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I have a hard time understanding, given the abundance of bad faith and predatory behavior Meta has displayed over entire span of its existence, why anyone would

by RGS1811 24d ago

I have a hard time understanding, given the abundance of bad faith and predatory behavior Meta has displayed over entire span of its existence, why anyone would want to consult with its "personal AI" or grant it access to "all aspects of your life".

algovex 24d ago
[dead]
gunalx 24d ago
Fact is most people don't really care. And they don't really know why they should care either. All the problems feels like something far away, while they are being exploited and sold without fully realising. I dont think anyone knowing full and well would be comfortable with it. At least that would dumbfound me.
augment_me 24d ago
There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined, most people don't give a shit and are just trying to minimize cognitive effort. My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day because it would mean less planning.
- lxgr 24d ago
  WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, so I'm not trusting Meta with much, and it's the only way I can reach quite a lot of people. A lot of people I know trust them begrudgingly (primarily with Instagram, because all of their friends are on it as well). People don't need to love a company to use its products. The perceived benefit merely needs to be bigger than the perceived cost.
  - cyanydeez 24d ago
    someone's questioning that claim legally: https://www.pcmag.com/news/lawsuit-alleges-that-whatsapp-has-no-end-to-end-encryption https://www.pcmag.com/news/lawsuit-alleges-that-whatsapp-has...
    - lxgr 24d ago
      And has a verdict been reached? Otherwise, people are pursuing all kinds of outlandish claims legally.
    - Egrodo 24d ago
      I work there. The claims made in this article are just blatantly false, and so obviously so to any employee I'm not sure how this hasn't been thrown out.
      - cyanydeez 24d ago
        I agree, it should be rediculously easy to demo it's real e2e capabilities. to everyones benefit
  - augment_me 24d ago
    This assumes completely techo-rational actors that continuously monitor cost-benefit analysis, other alternatives and switch products when one outweights the others. This is even further away from the reality where people have breakdowns because their app icon moved location and is not in the usual spot. The average person is optimizing towards energy use minimization by default because life is already hard enough with plans, kids, etc. Use incentives and we will arrive at closer truths than by claims and expressions.
    - lxgr 24d ago
      Slightly different lens, same outcome: It's there, it lets people do what they want to do with acceptable effort/other negative consequences, so they use it.
    - larodi 24d ago
      People have breakdowns because they are left without mobile reception for a few hours. Indeed this IS happening and I would expect people soon to have breakdowns, because they lack access to AI.
  - bossyTeacher 24d ago
    > WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, - Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when - backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained - even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext
    - lxgr 24d ago
      > - backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained Yes, but importantly not by Meta themselves. > - Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when Fair enough and worth mentioning. I'm personally fine with it. > - even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext Yes, but how would you prevent that even in principle? I can't control what the people I'm messaging do with their copy of my messages. As long as there isn't unnecessary non-repudiation (e.g. by the sender cryptographically signing all outbound messages, which the Signal protocol intentionally avoids), I think this is fair as well. I do agree that e.g. vanishing chats with a short timeout/"view only once" images should probably not be included in backups, though; last time I checked, I think they were.
      - cobbzilla 24d ago
        > Yes, but importantly not by Meta themselves. Don’t they save backups to Meta? Even if not, they can read whatever’s (unencrypted) on your phone if they really want to.
        lxgr 24d ago
        They currently go on iCloud on iOS and Google Drive on Android. There are rumors about a first-party backup service, which would obviously change that calculus, but nothing concrete yet.
    - addandsubtract 24d ago
  - jcgl 24d ago
    WhatsApp is E2EE, but Meta controls both ends. Instead of reading your plaintext on the server, they read it on the client. Not that tricky. I presume the hardest part would be avoiding detection via decompilation and other reverse engineering techniques. Not familiar with that space (can anyone here shed some light?), but it seems likely that an entity with Meta’s resources would be able to figure that out. E2EE probably protects well against bulk data collection (traffic analysis would sniff out sending 2x volume of data pretty quickly). But something more subtle and targeted, smuggled out in various fields of various protocols, would be hard to detect.
    - lxgr 24d ago
      They only need to get caught doing it once to have a gigantic lawsuit on their hands. They could possibly pull it off very selectively, but doing it in a dragnet fashion seems incredibly risky.
      - netsharc 24d ago
        My suspicion is that things like URL previews, or when the app calls a handler to open a link (YouTube, browser), are still monitored. So e.g. opening a link to an Amazon product that a friend sent makes you a target for ads in that category. It's a suspicion, they'd probably argue their EULA allows this. The typical "we have to monitor links for dangerous content" is always the standard bullshit.
        lxgr 24d ago
        This is indeed a common vector of privacy leaks on either the recipient side (to the sender, in this case, if they operate the target of the link for which a preview is being rendered) or to the platform provider (if the preview is rendered server-side). But last time I checked, in WhatsApp, URL previews are rendered exclusively on the sender side and then sent as (E2E encrypted) media to the recipient.
      - jcgl 24d ago
        What grounds would the lawsuit be based on? I can’t imagine that slurping any kind of data would be inconsistent with their EULA. The only risk would be the reputational damage. And as far as their bottom line is concerned, the impact of that would be negligible—how many of WhatsApp’s billion(?) users know that it’s supposed to be E2EE, let alone are under the illusion that Meta doesn’t have access to their data?
- meowface 24d ago
  Honestly I am in that camp, but Facebook is kind of a special case for me. I don't really care about giving Google or Microsoft or OpenAI or Anthropic all of my personal data, but Facebook is a bridge slightly too far.
- shimman 24d ago
  This comment is one of the most dystopian things I've read on this site.
  - edgarvaldes 24d ago
    >My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day I guess a lot of the AI enthusiasts are already pushing the "I automated my daily life decisions to this awesome AI. I now have more time and more brain power left to be productive!" angle.
  - afavour 24d ago
    I think the phrasing is a little extreme. Rather than “tell them what to eat” I’d say something like “everyone wishes they had a personal assistant”. I could do a lot better at meal planning than I do. I rotate between relatively few dishes. An AI that finds recipes and automatically adds the ingredients to my shopping could be interesting. Technically it’s “telling me what to eat” but it’s not like I’m taking orders from it.
    - shimman 23d ago
      No, it's more like society would have failed in raising me as a human being if I'm okay with completely ignoring the people that raised + provided for me where I purposely replace human connection with a chatbot.
- wnevets 24d ago
  > There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined Is there tho? I have Facebook account but don't use it in any meaningful way. I'm certainly not feeding it any new data. I'm curious to know what percentage of that 3 billion are zombie accounts like mine.
  - cillianpower 24d ago
    There almost certainly is. I think on HN people aren’t really aware that they don’t represent the median internet user super well. I would wager if you were to tally every late millennial and zoomer across the west, Instagram usage would probably be near 90%. Facebook usage among older people is also still absolutely rampant, at least anecdotally. Not to mention WhatsApp usage which is huge everywhere but the US seemingly
    - ipaddr 24d ago
      The population of the west who fit into zoomer near millennials wouldn't even be close to 500m. Maybe if we add threads bots we could get closer. Most of the accounts are bots/fake/not used anymore. 90% of zoomers don't have an account, most rarely use it and don't add more than a few photos for social proof.
      - wenc 24d ago
        > The population of the west who fit into zoomer near millennials wouldn't even be close to 500m. There are many people of all ages not in the west from very populous nations who use Insta, FB and WhatsApp. I’ve learned that US usage patterns are not representative of rest of world. More saliently, HN users’ conception of others’ usage patterns are absolutely not representative.
    - bertmuir 24d ago
      I'll take that wager! Before you look at any real statistics, how does $1000 sound?
    - dr_ 24d ago
      For anyone who has school age kids, WhatsApp usage is pretty huge in the US as well.
- runjake 24d ago
  3.6 billion (de-duped) daily users! https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2026/Meta-Reports-Second-Quarter-2026-Results/default.aspx https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
- ghostpepper 24d ago
  One thing they could try eating is glue on their pizza, helps the cheese stick to the toppings
nomel 24d ago
There's something like 177 million facebook users in the US. Most probably have Facebook/instagram/etc installed on their phones, streaming their location data/etc, without a worry in the world. Most would probably very much enjoy the utility of this agent. If you can't understand how the general population, the target customer for Meta, would think of using something like this, then it almost certainly means your entire social circle is within the same tech-aware bubble that you are in here. ;) I have a few non-tech people that I talk bounce this sort of thing off of, periodically, as a reality check.
Catloafdev 24d ago
Ya, I'm not sure why anyone would choose to use this over any other option that doesn't sacrifice your privacy.
- jeanmichelselli 24d ago
  Well.. I think I can imagine why.. ;)
aftbit 24d ago
Every single HN post about anything Meta-adjacent starts with a comment like this. Guys, we get it, the hive mind of HN doesn't like Meta/Facebook/Zuck. Fine. But can we actually comment on the technology and tools rather than the company for once?
- heyjamesknight 24d ago
  Posts about Meta must bring up general distrust of the company and its leadership. Posts about Google have to mention them sunsetting products often. It's just tradition at this point.
- frail_figure 24d ago
  Nice try Meta stock holder!
  - aftbit 23d ago
    Nah I don't own that crap :laugh:
- ryandrake 24d ago
  This comes up a lot here! Your comment reads like a lot of similar HN "Can't we just talk about the pure technology? Why do you all always have to bring up ethics/politics of it all??" As if these things are separable. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. As soon as it touches society, it necessarily gets dirtied up with messy things like law, ethics, corporate responsibility, capitalism, profit-seeking, public good. The technology is never separate from the environment around the technology. It's impossible (or at least dishonest) to try to simply discuss the pure technical aspects of The Torment Nexus.
- dabedee 24d ago
  The technology is an agent you name. You give it a face. Maybe tune the personality. And, it only gets useful as you grant it more and more access to your accounts. The technology is produced by a public company. And, in this case, the company is useful context for this story since it has just recently agreed to pay about $18 billion to resolve a multistate lawsuit claiming it intentionally designed addictive platforms that harmed young people's mental health. You cannot detach the technology from the company. It's definitely not a neutral artifact.
croddin 24d ago
I might use it for helping manage Facebook marketplace listings as that is data that is already on meta.
Anon1096 24d ago
This is probably why they are launching now. There's no real other competitor right now in the nicely made managed openclaw space for personal use (or at least, very very early. Maybe Grokbot can be considered the lead competitor but afaik it did not gain mindshare). Instinct is supposed to come out soon and by not being associated with Meta it'd be really appealing just on that front vs this. But being first to market is a real reason to use it and chance to gain lasting market share.
npalli 24d ago
You are right, sometimes the simplest answer is the right now. Don't trust Meta. Life is going to be much simpler. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me continuously for 20 years, shame on me.
matherial 24d ago
I had that conversation several times with friends outside of tech. The universal reaction is just a shrug - "my life is boring, what do they care". And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. In practice, it's a trade-off most people are comfortable making because they can't think of anything that some trillion-dollar tech company, or the FBI, or the FSB, would ever want to do to them specifically. It's the same reason why the market share for Firefox is a rounding error.
- RGS1811 24d ago
  I get this, and I’ve said similar things about privacy and security in the past, but Meta in particular has a history of intentionally using customer data and behavior to the detriment of those customers. Creating experiences designed to ensnare, addict, and ultimately harm their users. This goes beyond paranoia about security or privacy. It’s handing your drug dealer the keys to your house.
  - ryandrake 24d ago
    For a lot of companies, you can usually assume incompetence when they end up doing something terrible, but Meta is the strongest "Anti Hanlon's Razor" example. You have to always assume malice with those guys.
- cactacea 24d ago
  > hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
  - filoleg 24d ago
    > Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all. The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information. My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general). It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy. And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial). The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.
lenerdenator 24d ago
Because people are apathetic by nature until things become a real problem. It's not just Meta, either. How often do we have people on here talking about how amazing Chinese models are when the list of security breaches involving the Chinese government is extensive? People want something easy, quick, and free. Do those things and they'll let you get away with anything.
ebbi 24d ago
For this reason alone it's DOA for me.
capitanazo77 24d ago
It’s the life of a parasite. You don’t care if it takes just a bit from you. And it eventually protects you from worse parasites. (Like the us blocking china)
elisbce 24d ago
Why are all the seemingly smart people on HN so narrow-minded to the point of speaking idiotic nonsense? What do you think their 3.6B MAU are, all bots?
- darksaints 24d ago
  Based on what passes for “engagement” and “content” on their platforms, I’d estimate that a majority of their users are exactly that.
  - melasadra 24d ago
    So my country has somewhere between 100-200 million MAU for facebook ane. Facebook marketplace is huge here.It's basically our craigslist. Hobby groups/communities are also huge. If I wanted to find the local jogging or chess club, I'd use Facebook. Just remember that outside your bubble there's a whole wide world with billions of people living in it
    - alex1138 24d ago
      The company is hurting people outside the 'bubble'.
- alex1138 24d ago
  The company has been known to lie before And the thing is, network effects are killer. I'm on it because you're on it because Alice is on it because Bob is on it But, Facebook has apparently been known to censor links to competition (I'm less clear on this). With Myspace they had a tool where you could import contacts into Facebook from Myspace, but not the other way around
threethirtytwo 24d ago
Damn yeah why do people even use Facebook or WhatsApp or instagram? How does a company become a multi billion dollar company at all? Guess what.. it’s because people use it and don’t care. That’s the godawful truth. The other thing you need to realize is not only do people don’t care, but people like you know exactly why meta makes billions. It’s obvious. You seriously expect me to believe you don’t know why a company like meta makes billions? Come on. It’s sad but thats the way things are. I see someone pretend they don’t get it but if you take the time to think you’ll realize… We all get it. We just can’t face it.
UltraSane 24d ago
The ratio of privacy_reduction:convenience that most people are willing to tolerate is enormous.

by RGS1811 24d ago

algovex 24d ago

[dead]

gunalx 24d ago

Fact is most people don't really care. And they don't really know why they should care either. All the problems feels like something far away, while they are being exploited and sold without fully realising. I dont think anyone knowing full and well would be comfortable with it. At least that would dumbfound me.

augment_me 24d ago

There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined, most people don't give a shit and are just trying to minimize cognitive effort. My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day because it would mean less planning.

lxgr 24d ago
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, so I'm not trusting Meta with much, and it's the only way I can reach quite a lot of people. A lot of people I know trust them begrudgingly (primarily with Instagram, because all of their friends are on it as well). People don't need to love a company to use its products. The perceived benefit merely needs to be bigger than the perceived cost.
- cyanydeez 24d ago
  someone's questioning that claim legally: https://www.pcmag.com/news/lawsuit-alleges-that-whatsapp-has-no-end-to-end-encryption https://www.pcmag.com/news/lawsuit-alleges-that-whatsapp-has...
  - lxgr 24d ago
    And has a verdict been reached? Otherwise, people are pursuing all kinds of outlandish claims legally.
  - Egrodo 24d ago
    I work there. The claims made in this article are just blatantly false, and so obviously so to any employee I'm not sure how this hasn't been thrown out.
    - cyanydeez 24d ago
      I agree, it should be rediculously easy to demo it's real e2e capabilities. to everyones benefit
- augment_me 24d ago
  This assumes completely techo-rational actors that continuously monitor cost-benefit analysis, other alternatives and switch products when one outweights the others. This is even further away from the reality where people have breakdowns because their app icon moved location and is not in the usual spot. The average person is optimizing towards energy use minimization by default because life is already hard enough with plans, kids, etc. Use incentives and we will arrive at closer truths than by claims and expressions.
  - lxgr 24d ago
    Slightly different lens, same outcome: It's there, it lets people do what they want to do with acceptable effort/other negative consequences, so they use it.
  - larodi 24d ago
    People have breakdowns because they are left without mobile reception for a few hours. Indeed this IS happening and I would expect people soon to have breakdowns, because they lack access to AI.
- bossyTeacher 24d ago
  > WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, - Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when - backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained - even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext
  - lxgr 24d ago
    > - backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained Yes, but importantly not by Meta themselves. > - Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when Fair enough and worth mentioning. I'm personally fine with it. > - even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext Yes, but how would you prevent that even in principle? I can't control what the people I'm messaging do with their copy of my messages. As long as there isn't unnecessary non-repudiation (e.g. by the sender cryptographically signing all outbound messages, which the Signal protocol intentionally avoids), I think this is fair as well. I do agree that e.g. vanishing chats with a short timeout/"view only once" images should probably not be included in backups, though; last time I checked, I think they were.
    - cobbzilla 24d ago
      > Yes, but importantly not by Meta themselves. Don’t they save backups to Meta? Even if not, they can read whatever’s (unencrypted) on your phone if they really want to.
      - lxgr 24d ago
        They currently go on iCloud on iOS and Google Drive on Android. There are rumors about a first-party backup service, which would obviously change that calculus, but nothing concrete yet.
  - addandsubtract 24d ago
- jcgl 24d ago
  WhatsApp is E2EE, but Meta controls both ends. Instead of reading your plaintext on the server, they read it on the client. Not that tricky. I presume the hardest part would be avoiding detection via decompilation and other reverse engineering techniques. Not familiar with that space (can anyone here shed some light?), but it seems likely that an entity with Meta’s resources would be able to figure that out. E2EE probably protects well against bulk data collection (traffic analysis would sniff out sending 2x volume of data pretty quickly). But something more subtle and targeted, smuggled out in various fields of various protocols, would be hard to detect.
  - lxgr 24d ago
    They only need to get caught doing it once to have a gigantic lawsuit on their hands. They could possibly pull it off very selectively, but doing it in a dragnet fashion seems incredibly risky.
    - netsharc 24d ago
      My suspicion is that things like URL previews, or when the app calls a handler to open a link (YouTube, browser), are still monitored. So e.g. opening a link to an Amazon product that a friend sent makes you a target for ads in that category. It's a suspicion, they'd probably argue their EULA allows this. The typical "we have to monitor links for dangerous content" is always the standard bullshit.
      - lxgr 24d ago
        This is indeed a common vector of privacy leaks on either the recipient side (to the sender, in this case, if they operate the target of the link for which a preview is being rendered) or to the platform provider (if the preview is rendered server-side). But last time I checked, in WhatsApp, URL previews are rendered exclusively on the sender side and then sent as (E2E encrypted) media to the recipient.
    - jcgl 24d ago
      What grounds would the lawsuit be based on? I can’t imagine that slurping any kind of data would be inconsistent with their EULA. The only risk would be the reputational damage. And as far as their bottom line is concerned, the impact of that would be negligible—how many of WhatsApp’s billion(?) users know that it’s supposed to be E2EE, let alone are under the illusion that Meta doesn’t have access to their data?
meowface 24d ago
Honestly I am in that camp, but Facebook is kind of a special case for me. I don't really care about giving Google or Microsoft or OpenAI or Anthropic all of my personal data, but Facebook is a bridge slightly too far.
shimman 24d ago
This comment is one of the most dystopian things I've read on this site.
- edgarvaldes 24d ago
  >My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day I guess a lot of the AI enthusiasts are already pushing the "I automated my daily life decisions to this awesome AI. I now have more time and more brain power left to be productive!" angle.
- afavour 24d ago
  I think the phrasing is a little extreme. Rather than “tell them what to eat” I’d say something like “everyone wishes they had a personal assistant”. I could do a lot better at meal planning than I do. I rotate between relatively few dishes. An AI that finds recipes and automatically adds the ingredients to my shopping could be interesting. Technically it’s “telling me what to eat” but it’s not like I’m taking orders from it.
  - shimman 23d ago
    No, it's more like society would have failed in raising me as a human being if I'm okay with completely ignoring the people that raised + provided for me where I purposely replace human connection with a chatbot.
wnevets 24d ago
> There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined Is there tho? I have Facebook account but don't use it in any meaningful way. I'm certainly not feeding it any new data. I'm curious to know what percentage of that 3 billion are zombie accounts like mine.
- cillianpower 24d ago
  There almost certainly is. I think on HN people aren’t really aware that they don’t represent the median internet user super well. I would wager if you were to tally every late millennial and zoomer across the west, Instagram usage would probably be near 90%. Facebook usage among older people is also still absolutely rampant, at least anecdotally. Not to mention WhatsApp usage which is huge everywhere but the US seemingly
  - ipaddr 24d ago
    The population of the west who fit into zoomer near millennials wouldn't even be close to 500m. Maybe if we add threads bots we could get closer. Most of the accounts are bots/fake/not used anymore. 90% of zoomers don't have an account, most rarely use it and don't add more than a few photos for social proof.
    - wenc 24d ago
      > The population of the west who fit into zoomer near millennials wouldn't even be close to 500m. There are many people of all ages not in the west from very populous nations who use Insta, FB and WhatsApp. I’ve learned that US usage patterns are not representative of rest of world. More saliently, HN users’ conception of others’ usage patterns are absolutely not representative.
  - bertmuir 24d ago
    I'll take that wager! Before you look at any real statistics, how does $1000 sound?
  - dr_ 24d ago
    For anyone who has school age kids, WhatsApp usage is pretty huge in the US as well.
runjake 24d ago
3.6 billion (de-duped) daily users! https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2026/Meta-Reports-Second-Quarter-2026-Results/default.aspx https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
ghostpepper 24d ago
One thing they could try eating is glue on their pizza, helps the cheese stick to the toppings

nomel 24d ago

There's something like 177 million facebook users in the US. Most probably have Facebook/instagram/etc installed on their phones, streaming their location data/etc, without a worry in the world. Most would probably very much enjoy the utility of this agent. If you can't understand how the general population, the target customer for Meta, would think of using something like this, then it almost certainly means your entire social circle is within the same tech-aware bubble that you are in here. ;) I have a few non-tech people that I talk bounce this sort of thing off of, periodically, as a reality check.

Catloafdev 24d ago

Ya, I'm not sure why anyone would choose to use this over any other option that doesn't sacrifice your privacy.

jeanmichelselli 24d ago
Well.. I think I can imagine why.. ;)

aftbit 24d ago

Every single HN post about anything Meta-adjacent starts with a comment like this. Guys, we get it, the hive mind of HN doesn't like Meta/Facebook/Zuck. Fine. But can we actually comment on the technology and tools rather than the company for once?

heyjamesknight 24d ago
Posts about Meta must bring up general distrust of the company and its leadership. Posts about Google have to mention them sunsetting products often. It's just tradition at this point.
frail_figure 24d ago
Nice try Meta stock holder!
- aftbit 23d ago
  Nah I don't own that crap :laugh:
ryandrake 24d ago
This comes up a lot here! Your comment reads like a lot of similar HN "Can't we just talk about the pure technology? Why do you all always have to bring up ethics/politics of it all??" As if these things are separable. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. As soon as it touches society, it necessarily gets dirtied up with messy things like law, ethics, corporate responsibility, capitalism, profit-seeking, public good. The technology is never separate from the environment around the technology. It's impossible (or at least dishonest) to try to simply discuss the pure technical aspects of The Torment Nexus.
dabedee 24d ago
The technology is an agent you name. You give it a face. Maybe tune the personality. And, it only gets useful as you grant it more and more access to your accounts. The technology is produced by a public company. And, in this case, the company is useful context for this story since it has just recently agreed to pay about $18 billion to resolve a multistate lawsuit claiming it intentionally designed addictive platforms that harmed young people's mental health. You cannot detach the technology from the company. It's definitely not a neutral artifact.

croddin 24d ago

I might use it for helping manage Facebook marketplace listings as that is data that is already on meta.

Anon1096 24d ago

This is probably why they are launching now. There's no real other competitor right now in the nicely made managed openclaw space for personal use (or at least, very very early. Maybe Grokbot can be considered the lead competitor but afaik it did not gain mindshare). Instinct is supposed to come out soon and by not being associated with Meta it'd be really appealing just on that front vs this. But being first to market is a real reason to use it and chance to gain lasting market share.

npalli 24d ago

You are right, sometimes the simplest answer is the right now. Don't trust Meta. Life is going to be much simpler. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me continuously for 20 years, shame on me.

matherial 24d ago

I had that conversation several times with friends outside of tech. The universal reaction is just a shrug - "my life is boring, what do they care". And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. In practice, it's a trade-off most people are comfortable making because they can't think of anything that some trillion-dollar tech company, or the FBI, or the FSB, would ever want to do to them specifically. It's the same reason why the market share for Firefox is a rounding error.

RGS1811 24d ago
I get this, and I’ve said similar things about privacy and security in the past, but Meta in particular has a history of intentionally using customer data and behavior to the detriment of those customers. Creating experiences designed to ensnare, addict, and ultimately harm their users. This goes beyond paranoia about security or privacy. It’s handing your drug dealer the keys to your house.
- ryandrake 24d ago
  For a lot of companies, you can usually assume incompetence when they end up doing something terrible, but Meta is the strongest "Anti Hanlon's Razor" example. You have to always assume malice with those guys.
cactacea 24d ago
> hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
- filoleg 24d ago
  > Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all. The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information. My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general). It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy. And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial). The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.

lenerdenator 24d ago

Because people are apathetic by nature until things become a real problem. It's not just Meta, either. How often do we have people on here talking about how amazing Chinese models are when the list of security breaches involving the Chinese government is extensive? People want something easy, quick, and free. Do those things and they'll let you get away with anything.

ebbi 24d ago

For this reason alone it's DOA for me.

capitanazo77 24d ago

It’s the life of a parasite. You don’t care if it takes just a bit from you. And it eventually protects you from worse parasites. (Like the us blocking china)

elisbce 24d ago

Why are all the seemingly smart people on HN so narrow-minded to the point of speaking idiotic nonsense? What do you think their 3.6B MAU are, all bots?

darksaints 24d ago
Based on what passes for “engagement” and “content” on their platforms, I’d estimate that a majority of their users are exactly that.
- melasadra 24d ago
  So my country has somewhere between 100-200 million MAU for facebook ane. Facebook marketplace is huge here.It's basically our craigslist. Hobby groups/communities are also huge. If I wanted to find the local jogging or chess club, I'd use Facebook. Just remember that outside your bubble there's a whole wide world with billions of people living in it
  - alex1138 24d ago
    The company is hurting people outside the 'bubble'.
alex1138 24d ago
The company has been known to lie before And the thing is, network effects are killer. I'm on it because you're on it because Alice is on it because Bob is on it But, Facebook has apparently been known to censor links to competition (I'm less clear on this). With Myspace they had a tool where you could import contacts into Facebook from Myspace, but not the other way around

threethirtytwo 24d ago

Damn yeah why do people even use Facebook or WhatsApp or instagram? How does a company become a multi billion dollar company at all? Guess what.. it’s because people use it and don’t care. That’s the godawful truth. The other thing you need to realize is not only do people don’t care, but people like you know exactly why meta makes billions. It’s obvious. You seriously expect me to believe you don’t know why a company like meta makes billions? Come on. It’s sad but thats the way things are. I see someone pretend they don’t get it but if you take the time to think you’ll realize… We all get it. We just can’t face it.

UltraSane 24d ago

The ratio of privacy_reduction:convenience that most people are willing to tolerate is enormous.