Texas sues Meta, saying it misused facial recognition data | Hacker News Reader

Texas sues Meta, saying it misused facial recognition data

npr.org

81 pointspseudolus47 comments

This will be a great test of the Terms Of Service that Facebook provides. Texas argues this was done without consent and Facebook will point at their TOS and say “we can do what we like with the content people post”. This really needs to be challenged since nobody reads the TOS. Maybe someday we’ll actually get digital privacy reform in the US.

>This really needs to be challenged since nobody reads the TOS. Maybe someday we’ll actually get digital privacy reform in the US.

Or maybe that's now how contracts work and people should read the TOS before explicitly agreeing to be bound by those terms in exchange for an account.

Otherwise, I should just tell Navient to cancel my student loans because I never bothered to read all those tiny words, lol.

And everyone should drive safely. However, since neither of those is realistic by any definition of the word, it falls upon society to setup rules that make everyone better off.

But the rules are already in place and set up - the ones people want to ignore and pretend don't exist if they don't see them, even though they signed on the dotted line, as it were.

"The rules" are in place, but we can change them if we, as a society, decide that they don't work, or don't reflect reality, or cost too much.

Besides, if the vast majority of people ignores a rule, maybe it means that the rule is ripe for changing. That doesn't necessarily mean removing TOS entirely, mind you. There are a bunch of other solutions. We could enforce minimum standards for human-readable, short form presentation of TOS. We could enforce what they may and may not restrict, in order to allow users to accept with reasonable minimum expectations of what they're accepting.

Sure.

Have you read in their entirety every single ToS you ever signed?

If you didn't, why do you expect others to have? And if you don't expect others to have read stuff they agreed to, how fucking realistic is it that the rules say that everyone should abide by something that's simply impossible for a normal human being to do?

The rules exist and they are fucking dumb. Or better if I say: not grounded in reality?

If someone doesn't drive safely there can be negative consequences.

If people don't read the agreements they agree to there can be negative consequences.

That sounds great, except: not everything in Terms of Service or End User License Agreement is legally enforceable. The law is above these. And that is often not tested by trial (in this case it is).

Amazon kindle TOS take 9 hours to read: https://inshorts.com/en/news/man-takes-9-hours-to-read-amazo....

That's if you understand it entirely, including the legalese, on the first read. That's for the kindle only, not for amazon the website, nor alexa or prime.

I accepted 3 TOS last week, as a dev, it's almost part of my job description, but let's focus on normal people and say they don't accept TOS for Github, FIGMA or AWS, but only for stuff like youtube, gmail, msoffice, whatsapp, instagram, etc.

Let's be _very_ optimistic and say you have 20 TOS (excluding IRL contracts such as the bank, insurance, etc) forced on you every year by services: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Telegram, Facebook all have different TOS for difference services.

Then you have the TOS updates, that don't come as a diff of the previous one, but as a haystack with the changes as needles. So let's say 10 more to read, again.

Let's average reading time to 5 hours (I'm being very generous), and assume you understand the implications (at this point, it's not generosity, it's abnegation). That's 30 * 5, or 150 hours, that you are supposed to spend each year on reading those ? What do you do, take 3 weeks of vacation just for that ? Also don't forget to sleep, eat healthy, exercise, educate yourself, and socialize.

I hope you don't have a full time job or kids.

And what if, after reading the ToS, they object to some clause? Their only recourse is not using the service. Object to more than a handful, and soon your only option is living in a cave.

That, or push for legislation that limits what may be put into contracts, clickthrough or others. But since contracts are sacrosanct, and the highest purpose of society and the law is enforcing them, that option is off the table.

Then don’t use the services. I wouldn’t sign a contract without reading it. “Your honour, I had no time to read the contract, therefore it’s void” seems a bad excuse.

Or society can just treat shitty ToS clauses as invalid because the good of the individual is far more important than being fair to powerful ultra corporations.

So, don't use the internet, a smartphone or a laptop.

Because there is a TOS or CLUE coming with Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, Firefox, Chrome, Edge...

I'm assuming you didn't even read the TOS/CLUE required for you to post this comment.

Don't shop online, at all.

And I'm assuming you do, and didn't spend hours reading the TOS of all the sites you shop from.

Don't send messages.

Are you self hosting your email server ? Have you read your email provider TOS ? Each chat service TOS ? I doubt it.

Don't what videos on youtube. Don't search on google search. Don't use GPS.

You do that right ? Or have you actually read TOS for each service ?

If you said yes to all of this, either you are lying, living in a cave, or you are Richard Stallman. In which case, nice to meet you.

I don’t read tos (as in contracts of online services) but I don’t cry when something unexpected happens because I didn’t read them.

It’s my right to sign contracts without reading them. It’s not my right to pretend I didn’t sign them because I didn’t read them.

So you are ok with a system that is created to legally bind you to something you don't know and can be used against you later unless you take tremendous efforts to not be?

In that case, ok.

Most people are not, and it's reasonable.

In fact, it's terrible that we have to rely on lawyers because the law is so complicated you can't know or understand it all, just to live you regular life.

But TOS are even worst. Because they are asymmetrical. You don't get some right and some duty. Only duty for you, and rights for the other party, which is already economically and socially in a position of strength compared to you.

And no, it's not acceptable to tell people to accept that or live in a cave.

I don't have a google account attached to my android phone. This makes my life more difficult in all sort of ways, because society assumes more and more than I do.

So I'm just being punished because I don't want to give my life to a big corporation.

I understand people think it's BS. You should not have to do that.

Of course you get rights: the right to use the service!

You already have that right. At least in my country, by law.

The TOS is a layer on top of that right that corporations abuse to make that right conditional to their own laws.

EDIT: Arf, just looked at your comment history and now I understand I'm loosing my touch. One person answered:

"Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account because it's not what this site is for."

I missed the troll :)

Ok, you win. Have a nice day.

But could you claim that the contract is arbitrarily long and complex to knowingly discourage a reasonable person from reading it?

If you don’t have the legal expertise or the time to read a contract you hire a lawyer to have him see if the contract is reasonable, or you don’t sign it.

Doesn't matter for Meta. That collect data even if you don't use FB and without having an account.

> I wouldn’t sign a contract without reading it.

Sometimes it's not about how long does it take to read it, but even how it is interpreted by one of the parties, or if it includes clauses that are unreasonable.

For example, contracts signed by seniors who didn't have the knowledge or mental faculties to understand what they were signing, may be voided.

Ok it is obvious that there are one of three possible ways you handle terms of service:

1. You do not read any terms of service, like most people, and thus when you end up getting screwed over by a service you will accept that because you should have read the TOS, or perhaps you think the likelihood of you being screwed is minimal so you are willing to take the risk.

2. You read all TOS, do not accept those you disagree with, accept others you agree with.

3. You mix reading and not reading TOS dependent on how central you think they should be to your life, those that are not central you do not read because obviously those that are not central you can afford to have removed at the will of the corporations that own them.

But of course, you stated quite clearly that you wouldn't sign a contract without reading it, this must mean that you are doing number 2. You read every TOS you sign and some of them you refuse. That's great!

It's great because the parent poster you replied to made suppositions about how much time a person who did that would have to put aside to doing it, those were just suppositions though, you possess the cold hard facts and can tell us and them exactly how close their guestimates were, as well as answering the extremely important question as to how you manage your time to have enough of it to read and sign all those TOS, and in the cases where you have decided that a TOS did not fulfill your needs how you have handled it - how do you find services to replace them - have you ever been in a situation where you had to refuse a TOS even though your job may have depended on the usage of the service - how did you handle that?

Sure are a lot of things to find out about here, and finally someone who can help us out.

on edit: from reading further down the thread it seems when you said "I wouldn’t sign a contract without reading it." you actually meant that you would, but you would not complain when the company that you did not read the contract of screwed you over. Well that's sad. So I mean there is absolutely nothing a company could do to you that was not illegal that you would come complain about? Really?

Even if you hire a lawyer to review that ToS, that would be a waste of time because every ToS has a clause "we can change the terms any time we want for any reason we want and it's your responsibility to read the new terms on our website". Most ToSes also refer to "additional terms" written elsewhere.

1. Most if not all ToS contain parts that contradict law and are thus not enforcable. ToS and contracts in general are not some magical trap cards you can "gotcha" everyone with with anything you want.

2. Pretending that ToS are written in a way that the average user without a law degree, or even technical competency in this example, can 100% understand them and interpret their future implications is just dishonest.

In that sense:

To any HN user, by replying to my comment you agree to the following terms:

- Starting February 20th, 2022, you are obligated to upvote every piece of written text or submission created by user "2pEXgD0fZ5cF" appearing, now or in the future, on the website https://news.ycombinator or any website that can be considered derivative of https://news.ycombinator.com. These terms of interaction are subject to change at any point in the future. [1]

[1]: I'm not a lawyer, and someone trained in law probably would've been able to create a version of this that is actually funny.

You son of a gun. I'm in.

More and more TOS contain Mandatory Binding Arbitration. Once Mandatory Binding Arbitration is invoked, no other law matters. It supersedes other state and federal laws with respect to contracts. The contract will then be judged by arbiters who can be blacklisted by the company if they rule against them too often. State law is not permitted to prevent mandatory binding arbitration.

The fairness, reasonableness, or conscionableness of the rest of the contract is then not reviewable or adjudicate by a court of law. The arbiter will decide the fairness.

Due to clickwarp, you are not required to understand or perceive your loss of rights for them to be lost.

Corporations love them.

So, yes, they can be "gotcha"s

I should've put my emphasis on the "anything" part, surely there will always be aspects that can't override established law. At least for now, who knows if in the future Zuckerberg sneaks some Droit du seigneur [1] clause into Facebooks ToS once Silicon Valley has successfully "disrupted" Bodily integrity.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_du_seigneur

A couple of companies have been burned by that when a large number of customers all filed for arbitration at the same time. Because the company is responsible for the arbitration costs, it quickly became much more expensive than defending a class action lawsuit would have been. Arbitration is good if you're only expecting random one-off lawsuits here and there but if you're going to anger a large number of people, using it as an alternative to the legal system can quickly backfire.

Request for clarification: does "you" refer to yourself or the legal entity? If the legal entity, will a python upvoting bot in a jurisdiction where programs can be citizens satisfy contract terms?

The terms of interaction have been updated with the following addition:

These terms address any legal entity, any person equipped with the ability to communicate in written language. Further any entity that can be considered as capable of interaction with my comment in a manner that can be considered autonomous. In cases where autonomy can't be ascertained, the terms become applicable to a person by definition mentioned above that can be considered in control or responsible for the interacting entity.

I'm not a lawyer either but it's an interesting subject. In England, for a simple contract to exist you need offer, acceptance, consideration. What do you have that you are offering me that I might accept and what do I get in exchange for abiding by your terms? What thing of value changes hands between us that could be the 'consideration'? Also I just realised you didn't state the jurisdiction you will enforce your contract, so I choose... Somalia. You say 'I'll see you in court' I say 'I'll see you in Mogadishu then' :-)

> What thing of value changes hands between us that could be the 'consideration'?

By HN standards, I am obviously a high-net-worth individual with a total karma count of 2619. Interacting with me, a Public figure in the context of our community, is a privilege given that I can't interact with an arbitrary amount of users in a given window of time. Since I am offering you this interaction free of monetary charge, the terms of interaction can be considered a reasonable way to protect my interests, productivity and daily life as a high-net-worth individual user of the site https://news.ycombinator.com.

Not at all. To dumb it down (just started studying this subject): There is a hierarchy to each law, sometimes it can be overridden by a TOS, sometimes not, sometimes even the standard the industry has set is above the TOS (and strangely enough some laws, for example when you pay on the buss no contracts are written for the trip because it is is deemed to be standard of the transport industry).

It all depends.

Here they are leaning on "Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act".

You missed that part >Texas sued Facebook parent company Meta for exploiting the biometric data of millions of people in the state - including those who used the platform and those who did not.

No contract, no TOS, no consent.

First line of the article:

>Texas sued Facebook parent company Meta for exploiting the biometric data of millions of people in the state - including those who used the platform and those who did not.

Some of us never accepted their TOS, but they still maintain profiles for us.

Indeed! If someone uploads a photo of themself at a party and I'm in the photo - I never gave consent, but the uploader did. This is an important question that the court will need to answer.

>Facebook repeatedly captured Texans' biometric identifiers without their consent

How does a site avoid capturing biometric identifiers?

Ban users from uploading images of people altogether?

Instagram's support occasionally requires you to upload a 360º scan of your face to prove your identity. It's pretty clear that Meta is doing analysis of UGC.

That’s crazy. Glad that their app somehow stopped functioning on my older mobile OS. I also do realize that I’m in sort of a privileged position, as a 40+ guy my social life is totally independent of apps like IG, but had I been younger (and as such more socially dependent on those kinds of apps) I would have probably been more furious about it all.

Just had a friend who was talking about this. Account was hacked or Instagram just decided to make her do this.

Tried it twice, and it didn’t work. Couldn’t find any way to contact anyone, so basically got fed up and closed her social media accounts.

https://i.imgur.com/s7l71O7.jpg

Here's my ongoing support ticket regarding my personal account IG deleted without warning, it's been open without an official reply for 5 months now. I think they deleted it because I accessed it from an IP in a new country. I had to send a photo of my face holding up a code to open a ticket about it.

I lost hundreds of photos of my family, including some from the birth of my nieces.

I send a new email every couple months.

Any lawyers here? Is this something a person could file an injunction for, to force IG to let OP access their pictures? Is it feasible for a person to file an injunction? (Is an injunction the correct thing in this case?)

Here NY Times because NPR doesn't respect GDPR (I always have issues do anything on npr.org): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/texas-facebook...

If you hit the “Your choices” button on NPR you get a really nice text-only interface. That’s better than the NY Times for me.

Direct link is https://text.npr.org/1080769555

I know, but this is one of many piece of confirmation that NPR is not complying with GDPR. According to GDPR, you cannot show different pages/content depending on GDPR consent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com