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Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared
- goku12 1y agoThis is truly egregious. Facebook and Instagram are installed by default on many android phones and cannot be fully uninstalled. And even if asked for consent, many people may choose the harmful option by mistake or due to lack of awareness. It's alarming that these companies cannot be held to even the bare minimum standards of ethics. As an aside, there was a discussion a few days back where someone argued that being locked in to popular and abusive social/messaging platforms like these is an acceptable compromise, if it means retaining online contacts with everyone you know. Well, this is precisely the sort of apathy that gives these platforms the power to abuse their marketshare so blatantly. However, it doesn't affect only the people who choose to be irresponsible about privacy. It also drags the ignorant and the unwilling participants under the influence of these spyware.
- ethan_smith 1y agoYou can use ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to disable pre-installed Facebook/Instagram apps without root via `pm disable-user` commands, effectively preventing them from running or collecting data.
- dylan604 1y agowhich what, 0.5% of users will know and be able to do?
- esseph 1y agoThat number is way way way way way too high
- goku12 1y agoThat's what I did. But as others point out, how many know about this? And modifications are getting harder by the year. They are relying on these factors to ensure that the majority of the population remains exploitable.
- baobun 1y agoBettet make it a script or ansible playbook from the start since you will need to reapply it after system updates.
- tjpnz 1y agoI don't want their shit on my phone at all. Can I remove it entirely?
- samtheprogram 1y agoWith root.
- tjpnz 1y agoSo the ADB method alone isn't sufficient?
- herbst 1y agoBuy a phone that doesn't sell your soul to the highest bidder. Or install an alternative OS. You don't buy a bike and complain about the missing roof Edit:// on my last Xiaomi I could remove anything with ADB, even definitely necessary apps, without root, do try it.
- ethagnawl 1y agoThis is why I just spent weeks tracking down a modern device that I could vendor unlock and install LineageOS on. It's no longer possible on recent OnePlus devices and many people selling other brands on Swappa and Amazon claim their devices are vendor unlockable when they're actually just carrier unlockable. I don't want any vendor's crapware running on my device. I hate that I "have to" use Google Play to function in the modern world but Lineage and MindTheGapps is at least a less bad way to go. I should sit down and try something like postmarketOS or Mobian as a portable Linux machine is what I really want ...
- goku12 1y agoThat's what I plan to do too. My current device is locked down pretty aggressively. But the problem here is, what percentage of the population has the skill and patience to do it? These companies need to hold only a simple majority of the population hostage. The holdouts like you or me can be eventually peer pressured into accepting the same abuse. For example, let's say that you avoid a certain abusive messaging platform. But what if your bank or some other essential institution insist on using it to provide their service? We can complain all they want. But they will probably just neglect you until you concede in despair. To fight this, you need affordable and ethical alternatives for the device, platform and applications. You also would need either regulation or widespread public awareness. Honestly, the current situation is hopeless on that front.
- fsflover 1y ago> I should sit down and try something like postmarketOS or Mobian as a portable Linux machine is what I really want ... Or you can buy Librem 5 with preinstalled Debian-like OS. Works for me.
- ethagnawl 1y agoCoincidentally, I just saw the announcement about the Fairphone 6 which is similar to the above _and_ is able to be repaired or upgraded by mere mortals.
- 1y ago
- herbst 1y ago> Facebook and Instagram are installed by default on many android phones and cannot be fully uninstalled If you buy a phone with this kind of business practice. It's still your own choice to do so. Many good brands let you remove any app.
- AJ007 1y agoVery helpful for ad targeting. As Apple kills tracking and ramps up its own ad business, Meta will need to collect as many signals as possible.
- cameldrv 1y agoYeah holy crap can you imagine the data goldmine of all the things they could know about you from analyzing every photo you ever take with AI?
- toofy 1y agohow long until we find out that the brand new government/palantir deal is using these photos as well against citizens? i give it a year or less.
- bigiain 1y agoI look forward to the schadenfreude I will feel when someone makes the right FOI request and we discover this "feature" was built by Meta at the request of the NSA or the FBI or some other government TLA.
- Animats 1y ago> i give it a year or less. Yesterday.[1] [1] https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2025/06/26/jd-vance-meme-norwegian-tourist-denied-entry-us-phone-search-ohio/84369477007/ https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2025/06/26/jd-vance-me...
- blub 1y agoAccording to the thread on /r/europe that person smoked weed and lied about it on their immigration form.
- hedora 1y agoSo, they engaged in behavior that’s legal at Facebook HQ? In other news, FB has been using whatsapp metadata to coordinate genocide campaigns in Gaza. What’d all those dead civilians (including infants) do, again? Presumably they signed a TOS, so it’s OK.
- samtheprogram 1y agoI would love a source about the immigration form. That would at least make more sense. Weed is legal in half of the US. As a citizen, I find the story troubling. The tweets just saying “drug use” and then you hear it’s weed is ridiculous. Why wouldn’t they just state that they lied on their immigration form about drug use?
- jbombadil 1y agohttps://archive.is/3lllh https://archive.is/3lllh
- ants_everywhere 1y agoThis is why I requested family not to post pictures of my children on Facebook. They will get to decide what to do with their likenesses when they're older. It seemed cruel to let Facebook train a model on them from the time they were babies until they first start using social media in earnest.
- sebmellen 1y agoSince Facebook is pulling from the camera roll, not posting is not an adequate defense.
- zhivota 1y agoOnly logical thing to do personally is to take it completely off your mobile devices. You still get caught in the dragnet if you have friends and family posting you. Also in many places WhatsApp is practically a requirement for daily life which is frustrating. What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.
- latentsea 1y agoOn Android you can just make a separate user profile for it and do that I suppose.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoCaught in what tho?
- microtonal 1y agoWhat I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc. GrapheneOS comes pretty close to that I think? You can put such apps in a separate profile and cut off a lot of permissions. You can also scope contacts, storage, etc.
- dangus 1y ago
- ashdksnndck 1y ago[flagged]
- alex1138 1y agoFacebook has, though, historically been less than honest about consent I bet "agree to" is "we clicked the box for you anyway"
- dylan604 1y agoOops, we totally didn't mean to, but an undiscovered bug did not obey the check box and slurped in everything anyways.
- jiggawatts 1y agoMy KPIs? I don’t see what my new Lamborghini has to do with anything!
- bigiain 1y ago"Somebody moved fast and broke things. We have no idea why they thought that was appropriate behaviour on production systems, it's completely against company policy." It's surprising(not) how that class of error always seems to fall on the side of Facebook grabbing more data without consent, and never on the side of accidentally increasing user privacy.
- ashdksnndck 1y agoHow would you know? If Facebook has a bug that accidentally increases user privacy, does The Verge write an article about it?
- shakna 1y agoIf the Verge hears, you'd probably get something like this [0]. [0] https://www.theverge.com/news/694246/google-android-pixel-watch-3-bluetooth-6-sounding-tracking-wear-os-update https://www.theverge.com/news/694246/google-android-pixel-wa...
- kevingadd 1y agoThis seems like a liability nightmare. If they're just scanning all the image files on people's devices and using them for training, they're inevitably going to scoop up nudes without permission, not to mention the occasional CSAM or gore photo, right? Why would you want to risk having stuff like that sneak into your training set when you already have access to all people's public photos?
- sebmellen 1y agoI’m sure they use a provider like Hive to scan all the photos before processing them.
- latentsea 1y agoThe purpose of a system is what it does. To that end it could actually be a plot by the CIA to find targets with this type of material on their devices, which can then be used against them to turn them into assets.
- heavyset_go 1y agoIt's simple, they don't care.
- tjpnz 1y agoI doubt anyone who works there would care.
- bregma 1y agoThey have already captured federal regulation in the USA. If a federal agent decides to prosecute, it's one press of the "you're FIRED!" button.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoI wonder how many pieces of code at facebook there are with guards like if (userId == 1) { // don't add mark's data to training set }
- samlinnfer 1y agoDon’t worry, I upload Zuck’s photos to facebook for him.
- SoftTalker 1y agoLOL at the idea that he uses Facebook. None of the silicon valley bigwigs or their kids have anything to do with social media tech except in perhaps very controlled, orchestrated ways. The normal users are just "dumb fucks."
- polyomino 1y agoMark's user id is 4
- IncreasePosts 1y agoLame, it already jumped the shark by then
- anticensor 1y ago1 is @mark, 4 is @zuck
- coef2 1y agoI miss the old days when Facebook was simply a fun way to reconnect with friend and family who lived far away. Unfortunately, those days are gone. It feels like an over engineered attention-hogging system that collects a large amount of data and risks people's mental health along the way.
- droopyEyelids 1y agoThis is a real Rip Van Winkle style take (posted with gentle humor)
- msgodel 1y agoFrom the very beginning Facebook has been an AI wearing your friends as a skinsuit. People are only just starting to notice now.
- d_watt 1y agoPerhaps naive to say, but I think there was the briefest moment where your status updates started with "is", feeds were chronological, and photos and links weren't pushed over text, that it was not an adversarial actor to one's wellbeing.
- mysterydip 1y agoWell they had to grow the userbase before they could abuse it :)
- emseetech 1y agoThe early, organic days of social networking are always fun. They never would have pulled in billions of users if they started off how they are now.
- cornfieldlabs 1y agoCouldn't have said it better. Nothing is a social network anymore. Everything is a content-consumer a platform now. People just want to scroll and scroll
- aetherspawn 1y agoiOS -> Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Photos -> Facebook -> Set limited access
- msgodel 1y agoYou'd have to block nearly every app from ever seeing any image you don't want Facebook getting ahold of including apps that are made by other companies. Almost everyone uses their libraries, they practically have a shell on your phone (which is funny because you're not allowed that on your own device for "security.")
- hedora 1y agoAs much as I’m annoyed when my iPhone makes me do the dumb “give access to these photos to the app” dance, I’m happy they block that, at least. However, I wish they’d grow a pair and just outright block the FB and other similar dependencies that make such stuff necessary.
- ben_w 1y ago> However, I wish they’d grow a pair and just outright block the FB and other similar dependencies that make such stuff necessary. When the giants fight, which one of them is an evil monopolist, and which is the defender of freedom? (This is why I actually like the iPhone approach more than the macOS approach these days; thought I do miss the late 90s when I didn't need to care because nothing had any mechanism to spy on me anyway).
- Esophagus4 1y agoArgh… I didn’t even think about that
- msgodel 1y agoNeat-O. Maybe this will finally convince people to throw out their smartphones.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoSource: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/27/facebook-is-asking-to-use-meta-ai-on-photos-in-your-camera-roll-you-havent-yet-shared/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/27/facebook-is-asking-to-use-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494)
- dzhiurgis 1y agoWonder if you could ddos it by taking selfies with ai generated faces in background.
- deadbabe 1y agoWould it be any better if Facebook hired photographers to walk around cities and major events and just photograph random people doing stuff? AI will get hungrier.
- setnone 1y agoI heard something about meta glasses
- abhinavk 1y agoThey will sell a product that people will use to photograph random people doing stuff.
- deadbabe 1y agoThat only gives you POV type photos and they are too random and uncategorized. If you hire a large amount of photographers and assign each of them to capture photos with certain themes you will be far more efficient and get cleaner data. And you can get images from places where people do not use meta products.
- xyst 1y agoData and people are the commodity in this Ai gold rush. Primary benefactors are big tech.
- omnicognate 1y agoBeneficiaries
- Jackson__ 1y agoCurious, is this really necessary? I'd assume the subtotal of public images posted on meta services to be in the trillions.
- ipsum2 1y agoI imagine many people will react only to the headline and not read the article, but: "Meta tells The Verge that, for now, it’s not training on your unpublished photos with this new feature. “[The Verge’s headline] implies we are currently training our AI models with these photos, which we aren’t. This test doesn’t use people’s photos to improve or train our AI models,” As someone who is familiar with the ML space, it seems unlikely that the addition of private photos will significantly improve models, as you have mentioned.
- ejstronge 1y ago> I imagine many people will react only to the headline and not read the article [...] I saw this line in the article: "Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images." It would seem important to share this with people who may 'not read the article'
- squigz 1y agoShouldn't it have zero rights over your "camera roll images", which implies to me to be photos saved to a phone but not yet uploaded to Facebook?
- mupuff1234 1y agoProbably for personalization.
- JimDabell 1y agoThis article seems false. > On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or themes like birthdays or graduations.” > By allowing this feature, the message continues, users are agreeing to Meta AI terms, which allows their AI to analyze “media and facial features” of those unpublished photos, as well as the date said photos were taken, and the presence of other people or objects in them. You further grant Meta the right to “retain and use” that personal information. The straightforward explanation is this: they have a feature where it is helpful to group people together. For instance suggesting a photo of you and a friend to be posted on their birthday. In order to make this work, they need to perform facial recognition, so they ask for permission using their standard terms. Can they train their AI with it? Yes, you are giving them permission to do so. Does the information available tell us that is what they are doing? No, it does not. In fact, a Meta spokesperson said this: > “These suggestions are opt-in only and only shown to you – unless you decide to share them – and can be turned off at any time,” she continued. “Camera roll media may be used to improve these suggestions, but are not used to improve AI models in this test.” — https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/27/facebook-is-asking-to-use-meta-ai-on-photos-in-your-camera-roll-you-havent-yet-shared/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/27/facebook-is-asking-to-use-... Could they be lying about this? Sure, I guess. But don’t publish an article saying that they are doing it, when you have no evidence to show that they are doing this and they say they aren’t doing this. Might they do it in the future? Sure, I guess. But don’t publish an article saying that they are doing it, if the best you have is speculation about what they might do in the future. Does it make sense for them to do this? Not really. They’ve already got plenty of training data. Will your private photos really move the needle for them? Almost certainly not. Will it be worth the PR fallout? Definitely not. Should you grant them permission if you don’t want them to train on your private photos? No. This could have been a decent article if they were clearer about what is fact and what is speculation. But they overreached and said that Facebook is doing something when that is not evident at all. That crosses the line into dishonesty for me.
- BiteCode_dev 1y ago
- jurschreuder 1y agoThey're also developing VR glasses. The company that is destroying children's mental health with phone addiction is developing VR glasses. I guess nobody cares
- noisy_boy 1y ago> nobody cares Some people do but other people don't elect them.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago>Some people do but other people don't elect them. So, the other people don't care.
- squigz 1y agoHasn't Facebook (and pretty much all major social media platforms) had a clause in their TOS giving them a license to whatever you upload to their services, since forever?
- osmsucks 1y agoI forget the exact language, but I think it originally accounted for use of only public media in "marketing and promotional" material, so it didn't include private photos and ML training. This seems to be a step up (or, down, I guess) from that.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- windex 1y agozuck needs to fade into irrelevance. The guy hasnt done anything interesting in years. Every few years he raids private data and thinks he can do something with it.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago[dead]
- Alifatisk 1y agoZucks empire has done a lot in the field of LLMs, I don’t know if local llms would have been possible without their contributions
- notsydonia 1y agoIt's also a huge danger as the system FB uses to tag and categorize photos is clearly flawed. example: Meta took a business page I ran that had over 150K followers offline because of a photo that violated their 'strict anti-pornography' etc etc policies. The picture was of a planet - Saturn - and it took weeks of the most god-awful to and fro with (mostly) bots to get them to revoke the ban - their argument was that the planet was 'flesh-toned' and that their A.I. could not tell that was not actually skin. The image was from NASA via a stock library and labelled as such.
- southernplaces7 1y agoOne reads completely ridiculous cases like the one you describe, and shakes their head at those who preach the notion of creating ever more thickets of AI "powered" bots as a prima facie interface for our social services, customer support and other institutional interaction needs. Idiocies like this are why AI should absolutely never (at least at any present level of technology) be an inescapable means of filtering how a human is responded to with any complaint. Truly, fuck the mentality of those who want to cram this tendency down the public's throat. Though it sadly won't happen thanks to sheer corporate growth inertia, companies that do push such things should be punished into oblivion by the market.
- p_l 1y agoI worked on a project where one of the services was a model that decided whether to pay a medical bill. Before you start justified screams of horror, let me explain the simple honesty trick that ensured proper ethics, though I guess at cost of profit unacceptable to some corporations: The model could only decide between auto approving a repayment, or refer the bill to existing human staff. The entire idea was that the obvious cases will be auto approved, and anything more complex would follow the existing practice.
- conartist6 1y agoMmmmhm, which means the humans now understand that they should be callous and cold. If they're not rubber stamping rejections all the time then the AI isn't doing anything useful by making a feed of easy-to-reject applications. The system will become evil even if it has humans in it because they have been given no power to resist the incentives
- nottorp 1y agoHmm I don't post photos privately on FB, and I maybe post one public photo every 2-3 years. What can I use to "poison" their training? I'll just send them privately to the friends that would consider that fun.
- rickdeckard 1y agoAccording to the article they want to upload and process "selected pictures from your camera roll" to make suggestions. Now the definition may vary, but the camera roll is probably the list of images on your phone (which the app accesses when you pick an image to post), not a list of pictures you already posted privately...
- nottorp 1y agoOh... that ain't going to happen. I don't have any Facebook apps on my phone nor i'm signed into the site in the browser. (Or so I hope.)
- robin_reala 1y agoRemember that you can delete your Meta accounts and have nothing to do with them. It’s not hard to do.
- clcaev 1y ago> Remember that you can delete your Meta accounts and have nothing to do with them. It’s not hard to do. This means deleting real-world social connections. Meta owns the interwoven communication hubs of many local communities. Let me provide an example. My swim team coach uses WhatsApp for all communication, including frequent pool schedule changes. They have strongly resisted change, as it is too much work to get 50+ subscribers to move to an alternative platform. They are the only local choice; this team is where my friends swim. Sure, I could work tirelessly to convince everyone to switch. However, most of the members use WhatsApp for other communities (eg triathlon and open-water clubs). Introducing an alternative incrementally means each member has to manage N+1 apps, etc. Importantly, super nodes (coaches, multi-club parents) with the most connections offer the most resistance: things work for them, why should they change?
- robin_reala 1y agoI didn’t say you should delete your account, I said you can. There will of course be downsides, but it’s a choice you can make if the negative factors tip the balance.
- throwaway83094 1y agoYou could choose not to engage with communities that force you to use platforms that violate your rights. No need to cut anyone off for now, but something to keep in mind for the future.
- ryandrake 1y agoI don’t know why you’re downvoted, you are absolutely right. We need to 1. Not engage and therefore be part of the problem and 2. Be vocal and loudly tell these businesses that it’s not acceptable to offer only Social Media mediated channels for communication. And stop doing business with those who keep doing it.
- ch_fr 1y agoBe it opt-in or not, I don't like that Meta is comfortable enough to even suggest it. Even when putting AI out of the equation, this is still one more of Meta's repeated attempts at breaking out of mobile app encapsulation (see the Onavo VPN or localhost tracking).
- ch_fr 1y agoProbably would have been a more fitting comment for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399494
- gorjusborg 1y agoAs commercial AI kills its food source (the internet) we'll see corporations doing desperate things to keep feeding it.
- ATechGuy 1y agoSome of the best decisions I made ever: 1. Deleted FB in 2012 :) 2. Didn't create insta or whatsapp account 3. Never applied to meta jobs
- pyman 1y agoThe joy of deleting Facebook in 2021 is something I'll never be able to put into words. A company that's right up there with gambling and tobacco: designed to keep you hooked, no matter the cost.
- gambiting 1y agoI was going to say Instagram is much worse in terms of keeping you hooked but then I remembered who owns it.
- pyman 1y agoFacebook is way worse than Instagram. I've never, ever seen an algorithm as evil and anti-social as the one Facebook's programmers created. At one point, it was showing my family and friends a comment my cousin had made about a politician, and they started getting into heated arguments with him. And this kept happening again and again. It honestly felt like the algorithm was trying to polarise entire families and friend groups, driving engagement by surfacing exactly the things people disagreed with or didn't want to hear. During the pandemic the algorithm drove everyone insane. At one point, I compared Facebook to a virus. It hijacked conversations, infected relationships, misled people, and distorted their perceptions of others.
- arccy 1y agoYeah facebook is definitely worse, though it's kind of like twitter: any action can become an item in other people's timelines. instagram is still bad now that they push more ads and content from people you don't follow onto you, but at least it's only things that are explicitly posted, and it's easier to maintain multiple profiles with different feeds
- jofla_net 1y agoIts just "giving users more of what they want", said the owner of Marks Meats. I dont think a take on technology and society could be more naive.
- willsmith72 1y ago
- 29athrowaway 1y agoThe AR glasses are also about the same... just get a lot of pictures so they can feed their AI.
- geor9e 1y agoHacker News users keep getting worked up about opt-in services they don't want to opt in to.
- sciencerobot 1y agoI don’t use meta products. Photos of me are on the camera rolls of people who do.
- labrador 1y agoIt's like that Ricky Gervais joke: Guy walks to a public square, sees a message board and on it sees an ad for guitar lessons. Guy gets upset and angrily says "but I don't want guitar lessons!" Calls the number and complains to the guitar teacher.
- bgwalter 1y agoThey are still pushing the "AI dominance over China" argument to clueless politicians. The anti regulation clause sneaked into the "Big Beautiful Bill" ($5 trillion new debt) facilitates consumer exploitation and has no impact at all on military applications. If China dominates consumer exploitation, let them and shut off their Internet companies. Strangely enough, why not invest $500 billion in a working fusion reactor if these people are so worried about U.S. dominance?
- Finnucane 1y agoI continue to be retroactively vindicated for never using fb from my phone. Now, if they figure out how to get access to my Hasselblad 503 I'm screwed.
- puttycat 1y agoSome time ago I asked on HN "will you go work for Meta?" [1]. I'm so glad I didn't pass their (ridiculous, redundant) set of interviews. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935199
- huhkerrf 1y agoI mean, the very first two replies on your link are "yes" and the third is "maybe." Doesn't seem very unanimous to me. (My comment makes less sense now. OP had originally said the replies were unanimously negative, but has since edited the comment to remove that.)
- Anon1096 1y agoSo you failed their interview and then proceeded to post a whole thread to get validation that Meta's not a good company to work for? And you're still posting about it a year later? Talk about sour grapes.
- puttycat 1y agoThanks for the good vibes. Did it occur to you that the original question might have been posted before the rejection?
- charcircuit 1y agoWho would want to have AI be applied after you share the photos? Most people would want to check what the photos actually look like before publishing them. The appeal of this feature is to be able to see the suggestions immediately. The feature is opt in and you don't have to grant permission to your camera roll if you don't want to.
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- demarq 1y agoQuestion to the Meta engineers on here, do you ever speak out about this internally?
- StochasticLi 1y agoNo. I worked at Meta, and these are mostly mid-skilled engineers who want to make money while working a few hours a week and pretending to work the rest. They would never attract top talent because top engineers can earn 10 times their salary on their own without leaving the terminal nowadays. Even if they offered $10M/year, I feel these kinds of people can't be bought. It's just a job. You will get fired if you question people above you.
- demarq 1y agoThat’s sad.
- barbazoo 1y agoWe’re on here are privileged. I feel bad for the billions of people that aren’t aware of or unable to see how truly terrible that organization is for societies and the planet.
- harvey9 1y agoI don't think this privilege counts for much since we all live in the same societies, and even among hn users there are few people with meaningful influence over Meta.
- Anthony-G 1y agoSimilar to how Cassandra’s gift of prophecy was actually a curse because she was unable to use her foresight to avoid or mitigate the predicted misfortunes and tragedies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra
- api 1y agoNot your computer, data not encrypted with keys you control, not your data.
- phendrenad2 1y agoMeta products are such a bad deal for users. I wish there was an alternative to Facebook and Instagram, even if it had no users. We, as users, can solve the "no users" problem for you. Facebook and Instagram became popular, contrary to popular belief, not because it had "critical mass" or some Hoffmanite bullshit like that, but because it had the technical community using them, and they brought their friends and family. Someone just needs to build it.
- huhkerrf 1y agoThis, sadly, just doesn't live up to reality. It wasn't the technical users that made Facebook popular. It was college students, and not the CS ones. I remember, I was there. As for Instagram, again, I was there. Had that been a platform primarily for a technical audience, it wouldn't have taken it off. The one platform you can say this about is Twitter. That, undoubtedly, started off with a much more tech audience, and grew so popular due to API integrations. As for someone just needing to build alternatives. There have been dozens upon dozens over the years. Where are they now?
- krapp 1y agoAlternatives such as the Fediverse are doing just fine, despite HN's categorical rejection of anything that doesn't match the big corporate platforms in scale and revenue as "viable."
- righthand 1y agoYou have to accept that attitude exists here because HN is a forum hosted by a VC firm. The reality is that the fediverse doesn't really have a huge economic impact and the people who swim around the capitalism waters think that stinks. Even though the fediverse by default is perfectly fine this way.
- p2detar 1y agoMy impression about Fedi is that it’s much bigger than most people think it is, but those who are in it don’t like talking about it a lot.
- b0a04gl 1y ago[dead]
- bee_rider 1y ago> Unfortunately for end users, in tech companies’ rush to stay ahead, it’s not always clear what they’re agreeing to when features like this appear. At this point, is there really a lack of clarity? I think we all know Facebook is going to interpret any permission to look at anything, as full permission to do whatever the hell they want with it. There are people who care about this, and people who don’t. Telling ourselves there’s confusion… I think is not going to produce an accurate model of reality. I think these social media companies are evil. I just don’t see the point in deluding myself into thinking that they are outsmarting everybody. It is a difference of priorities, not smarts.
- exabrial 1y agoSilicon Valley has a problem with one word: consent. What stinks is the original concept: keeping up with disperate friends, its pretty awesome. I enjoy seeing my friends' kids grow up even though I don't really know them.
- anonymars 1y agoWhatever do you mean? WhatsApp asks consent before hoovering up my contact info. Oh, what's that, I can't actually initiate any conversations without giving that up? Well, that's just the free market, baby. Use something else if you don't like it. You're telling me that all over the world WhatsApp is basically mandatory to communicate with most people and businesses? Well in this land of freedom, network effects cannot stand up to my Free Market Principles good sir!
- windex 1y agoI mentioned this on another thread. I tried my best to avoid FB, but then they acquire products like WhatsApp to then hoover up personal data again. This shouldn't be allowed. PII and personal data should be bound to the original terms on which the product launched. Zuck should find a quiet part of the internet or the metaverse to curl up and fade away. The guy just doesn't have any redeeming qualities.
- ProllyInfamous 1y agoMy local DNS rules (PiHole) block all Google & Facebook products. It's actually kind of fun seeking/using less-global alternatives, even if just for the different perspectives. e.g. Bing maps is my favorite way to explore cities (yes, I know they're a MSFT product, their code/login doesn't permeate across my internets).
- righthand 1y agoWhy MS Bing maps? The UI is nice or are there extra features that make it great for exploration? And by exploration do you mean physical or digital?
- ProllyInfamous 1y ago>Why Bing? I first saught out Bing Maps because the aerial views can be set askew from cardinal directions, which allows you to (sometimes) discover objects beneath tree-cover (hidden in top-down views). I've continued using Bing for digital explorations because the physical printouts have more contrast (i.e. are easier to read; however, alltrails has the best printouts). Bing seems to list more businesses than other platforms, and presents the information with less clutter. But ultimately, I use Bing because I can use it while still blocking all other tracking products of its parent company (which is very difficult to do with e.g. Google products — which I just ban entirely).
- akomtu 1y agoCorps are going to be as abusive as the situation allows. Today Facebook is asking, tomorrow the consent to AI will be required to continue using the service.
- cpersona 1y agoThere's a future where people (or AI) will take pictures, AI will edit and post the ones that will be liked, and then AI will like pictures based on previous like history.
- imartin2k 1y agoThe world would be a better place without this shitty company.
- backendEngineer 1y agofuck Meta
- CHUCKEESH 1y ago[flagged]