, or they used to be public but went private, etc.
- ATechGuy 1y agoUnfortunately, everything you mentioned above is a possibility.