Facebook will soon use your photos, posts and other info to train its AI

Opt-out process: requests must be written longhand by the requester on parchment, witnessed by a clergyman of the church and the constable of the town. The request must bear the seal of the governor and must be sealed in beeswax on the night of the full moon. It must be placed on the next ship bound for Menlo Park at dawn the next day. Requests lost to piracy, shipwreck, or overall apathy of the recipient will not be honored.

> “if your objection is honoured, it will be applied going forwards”.

It is absolutely wild being in the "before times" (i.e. before any real legislation is applied to the use of data for AI training) and seeing statements that basically amount to "eh if we feel like it, we'll exempt you".

Not very often you see an "if" in statements like this.

I would be very very surprised if this wouldn't be happening for the whole time.

The opt-out form on Instagram has a "Send" button that pops up a dialog saying it's sent an email, please enter the code in that email to submit your opt-out. But after trying multiple times, no email has arrived. Oh, what a fucking convenient breakdown of your systems, Zuck.

Crazy, and this will likely fall under the radar in todays news cycle. People just don't care anymore. Privacy is dead.

Honest question - how does FB define a 'public' image ?

Is it an image that is searchable on the web ? or A pic visible by a few outside of your FB network ? A pic visible to anyone besides the owner ?

This seems relevant since they have trained on this basis

This is why we’ve migrated to Apple Photos. It’s a paid service. If Apple’s terms change, then we just migrate to another service or host it ourselves though I doubt this will happen since privacy is a feature that Apple marketing keeps touting. What Facebook is doing seems fair though since no one is paying them to host photos.

I’m flabbergasted.

They haven’t found a way start doing it already?

Time to delete your Facebook product account (you are the product being sold).

The only reason this isn't bigger news is EU protections that state they have to tell their people, why this is in Ireland news and nowhere else.

I'm sure it's in the TL;DR TOS in the US already accepted long ago in simply continuing to use facebook services. Zuck said it best when he called facebook users dumb fscks himself.

Didn't they get in trouble for doing this 10+ years ago with the facial recognition fiasco, got caught and their hand slapped, and issued a "so sorry, won't do it again, we promise, pinky swear this time"?

This company's (and really many of its peers') sociopathic behavior is right out of a late 80s sci-fi thriller.

Consent is a term that doesn't exist in Silicon Valley.

"Just copy and paste this as a post to opt-out"

From the full screen cookie dialog preventing me from reading this article:

We and our 71 vendors process data for the following purposes:

Use precise geolocation data. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Store and/or access information on a device. Personalised advertising and content, advertising and content measurement, audience research and services development.

I stopped using Facebook in 2012, and "deleted" my account in 2016.

I would bet good money that they still have everything I ever posted in their databases (with a "deleted" flag set), and that there is absolutely no way for me to reject consent for them to use all of that to train their bullshit engines.

When I heard about this I sent the note below to legal@fb.com.

--

To: Meta / Facebook

Re: AI training

I am a user of your platform in <Country>.

I’ve recently been given to understand that you plan to start utilizing my personal data (photos, posts, etc) to train your AI models. I am writing to make it clear that I DO NOT consent to this use of my information.

I tried to find a setting on your website to “opt out” and have been unsuccessful.

Be advised if you utilize any of my data for training without my consent, I will litigate to the full extent of the law, including seeking an order to compel the destruction of any resulting models, weights, data, source code, etc. that has been generated from it. Should such an order be granted it could be a very expensive consequence for Meta given the likely size of the resulting dataset that would have been “tainted” with inputs from my personal data.

Further, I strongly advise you make this an “opt in” process for users – in addition to mitigating your legal risk, it’s simply the right thing to do. Expecting that you already somehow have permission for such an invasive use of your users’ data and constructing the feature as “opt out” is, frankly, contemptible.

Seems they are violating The Privacy Act of 1974 The Privacy Act of 1974 is a federal law that governs our collection and use of records we maintain on you in a system of records. A system of records is any grouping of information about an individual under the control of a Federal agency from which information is retrievable by personal identifiers, such as name, social security number, or other identifying number or symbol. Under the Privacy Act, Federal agencies may not disclose information without consent unless certain exceptions apply to the disclosure. The Privacy Act provides protections to individuals in three primary ways. It provides individuals with:

the right to request their records, subject to Privacy Act exemptions;

the right to request a change to their records that are not accurate, relevant, timely or complete;

and the right to be protected against unwarranted invasion of their privacy resulting from the collection, maintenance, use, and disclosure of their personal information. https://osc.gov/Pages/Privacy-Act.aspx

I say seems, because even though they aren't a federal agency, they should be held to the same standard at a minimum. It's our data, they don't own it, and they don't have a right to injure us for it.