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Comment by furyofantares | Hacker News Reader

Lots of comments about how this isn’t new, or how it’s related to accessibility. The article mentions all this. That’s not what the story is. It’s not a very deep story, but I don’t think it’s quite so trivial as is being suggested.

The story is about this info being exposed to users just browsing the site, and the reaction that elicits. Someone seeing the tags inline in their feed by a glitch will tend to have a very different response than someone who is asked to view source and look for it.

I believe this is relevant because a regular conversation around here centers around the idea that many folks in tech circles find it creepy or unhealthy for society to have so much info being collected and processed for profit by giant corporations, and how most people outside of tech circles seem not to care at all.

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This is just the alt-text associated with the image and is there for accessibility purposes. That text is always part of the page even without the "glitch". This to me is a good use of AI as it provides a richer experience for those who can't otherwise view the images.

I suppose it might make some people aware, who weren't otherwise, that their images are being processed for content.

Much more interesting and readily available though are the "interests" Facebook assigns to you, which everyone can access: Settings | Ads | Your Interests. These hint at much deeper analysis that is being done with data, and data from other sources beyond just analyzing pictures for content.

This is the golden goose from Facebook's perspective. Their whole business is based around having a giant ontology of subjects and slotting you into this giant graph, then selling access into that ontology.

That has been the basis of targeted advertising since well-before the advent of the internet, but now the ontology is much, much richer and the people are providing the data used for the AI-driven slotting all on their own.

I was unaware of that section of Facebook's settings, so thank you for the tip!

Looking through it, I am far less concerned with what Facebook knows about me, but I am not a daily user of the platform, and so it is probably understandable why their "Interests" as flagged are so generic (and also some are just wrong).

I agree with your point entirely but I wonder if more people outside of tech would care if only they understood what these companies were doing with their personal data.

Yes I believe the number of users on facebook would drop incredibly quickly

That is an incredibly charitable interpretation of the word "reveal" in the headline. Every piece of information can be "revealed" to someone by that definition, it's happening all the time, and it wouldn't be a newsworthy event.

"Reveal" means to show something that was previously hidden from view - what has happened here is pretty much the textbook definition of the word.

The implication is that a secret is being revealed, possibly a dark secret to worry about. But FB and others put content in alt tags for people to read when they can’t see the images (for example die to blindness), it is much less dramatic to “reveal” something that was intentionally put there for people to read.

is image alt text really that hidden, even if facebook doesnt show it on mouse hover? any screen reader would have used the descriptions, no?

Yeah no. It's not like people have not seen tag suggestions before, or don't realize the relevance of recommendations etc etc. Even the most tech-illiterate facebook users i know all know that.

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