Anyone trusting Facebook to follow basic human decency and, yes, laws, is a fool.
https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerber...
"While Zuckerberg reportedly wanted to prevent "explicit" conversations with younger teens, a February 2024 meeting summary shows he believed Meta should be "less restrictive than proposed" and wanted to "allow adults to engage in racier conversation on topics like sex." He also rejected parental controls that would have let families disable the AI feature entirely. Nick Clegg, Meta's former head of global policy, questioned the approach in internal emails, asking if the company really wanted these products "known for" sexual interactions with teens, warning of "inevitable societal backlash."
Put differently: even if you don't owe megacorps that don't follow basic human decency better, you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I don't have any proof that Meta stores WhatsApp messages but I feel it in my bones that at the very least tried to do so. And if ever that comes to light, precisely nobody will be surprised.
The amount of ambient cynicism on the internet basically makes this a meaningless statement. You could plausibly make the same claim for tons of other conspiracy theories, eg. JFK was assassinated by the CIA/FBI, Bush did 9/11, covid was intentionally engineered by the chinese/US government, etc.
On the other hand, Occam's razor can barely keep up with the mental gymnastics required to paint Bush (or even Cheney) as the mastermind behind 9/11.
The evidence is pretty clear that Facebook wants to do everything they legally can to track and monitor people, and they're perfectly okay crossing the line and going to court to find the boundaries.
Using a company like that for encrypted messaging seems like an unnecessary risk. Maybe they're not decrypting it, but they're undoubtedly tracking everything else about the conversation because that's what they do.
And I’m not even getting into the obvious negative social/political repercussions that have come directly from Facebook and their total lack of accountability/care. They make the world worse. Aside from the inconvenience for hobbyist communities and other groups, all of which should leave Facebook anyway, we would lose nothing of value if Facebook was shut down today. The world would get slightly better.
The true wealthy live by an entirely different set of rules than the rest of us, especially when they are willing to prostrate themselves to the US President.
This has always been true to some degree, but is both more true than ever (there used to be some limits based on accepted decorum) plus they just dont even try to hide it anymore.
No, the best (and also most likely) outcome is you using a VPN and nothing happens, like 99.9% of pirates out there.
>Literally nothing happened.
Isn't there a lawsuit in the works?
Edit: they already won their first case in June against authors. I am very curious to see how that lawsuit goes. Obviously we don’t know the results yet but I would be incredibly surprised to see them lose and/or have to “undo” the training. That’s a difficult world to imagine, especially under the current US admin. Smart money is the damage is done and they’ll find some new way to be awful or otherwise break rules we can’t.
Is there any indication they didn't use a VPN? If they did use a VPN, how is it "there are rules for me and not them", given that anyone can also use VPN to pirate with impunity?
If there's some two tier treatment of Meta, it's that they're being sued more aggressively than the average pirate. If you pirated Stranger Things, you can blab all you want about your copyright infringement escapades, and you'll unlikely never face any legal consequences. OTOH once word got out that Meta torrenting books, every copyright lawyer out there is going after them.