OpenAI had them classify CSAM, so Sama fired them as a client back in 2022. https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
We're 4 years on, 3 years since that report broke. Not a single thing has improved about how tech companies operate.
It’s a terrible job, I wouldn’t want to do it, but someone needs to. Perhaps one day, AI will be accurate enough to not need it, but even then you need someone to process complaints and waivers (like someone’s home photos being inaccurately flagged).
Different situation.
Facebook has to do CSAM moderation because it's a publishing platform. People will post CSAM on facebook, so they must do moderation.
And "just don't have facebook" isn't a solution because every publication of any sort has to deal with this problem; Any newspaper accepting mail has this problem. (Albeit to a much more scaled down version) People were nailing obscene things to bulletin boards for all recorded history.
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In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.
The downside would be "worse LLMs" or "LLMs being created later", which is a perfectly acceptable compromise.
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This is not to say that genuine content flagging firms have no reason to curate such data & build tools to automatically flag content before human moderators have to. (But then they also shouldn't be outsourcing this and traumatizing contract workers for $2-3 an hour)
But OpenAI is not such a firm. It's a general AI company.
Is there an hourly rate at which this should be acceptable?
The current support systems for police in this subject are already insufficient. Facebook's treatment of their moderation staff is abhorrent. The point of including the pay figure is to further illustrate just how damning this subcontracting practice is.
You are just too priviledge to understand people: many people would be glad do do it for the minimum wage, I would fight to have that oportunity (I live in west EU).
Not only is there an acceptable market rate for trauma, it’s sometimes competitive and requires licensing.
First responders/doctors/CPS investigators see the worst but they also have days where they make a difference. Save a life or multiple lives. I'm sure it's a huge part of what makes the job bearable, and to some meaningful.
I'm not discounting your point about high rates of suicide either. If anything, when you take away any good days, you're left, as a content moderator, with just seeing the worst of the world day in, day out, with nothing to make it meaningful. I'd suggest that's something we as a society should not tolerate as being an acceptable trade for the ability to share cat photos.
You think miners don't make a difference or save lives?
Do you think miners mining is saving lives in the same way that doctors saving lives is saving lives?
To continue the parents point, do you think miners derive a deep or powerful satisfaction from some of their mining work which might offer some of the heavy cost it has on them physically and emotionally?
And I think what prevents miners to "derive a deep or powerful satisfaction from some of their mining work which might offset some of the heavy cost it has on them physically and emotionally" is not anything inherent in their work, but people thinking that only direct affect should be prestigious and satisfying and underapreciating the thankless background work to keep the lights on.
Same way people sneer at cleaning people or teachers and their meagre salaries and no respect, or domestic labor.
^ i originally said "triage doctors" but i meant the resident ER doc.
They have access to better counselling and are ostensibly trained for the job. But there are still suicides.
The core Facebook product is users' posts. It's not possible to separate those two. Nor can one downscale Facebook in a way that stops the problem; The aforementioned "Facebook has had this problem because it's a problem we've had since the medieval days of a town bulletin board"
With OpenAI, the way ChatGPT was built and user submissions are separate things. The GPT models could have been have been trained without this mess. OpenAI could be more selective in what data it scrapes.
While OpenAI cannot stop users sending god knows what in their prompt text and images, OpenAI can choose to not interact with that data beyond the minimum legal retention, by e.g. not using it for training the next generation of models. This would massively downscale the problem.
AI output is another such problem, where A) Maybe this'd be less of a problem if they didn't recklessly include a bunch of CSAM into the training data by accident, and B) LLMs just aren't the kind of fundamental human right that "having a public opinion" is. It would be fine if they were less good, invented years later, or even not invented at all.
The main counterargument to the latter has been the "But China is inventing evil AI" spiel, which is fairly weak. If China builds an orphaned baby crushing machine, we do not need to build an orphaned baby crushing machine of our own. (And the reality is that China is only chasing AI so aggressively because the west does. They're reasonable people, it would have been entirely possible for both the west and China to make a mutual "no orphan crushing" agreement and just accept slower rollout of technology. This is exactly what has been done with human genetic engineering, and China did in fact enforce these norms.)
You've just thrown the garbage over your fence. Instead of OpenAI contracting Sama to classify CSAM, the "Curators" have to.
At the end of the day, someone needs to classify it. If you say the platforms need to, and they miss some, and it ends up in OAI training data, OAI is going to be the entity paying the prices.
Any website that allows user to upload videos needs some sort of service that can identify and report CSAM.
This is of course incredibly illegal, but megacorps (by valuation) and oligarchy members are above the law so who cares. I assume there could be a regulatory framework which can make this legal for an extremely specific purpose, but there is zero change that OpenAI was part of this/abiding by this in 2022, absolutely none.
The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server. CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers.
Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.
That's a tradeoff you can choose to make, but you need to enter into it with open eyes.
It doesn't matter how many are shared but how many are viewed. On a small server community policing works just fine, bad actors are easier and faster to block and to top it off, the smaller reach of each server makes it unprofitable to target multiple serves, fish for their weak points. etc - the dirty jobs become unprofitable which is what matters most.
With the help of AI, small players can do a better job at removing CSAM.
Chicken/egg. How do you expect that AI to be able to detect CSAM without appropriate training, which requires appropriately classified training data?
No it's not. It's certainly not my choice. No one asked me if it's okay for Facebook to distribute CSAM because you insist it would be worse if it didn't.
Now consider that some of those smaller entities might not be even notionally interested in avoiding the existence of that specific type of content on their platform, and are small enough for regulators to be unaware of its existence?
Can you elaborate on what exactly is wrong there? Do you see the third alternative C and it's not the "whole choice"? Or are you saying A or B do not exist and therefore there's no choice? Please name C, or tell us why A or B don't exist (or aren't acceptable), or explain your view that doesn't fit into these options.
>That's a tradeoff you can choose to make
is not correct: It is a tradeoff that one specific person can choose to make, but not one that I or we can choose to make, because we don't control facebook. Mark Zuckerberg controls facebook. He alone can choose to make that tradeoff, or not, on behalf of society.
Yes, he alone can make the choice. Not you or I.
And therefore anything that is remotely questionable will be blocked. Not just kiddie porn. Pissed off a local business with a bad review? Blocked.
Child abusers are twisted people, and I really don’t care much what happens to them, but making it impossible for them to use the internet means sterilizing the whole thing.
This is already the case. There is a lot of lawful, useful, medical or educational content that is actively censured on social medias because they include words or pictures of organs while same social medias actively encourage and develop algorithm to push underage girls (and possibly boys) posting pictures of themselves in sexual poses, attires and context.
Big tech and social media networks love and push CSAM, they just hide the genitals but the content really is the same.
Like what? It’s all there on Wikipedia, and for all of Wiki’s faults, I have trouble imagining what kind of useful, educational, medical information you will find on social media that is better than that.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
But that's not possible in today's oligopoly of social media. An invisible algorithm will ban you, and there is no way back, and few alternates. Big Social Media is way worse from a sanitizing perspective than some federated social media.
I know a local blog that pre-approves every comment. He lets a lot of stuff through, because he lets people be dumbasses. If he were personally liable, the conversation would get a lot quieter.
Moderators need to actually understand the context of the picture/video, which requires knowledge of culture and language of the people sharing the pictures. It's really difficult to do that without hiring moderators from every culture in the world.
But small federated servers can often align along real world human social networks, so it's easier for the server admin to understand what should be removed.
My impression is it would take Manhattan-Project levels of effort and funds to come close to "solving" this problem, especially without someone getting on a watchlist for having a telehealth-first primary care provider insurace plan and asking for advice on their toddler's chickenpox.
Human review? Meta has small armies worth of content moderators already that tend to burn out with psychological problems and have a suicide rate where you're probably better off going to fight in a real war. (This includes workers hired by Sama in Kenya, to link back to the OP.)
I will reluctantly grant Meta that they're up against a really hard problem here.
It is a problem of their own making.
So if you want to send someone to jail, just talk your way into joining their server, upload some illegal content, and report them for it?
> Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.
Why would someone join a server with active moderation if they wanted to share CSAM with their social media friends?
They would seek out one of those servers that was set up specifically for those groups, where it was known to be a safe space.
This is what many people don't get about federated networks: The people in those little servers DGAF if you block them. They want to be surrounded by their likeminded friends away from the rules of some bigger service like Facebook or Twitter. Federated social media is the perfect platform for them because they can find someone who set up a server in some other country with their own idea of rules and join that, not be subject to the regulations of mainstream social media.
It also makes it relatively easy to avoid, as server admins share blocklists. I know a dozen servers offhand that i'd block if i ran another fediverse server.
Fosstodon fediverse server doesn't have this issue, for example.
I replied this way because the way you wrote it, it sounds like an indictment of a system that's designed to avoid advertisers getting user profiles, over all else.
The problem is the people who participate in this (the illegal and immoral), and not "the network."
Because of course the people congregating to do illegal stuff online are going to do it in your jurisdiction where prosecution is guaranteed
These are pretty clear laws established by a democratic government with a pretty good record for rule of law.
The fact is that simple scale means that there will always be something, no matter how abhorrent. Small scale doesn't change this, it just concentrates it.
Would you drive a car optimized for profit that didn't have those safety features? How about on a highway? Daily?
Demanding some perfect immediate magic response there is the equivalent of asking car manufacturers to prevent all deaths.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f...
Here it's said that it's the users fault. I disagree. Completely. Most of these companies, staying on topic many of these companies have laid off the employees who tried to prevent things like this,
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/meta-layoffs-ai.html
https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-ai-safety-institute-will-be...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dqd54wpEfjKJsJBk6/xai-s-grok...
The list of not even trying anymore goes on and on. Mechahitler was also fun
So yes, yes, let's do like we did with cars.
Actually companies should be bullied about privacy and copyright so they are unable to share any contents at a scale with 3rd parties. Thus they have to solve it on their own and forced to realize their business model is shit.
No it isn't. Small servers often don't have paid security or moderation, are run in anonymous fashion, and have no profit motive that can even be used to incentivize them against hosting illegal content.
That's visible when it comes to porn. There's a million bootleg porn sites on the internet hosted that show off illegal content. The only site that was ever forced to curate its content was Pornhub, because they're sufficiently large, work in a jurisdiction that has laws and can be held accountable. From a content moderation standpoint going after a million web forums is an absolute pain in the ass compared to going after Facebook.
Which is the first argument any decentralization advocate always brings up (and they're correct to do so), censorship is harder and evasion of law enforcement easier when dealing with a network of independent actors.
You now have 100x the total human effort for mods to review and ban him.
Anecdotally, when I was a young adult I was a volunteer moderator for a large forum. We got reports of CSAM several times a month and had a process for escalating and reporting it to the FBI IC3 - we retained a lot of information about the users that posted it.
One of the administrators of the website mentioned to me that over the years since the inception of the forum, they'd reported almost a thousand incidents of CSAM distribution - and the FBI followed up with them to get information less than 10 times in total.
Do we really have to give the benefit of the doubt to the agency that was literally running one of the largest CSAM distribution outlets in the world for years as a honeypot?
Of course, that was 60 years ago.
Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
I guess "other forces were worse" can certainly be true, but then how low are we holding the bar?
Big “citation needed” here. My bet is that Meta have far better moderation systems than any other social media company on the planet.
That's more what i got from that pull-quote. I know a company that has hundreds of individual forums, and those are all moderated quickly and correctly (last i heard). They're moderated so effectively they often get DDoS by Russian IPs for banning users for scam posts from that country.
Westeners are too expensive and unwilling to do it. AI is a business model that requires poverty and extreme inequality to function. Yes other businesses do that too, but they don't claim it's a solution to everything while it actually has very special human requirements.
There are more reasons why these jobs are located in developing countries, it's not only the price of labour. Imagine for a second, these annotations would have to be done in the US. The public outrage would probably be audible across the Atlantic. This is another form of imperialism.
Granted the latter is kinda happening distantly on YouTube where you can’t talk about “ suicide “ so everyone self censors…
you must be extremy priviledge to think that way, even as EU I would be glad to do it for the minimum salary. For your info, a terrible job for most human is a job that is extremly hard physically at the point of destroying your health. That said, like many people, I would find it much more interesting than many boring job. [If someone read this, please hire me for this, in exchange I would work the 5 first hour for free]
If script writers gave the company this name in a fictionalization it would be rejected as too on the nose.
Safety and user pain is a part of tech which seems largely ignored, even on sites like HN.
I really have no idea why this ignorance prevails; commenters seem to genuinely be unaware of what goes on in Trust and Safety processes.
I mean, most users would complain about content moderation, but their experience would be miles ahead of what most of humanity enjoys when it comes to responsiveness.
I believe this lack of knowledge, examples, and case history is causing a blind spot in tech centric conversations when it comes to the causes of the Techlash.
Unfortunately this backlash is also the perfect cover for authoritarian government action - they come across as responsive to voters while also reigning in firms that are more responsive to American citizens and government officers than their own.
But it's not really a fascism thing. While fascism does love the oppression of women, and the current crop of fascists have a notable connection to the Epstein case, this is a lot more boring.
Sam Altman's not a fascist, he's a wet noodle who sucks up to the Trump administration for money. He's not even good at it. The way his company handled CSAM does cast aspersions on Altman & the accusations from his sister, but all other evidence suggests he's just a moron acting recklessly. Not identifying the problem ahead of time, and acting poorly in response.
In the case of Meta. We know who Zuckerberg is. The company got it's start as, in crude terms, a sex pest website. The original "Facemash" website forcibly taken down by Harvard. This is not some new consequence of this turn to fascism, Zuckerberg's always been like this, and the actions taken against him were clearly not enough to avoid the company culture following his precedent.
Disagree, not on average. There was a non-trivially higher % of decisions made based on "what's good for the customer" or "what's good for the product" or "I would be ashamed to do this" and a lower % of decisions made based on "what maximizes profit in the next quarter". I think that is more ethical. To take it to an extreme, using slave labor because it's good for the customer is more ethical than using slave labor to maximize profit in the next quarter.
I don't see anyone saying that people don't have the right to use them. I see people saying that they have the right to avoid being anywhere near the people who use them and to disapprove of those people. Which is just as much of a right as the right to wear spy glasses.
I think that's true in principle, but in practice there are going to be two kinds of smart glasses users; extraordinarily annoying kids or you adults acting annoying in public so they can post videos to social media, and then normal people who have no clear sense for how much they're violating the privacy of those around them, and just like cool tech.
Very, very few users are going to be an interesting or valid use case -- eg: someone who is using them to assist with a disability, or for research, or something.
Even most dash cams don't stream to Meta -- they just record the last _n_ hours and you need to know to save off the video if you're in an crash / incident. In other words, most of the time no privacy is violated, and the only potential privacy violation occurs during an incident.
Even policy body cams, which I wholeheartedly support, have some pretty strong downsides: currently, if you're at the end of your rope, having the worst day of your life, and in your dishevelment turn a speeding ticket into a BATLEO, you're famous forever for being a lunatic. Maybe the rest of the time you're a good person, and you can learn from this and move on. Except now you have a permanent albatross around your neck. This is a secondary penalty that the justice system did not intend, and has no answer for.
It makes a lot of sense for actual accessibility devices to be offline-capable. You don’t want to lose your “sight” when you step into a metal building or elevator.
For parents smart glasses are awesome, no need to pull out a phone to take a picture. No need to view the world through a phone screen.
They are also useful as being regular BT headphones as well. Podcasts while walking w/o tiny earbuds to lose.
You realize smart glasses have a battery that allows for all of 15 to 20 minutes of recording right?
Hell just turning on wake word detection for asking it questions murders the battery life and it is one of the first things people turn off.
The phone in your pocket reports your position to multiple ad agencies throughout the day. Stores track individual's movements throughout their buildings and see what aisles people linger at.
15 minutes of video recording via glasses (versus on a smart phone, or go pro, or drone) is not some huge mass surveillance issue.
You then list a mere two categories.
Would your argument have been similar in 2008 if told that in ten years, everyone in the economic first world would be carrying multiple cameras including a dedicated "selfie" camera at all times?
None of the cameras you're mentioning are pointed at people all the time.
When you are wearing Meta glasses, they are.
My wider point is that there are already many obvious use cases, and as adoption of cameras which are always on or plausibly always on rises, there will be a lot more, including augmented reality, translation, context hinting, AI agent awareness for assistants and personal security, and at least dozens of others, some of which I am sure no one has started building for, yet.
Meta is probably not the winner in this space (or, I hope not, at least, so we agree there!). However, the idea that people have a right to remember and process what they see and hear in full fidelity is pretty basic, in my opinion.
If that's what we were talking about, I'd be much less bothered. But it's not. What we're talking about is people recording others and feeding that data to a third party.
no? You think what I wrote is just a scary way to frame GPS? Maybe that's because you're part of the conspiracy!
body cams are local and mostly used by law enforcement to guarantee they are not abusing their power.
glassholes are connected to the cloud. you may have the right to record on public space, i have the right to remain anonymous in the crowd and not be constatly targeted by an advertisement company.
Even if 1% of the corner cases are legit uses (blind people having the glasses describe the world around them is fantastic.) 99% of the people using them are assholes that deserve to be put in the ground and the glasses smashed.
Edit: Not that I would want Meta to get all that data anyway. But even if glasses exist which are more privacy conscious, I think Meta and Google Glass thoroughly ruined the reputation of any kind of wearable like this.
Of course you have to be able to spot that. And trust that it really doesn't record when it's off (note that it simply may be covered by the user)
Also I just googled for what the light actually looks like when it's recording, and it's not even really that visible...
This alone doesn't outweigh all of the negative uses, but I would argue that it's reasonable and legitimate.
But I'd like to have some smart glasses that do respect my privacy and offer this kind of functionality. Honestly, most of the things smart glasses do today are stuff I'd really like. Having my glasses just be the bone conduction headphones I often wear anyways? Check. Easy access to taking photos and short videos of life experiences? Love it. Integrated into the thing I'm often wearing on my head anyways? Perfect.
Do you think you will know if someone has their phone in their pocket or in a holster, and is turned on and recording? You will never know.
There are dozens if not hundreds of cameras pointed at the street that record people every time they go out in public in any urban setting.
Subject to local law. It's an offence to make indecent images of children, for example.
However, it is absolutely not the case that Meta has a right to that data, as a data controller under GDPR.
> feels at risk
This is a red flag phrase: it's a justification that people whip out for all sorts of unjustified things up to and including murder.
At least this says something about the intention. Someone who films with a hidden phone implicitly shows that they intentionally hid this from the people being filmed.
Filming with glasses is hidden by design. It gives plausible deniability to the person filming, so they can film covertly but pretend they weren't hiding anything.
In most cases this doesn't make a difference but there are some cases where the premeditation can make it worse for the person doing the "abusive" filming.
Big assumption here that the place you're on vacation doesn't have different laws. You may have absolutely no right to record "everything and everyone" around you.
Oh blind people too. That one makes sense.
But smart glasses that send everything to The Cloud? Burn them all. Especially if they're from fricken' Meta.
None of those default to sharing your recording with anyone else, let alone with no practical way to opt out.
Why is it a right?
>Are you going to go after car cameras next?
No. A car cannot follow me into a building very easily. It cannot turn as quickly as a human head.
>Any American who has any opposition to public recording is violating the First Amendment and doesn't even deserve to be an American.
lmao
I do not want my employees recording their day job and selling it, or the creepy dude next to me in the bathroom filming my goods or the log jam flying out of my butt so meta can try to sell me pepto.
I also don't want that one time I did something minor illegal like jay walking get auto fed into palantir so they can ship me to the latest internment camp.
Or someone stealing my biometrics by just walking past me.
I do not want to live in such a dystopian country. No this right shouldn't exist and I'm glad it doesn't in my country.
> If none of this makes sense to you, wait till standalone cameras become much smaller to where they become a smartbutton -- what will you do then?
Why are you against killing? Wait till you don't need to hit them but can accelerate metal pieces at them -- what will you do then?
> Any American who has any opposition to public recording is fighting the First Amendment and doesn't even deserve to be an American.
Anyone who is against X deserves not to be protected by law. "First they came for the communists..."
Smartphones are illegal in your country? I am skeptical.
The right to record is the right to remember.
Is the law applied equally, so that businesses, police officers, and government agencies are also not allowed to record in public?
Great! Now do people with smart TVs and people with smart phones
Aren’t there already posts and articles on how to ensure that TVs don’t farm information from us?
If you insist on the glasses, wear a fake GoPro.
Now, for your "while cycling" qualifier, why does it matter? Again, if you stop to talk to people while recording and it is not obvious you are recording, you're a glasshole. Personally, I have no experience with camera quality from the devices, but I do know what a GoPro can do. My gut instinct is that the GoPro will be superior footage.
Yes, I could record while talking to people but I wouldn't get the point of that, I want to record descents and pretty views.
My main point is someone owning smart glasses doesn't mean they automatically suck and should be ostracized.
I went to the beach, jet skiing. One of the guys had Meta glasses.
I liked the footage.
The danger with creep glasses is that many people don't know what they are, they can be used with the LED disabled so they're perfect for filming people without their knowledge, and "these are prescription glasses" has a good chance of working. In a place with a "no recording devices" policy, "could you put that gopro away" has wide social acceptance/support, "take those glasses off" less so.
I don't think ostracizing users of Meta Glasses (or Google Glass before that) is the answer.
But I get the problems of hidden cameras.
So did the Meta's LLM training model as well as the contractor across the globe reviewing your footage.
There's also nothing stopping us from stigmatizing the use of smartphones in public. Even a slight discouragement of it would be progress. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
is this a Western/American thing about no shame regarding one's body in public places in the presence of other people, be it male or female?
I can never imagine this happening in my country.
I mean it's a locker room... it's a space meant for changing clothes and showering.
i'd never step out to a place where a stranger could see me, without a towel or wet shorts covering my private bits.
And the people who act annoyed because you are disturbing their film set as if they are James Cameron are the funniest.
Security cameras afaik usually don't record audio, but all phones can. And they don't even need to be pointed in any specific direction.
On a separate note, (and this is a genuine question) are you by any chance aware the term Non-consensual intimate imagery / NCII?
I am beginning to suspect that the average HN goer isn’t aware of the scope and scale of the Trust and Safety problem.
No, i don't think I've heard about NCII before, and Trust and Safety sounds like some corporate PR whitewashing term to me.
2> NCII: Years ago, I was scoping reddit to identify content that was harmful from an Indian perspective. By far the largest category was NCII. This could range from morphed images, to intimate images reshared, to images from their socials reshared in thirst communities. This included images of underage children.
Removing NCII is rough. First the victim has to be willing to come forward and get over the shame. Then they have to deal with a near impossible system and get someone to help. The more conservative the nation, the less likely the support networks will be forgiving or helpful. Finally, once the data is out there, it’s going to be reflected across multiple sites which are in international jurisdictions.
This is one of the situations where, I fear, your life is simply hosed.
Korea is another country which has a severe problem with NCII, and I believe they even instituted laws against deepfaked porn.
>PR whitewashing: Heh. Well thats the division that deals with online safety, fraud, content moderation, policy and the rest. I believe eBay was the first firm to use that term when they were handling fraud.
The issue is when you go from fantasy to actually enacting it, which is usually when you earn the epithet of “Creep”.
Also, why make a throwaway for this line? I take it you haven’t heard of NCII?
Can tell you that my urge to take photos/record drastically dips around other people. Particularly if it were meant for any sort of commercial exploitation. Stephenson called people wired for max indiscriminate data collection/processing "gargoyles". Personally I prefer glassholes.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-borg-of...
Smart glasses, however, are always aimed at whatever the wearer is looking at. They may or may not be recording (note the reports of people hiding the LED indicators), and at a fair distance could easily be mistaken for a normal pair.
The general populace is much more likely to notice the former recording rather than the latter.
Just because you don’t notice it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
However, this is still a different thing than smart glasses which can further be segmented into who designed the smart glasses.
It's the camera of their smartphone.
Not sure if it's ON though.
I do not care which country the outsourcing company is in. When criminals go global, protection whistleblowers should go global too.
A Kenyan workers' organisation alleges Meta's decision was caused by the staff speaking out.
Meta says it's because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects ...Not that I am remotely interested in defending Meta, or optimistic that they would proactively address privacy issues. But I don't feel that sympathetic to the outsourcing company here either.
I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I'm just going off what is said and not said in the article. If I were whistleblowing about something like this, I would take pains to describe what measures I took internally before going public. I didn't see any of that here.
EDIT: Look, to be clear, I think it's bad that naive or uninformed people are buying video recorders from Meta and unintentionally having their private lives intruded on by a company that, based on its history, clearly can't be trusted to be a helpful, transparent partner to customers on privacy. I think it's good that the media is giving people a reminder of this. I think it's good that the sources said something, even though the consequences they suffered seem inevitable. But to me, there is nothing essentially new to be learned here, and I don't know what can or should be done to improve the situation. I think for now, the best thing for people to do is not buy Meta hardware if they have any desire for privacy. Maybe there are laws that could help, but what should be in the laws exactly? It's not obvious to me what would work. I suspect that some of the reason people buy these products is for data capture, and that will sometimes lead to sensitive stuff being recorded. What should the rules be around this and who should decide? Personally I don't know.
Why reflexively defend a massive tech corporation caught repeatedly violating the law?
Because it is the natural expansion of the quote attributed to Upton Sinclair:
> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires
Congratulations, you have a bright future in politics and/or tech CEOing.
The secondary issue is that it's generally frowned upon to make your employees view nudity in the workplace. Are there extenuating circumstances here? No, we have no evidence there are any extenuating circumstances here.
> Meta said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.
Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.
> Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.
It's total fantasy. I've worked in big tech. Casually uploading and providing company/contractor access to non-redacted intimate photos or pictures of the insides of people's homes vaguely "for the purpose of improving the customer experience" would not pass even a surface-level privacy or data-protection review anywhere I've ever worked. Do Meta even read what they are saying?
Hell, I know of a major firm that decided QA was not needed for their trust and safety process.
Another common issue will be SEA Arabic speakers tasked with labelling Middle Eastern Arabic content, because accents and cultural dialects are not a thing.
I’ve had people at FAANG firms cry on my shoulder, because they couldn’t get access to engineering resources at their own firms.
There was the famous case of meta executives overriding T&S policy and telling them that what content was news worthy during the Boston bombing. On a separate incident, they told their team that cartel violence was not newsworthy when friends in London complained about it.
When you say this is fantasy, what do you mean precisely?
There’s probably an opt out / opt in clause somewhere in the terms and conditions, which makes it feasible for Meta (and other firms) to use this data.
> Am I reading this correctly?!
I'm reminded of Bo Burnham's wonderful "That Funny Feeling" from 2021's "Inside", where one of the absurd examples he offers in the lyrics is:
There it is again, that funny feeling
That funny feeling
Reading Pornhub's terms of service ...edit 2: OK, I see what you mean. But I'm wondering if it should be possible to consent to this via T&C. Basically the same issue as with many online services, turned up to 11, sure. And it involves OTHER people, who have not consented.
Stuff like this used to be outrage fuel even when it was more of a social experiment, e.g. the documentary "We live in public" or the "Big brother" TV show. By now, I'm sure there have been millions of influencers doing similar things, but it's very much not considered normal?
Streaming to an unknown number of employees might be considered different from streaming to the public, sure.
But the core question here is whether there's informed consent, and, IMO also, if it should be possible to consent to this when the other party is a company like Meta and the pretext is not deliberately seeking attention (like influencers and streamers do).
edit, clarified social media comparison
It being scripted doesn't really change much, but yes, I think your tangent is correct.
I wanted to illustrate the shift in what's considered "normal", fully acknowledging that a scripted show catering to voyeurism is different from the situation discussed here. Completely different, just related.
The "outrage fuel" that I meant was that some people consider it immoral to incentivize people to overstep boundaries of privacy, decency and human dignity.
Staged or not, the selling point of the show was that it was about "regular people".
I'm aware that this small and short-lived public discussion seems antiquated today, that's why I mentioned it.
> some people consider it immoral to incentivize people to overstep boundaries of privacy, decency and human dignity
I'd be one of those people. Mr Beast is a cancer on our society and the fact that he is the most popular YouTuber says volumes about our society as a whole (again--never watched, but I've read enough). Though I imagine much of his stunts are staged as well, I think it just goes along with what you're saying about Big Brother.
I don't think this kind of public discussion is antiquated (assuming you're talking about this meta-discussion in this comment thread), I'd say it's just rare to see unless you look for it (HN for example). And I'd also argue that those who criticized pop culture were always in the minority (almost by definition). I think it's a good callout regardless.
I know our culture is so supremely fucked at this point that wearing corporate surveillance goggles during intimate moments could somehow be normalized, but holy shit. How did people get so trusting?
but i do agree that people just have become too trusting with our tech overlords, and its that trust that makes them continue to do shit like this over and over.
… although I really extend that to why are you wearing an internet connected camera that is obviously going to be monitored by Meta.
Of course, anyone who opened a newspaper in the last 10 years or so would know better, but I can definitively see some people not giving a fuck about it.
I never understood the appeal of upskirt pictures. But I think that taking videos of non-consenting participants/victims is the current version of the upskirt photo craze.
i think its a mixture of fetish (panty-fetish is a whole craze in some parts of the world...) and voyeurism, like the appeal _is_ the lack of consent. I recently saw on reddit there was a whole deluge of non-consensual porn being uploaded to a certain site and once that news broke, visits to that site spiked. I think that just says a lot about society as a whole.
Which is why I'd never touch a person tech device from Meta.
Their entire DNA is written to exploit their users for profit. In my judgement, they literally cannot and will never consider those issues as anything other than something to obscure to keep people unaware of the depth of the exploitation.
Probably this is people asking the glasses something about what they see and the glasses uploading video for classification to generate an answer.
People think it is "just AI" so are not very concerned about privacy.
You can discard them after tagging+using them for learning.
The thing that really gets me is that internally there are 4 levels of data 1 being public domain shit (the sky is blue) up to 4 which is private user data, or something that is sensitive if leaked or shared.
I was told that by default all user data is level 4, as in if you do anything without decent approval, you're insta fired. There are many stories about at least one person a month during boot camp accessing user data and getting escorted out of the building within hours.
The part where I worked, in visual research, we had to jump through a years worth of legal hoops to get permission to record videos in public. We had to build an anonymisation pipeline, bullet proof audit trail, delete as much data as possible, with auto delete if something went wrong.
We had rigid rule about where that data could be stored and _who_ could access it. We were not allowed to share "wild" footage (ie data that might have the hint of anyone who hadn't signed a contract) for annotation because it would be given to a third party. THe public datasets we released all had traceable people, locations all with legal waivers signed.
Then I hear they just started fucking hosing private data to annotators to _train_ on? without any fucking basic controls at all? Just shows that whenever Zuck or monetsization want something, the rules don't apply.
I look forward to that entire industry collapsing in on it's self.
Given the size and nature of Meta's business, I would assume they would have better systems in place. SWEs should only have access to PII with explicit consent from users/customers e.g. support tickets.
Especially someone going through boot camp. Do they have access to de-anonymized user data during training?
Shit, at my last company I had to jump through so many hoops to access user data even with consent from the customer.
They did when I was there. every time you got close to user data an "interstitial" would pop up asking you for a ticket number and justification. There were a bunch of tools that ran searching for people accessing user data.
For example in boot camp you'd create a page that pulled your profile details. this was to introduce the idea of "ents" (the API that manages the social graph) and mercurial. You could, if you wanted to then traverse your friend graph. as soon as you did that, it'd trigger one the automated rules and your account would be suspended and you'd be yeeted within hours.
The point was, if you were doing something legitimate it was fine, but if you stepped out of line, the automated systems would find out and fire you on the stop.
also as everything is done through remote dev boxes, _everything_ is recorded (along with all the files on your laptop, and the regular screenshots, plus all the browser history and keystrokes) Data exfiltraition is super hard, hence why there are hardly any "angry nerd extorts girl" type stories. Its not because meta isn't full of angry nerds, it because its really really difficult to get at user data without getting caught.
Its not a mistake that this data got into contractor hands, it was a decision that took lots of time, numerous legal reviews and signoff from Zuck himself.
We could also toss vibe coded mess on top of this and probably get closer to the truth.
That could be moderation, or it could be labelling new examples for training/validation
⸻
1. The first rhyme that came to mind was bow, but I realized there was a problem with that example.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/row#dictionary-en...
At this scale, this sound like some insider joke contract made up only to make some hustle on the side capitalizing with stock options on the possibility of adhoc news trading bots glitching out on the keyword, here "x.com/sama" signals.
So it doesn’t surprise me that Meta didnt renew/cancelled a contract that is a net negative for them. Arguing over the reason seems fruitless as no reason is needed per the terms of the contract (I assume since breach of contract wasn’t brought up by the sub).
You are the frog being boiled.
The latter is literally illegal, at least in my country and I hope in any civilized country. If your point is that there's no difference between glasses and other forms of creep cams and the glasses should be illegal too, I concur!
Aren’t there countries that make it mandatory to blot out faces of people on videos if they didn’t consent?
There is no expectation of privacy in public.
In the US at least, any private homeowner/renter can deny entry to their property, barring legal warrants and exceptional circumstances. A business can have a policy, and is generally legally protected as long as the policy is 1) equally applied, and 2) does not violate ADA... A court would have to weigh in if glasses are allowed or not for ADA... but I suspect there's already a case where a movie theater banned such glasses and they would probably(?) win, since such individuals could be expected to have non-recording glasses.
I do not remember every single person I see on the street. What makes it Ok for some guy who will also forget me to create a stored, persistent, AI processed set of videos of me?
I do find the idea of a glasses version of an action cam quite cool, but we are talking about smart glasses from Meta here, which is a different thing.
We are talking about a network of streaming cameras moving around, filming.These videos are stored, still without any specifics about a purpose or when the data will be deleted.
Besides, the filmed people do not choose or consent to be filmed, they might not even be aware that they are filmed. This is not like a phone where you at least have a chance to see it. The person doing the filming chooses to film. Or they might not be aware they are still filming. They might also be one update away from always on. If Amazon did it with Alexa, Meta can do it with the glasses.
Of course, there are CCTV, but, at least in Europe, their use is very specific. You have to be informed about who to contact about the data, as well as the purpose of the recording and how long it will be stored. There too the scope is much more limited than a random guy filming people without their consent.
The collection is one problem. The usage is another. We know they are used to train AI for unspecified use, generative AI? Something else? Under the GDPR the purpose of the collection should be known, but in that context it is extremely murky.
Based on existing technology, it would be possible for them to use facial recognition on these videos to track individuals, building profiles as they go, including location. These profiles could even be linked to the identity of people who have been tagged in photos before. While it might be extremely difficult now, it might be possible later. Making it possible might even be what the AI training is about. The data exist, and it is unclear how long it will be kept, or whether the purpose of processing will change.
It would be bad enough if it was any company, but we are talking about Meta, a company that brought us the Cambridge analytica scandal. A company that knowingly let its users be scammed by ads for profit. Profit over ethics has been part of their DNA from the start, not an exception.
It's the same with phones. I know blind people who have been harassed for holding their phones up to things as though they are taking pictures, but in fact they're using the camera on their phone to render signage legible to them, or having their phone (or a person on the other end) read it.
Banning this in a way that doesn't in practice cause problems for visually impaired people would be difficult. It might also be difficult to do in a way that doesn't harm, for instance, accountability for cops who are acting in public.
The impulse to "ban" is sometimes a bit naive imo.
Because nobody knows how to put a dot of nail polish on an led they don't want seen, right?
I assume that every single person who still works at Meta has done that personal calculus and decided that they fall on the "this is fucking amazing, important work" side.
And the five or six HNers that bought the Apple goggles.
“Yes, we all know it, and we keep those app installed regardless“.
Maybe a company with those standards should not get our business. Oops, no wait, maybe they mean the Friedman Doctrine standards? In that case they are entitled to do any and every thing to make a profit. No matter what the harm.
[edit: add last two sentences]
So that when I say that they really do have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using their internal systems to violate user privacy, it's not because I'm eager to defend them. It's just true (at least, it was when I was there). There are internal systems dedicated to making sure you have access to what you need to do your job, and absolutely nothing else. All content you interact with through internal tools is monitored and logged. If you get caught trying to use whatever access your job gives you for anything other than doing your job, security immediately escorts you out of the building. This is drilled into new hires early and often. For everything Meta gets wrong, they really do take this seriously.
(I do think these smart glasses are super creepy and I'm not defending Meta's data collection practices.)
> but we don't know the real reason.
We know the course of events. We have brains and can reason. You really expect Meta to come out and say "Yep, we fired them because they whistleblowed"
> I'm not defending Meta's data collection practices
No but you certainly seem to be over here quibbling about epistemology in the defense of Meta
But that can't be the problem. They're collecting the data that users send them. To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable.
And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?
> And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?
This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to "recognize it as untouchable"; they're all untouchable).
If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.
No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect, you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.
That was in reference to the original story, that human annotation is happening on videos that no one knew were getting reviewed. If you want to talk about not collecting at all, well:
> If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.
It incorporates by reference the general Facebook privacy policy. The relevant subsection is here: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy?subpage=4.subpage.12...
Facebook reserves the right to share any information they have about you with their contractors, for purposes including but not limited to:
- investigating suspicious activity
- improving the functionality of their products
- providing technical infrastructure services
- analyzing how their products are used
- conducting research
If Facebook were designed with a different set of incentives that prioritized the user, fostered positive engagement, and better respected individual's privacy and data sovereignty - setting a better standard for the whole industry - I feel there wouldn't be all this fuss today about banning social media accounts.
Same for "Meta reads your E2E whatsapp messages". Meta does many things, is probably massively net negative for civilisation, but it doesn't do that.
They don't boil live kittens either, I believe. Doesn't seem relevant though.
All advertiser support agents were given super-read on all profiles & pages, and I never once observed a CSR being questioned on their use of this access in any way.
The man is without any redeeming qualities.
When did FaceBook make the world not-worse?
If you truly want to atone for your sins, you have a long way to go. I don't blame you for having worked there, I've worked at places that are only a little better than Meta (which is hard considering Meta is at the absolute bottom of the entire ladder, including Peter Thiel companies, thanks to Meta's sheer scale of carnage). But its time to completely come to terms with the reality, rather than stopping halfway to try and feel better about your resume.
The irony is meta wants to implement verification to protect kids. Meanwhile it's doing everything it can to exploit them most at every single level for profit and for the love of the game. Billions of dollars, the world's most advanced computers all dedicated for it
They just got fired for "piercing the veil". They committed the sin of bringing attention to the invasion of privacy.
Mostly, I'm just surprised that anybody would be naive enough to take a camera provided by Facebook into a sexual encounter and expect anything else.
The problem here (other than Meta being Meta) is people assuming Meta isn't permanently operating in bad faith. I'm just surprised anybody into tech to the extent they'd buy first-gen VR glasses would be surprised at Meta doing Meta things. That's all, I guess.
If you read, eg, Buffet, he makes the point that a manager donating to a political cause, whether the Heritage Foundation or, God forbid, something as far right as the SPLC, makes that donation with money that otherwise accrues to the shareholders. The manager therefore creates an agency problem, where he might pursue his own interests at the expense of the owners.
If they are aligned, the manager can retain the earnings and create a dividend for the owners, such that they can then make the donation directly. If they are not aligned with the owners, they are redistributing wealth.
I am not surprised that the Left advocates for backdoor wealth redistribution, but I would prefer they be honest about it.
I'm pretty sure it's not just the Left team that advocates for bribes (sorry lobbying) to politicians. I don't think that's a very commonly held understanding of wealth redistribution either...but this argument you present isn't very coherent which is somewhat expected so I guess keep on keeping on..
There was an example in the article where a user’s glasses kept recording the user’s wife after he took them off. That’s bad but on the user, not Facebook.
Seems similar to a situation where someone takes nudes of someone without their consent and then sends them off to a lab to be printed. The lab isn’t doing anything illegal or unethical printing them when they ask the user “are these legal” and the user replies “yes.” Unless you want to stop photo printers from ever printing nudes, I think the responsibility is on the user, not the firm.
And people do record porn for personal viewing. They probably didn't know it was being viewed by meta employees as well.
Meta isn’t lying, you should assume other companies are doing it too, Tesla did it with their cameras, and assume others like any company has access to your camera, I would even assume CCTV cameras too. It’s why for anything sensitive, try to use open source stacks, you might lose some of the features, but it’s a needed compromise.
Or they might start scanning for "problematic" behavior, a bit like the Apple CSAM fingerprinting initiative.
So not one part of me would ever buy Meta glasses (or the Snap glasses before that). You simply don't have sufficient control over the recordings and big tech companies can't be trusted, as we've witnessed from outsourced workers sharing explicit images. And I bet that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would get these and trust Meta to manage the risks.
Things like audio scanning your living space using those Alexa smart speakers with ultrasonics to get an image of not only everything in your space, but where you are in that space as well.
That technological use case only came out within the last five or so years, maybe closer to eight. Either way I could see that coming before it became a thing just because ultrasound imaging of your unborn child is a thing ultrasound imaging of the sea floor is a thing so why wouldn’t ultrasound imaging of your living space be a thing by a company who wants to know what you buy.
I never ever ever had Alexa I only ever had a Google home because I got it for free with GPM but I almost never used it because I hated the idea of it always listening.
I already regret Wi-Fi because they figured out now how to look through walls with that.
1. Meta AFAIR paid/compensated people — contractors or recruited via ads — to have them submit their data. There are strict privacy protocol and reviews in place to distinguish data use in these cases vs gen public. This is not to say the process is perfect, but if these users are gen public, I would be very shocked.
2. Hiring contractors to submit data is a more controlled environment VS recruitment of gen pub via ads to submit data, but the former has more well understood privacy disclosures than the latter. This means in practice asking contractors to wear glasses and "move around their surroundings naturally and do things" goes well with basically the privacy practice "the data your are submitting we can view and use all of it for purpose X and nothing but X". BUT this framing is with ad based recruited people — which are general users who willingly submit data — is much much harder. My suspicion is they are running ad based recruiting in general public and while those users may have signed a privacy statement it is very surprising that they did not tighten the privacy practices around the use of the data and who has access.