Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Why do they even need workers to classify naked content? They could filter some content prior to passing it to workers. They already have models to moderate explicit content.by f311a
- Bigtech and the race to the bottom of the ethical pitt. We can still go lowerrrr!by touwer
- by mproud
- This headline reminds me that “row” is one of these words I’ve been mispronouncing almost my whole life (I just learned the correct pronunciation this year). In this context row rhymes with cow,¹ now dough.
⸻
1. The first rhyme that came to mind was bow, but I realized there was a problem with that example.
by dhosek - Row as in rowdyby jjk166
- You will appreciate: https://youtu.be/uZV40f0cXF4
:)
by i2shar - It's a source of jokes in the UK at least. Most Americans don't know the difference. As the saying goes, "two countries separated by a common language."by hodgesrm
- That's amazing. I've also been mispronouncing it incorrectly my entire life. Thanks for this info! I'm a native English speaker and my language continues to surprise me.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/row#dictionary-en...
- One of the bigger commercial niches for smart glasses is filming POV porn, so it is hardly surprising that sort of content ended up in the moderation queue. The project should have planned to account for that use case.by swiftcoder
- How do you moderate what people do? You send someone to stop them from having sex because it was streamed to your servers?by ozozozd
- Why is there even a “ moderation queue”? Isn’t this people’s private recordings?by hosteur
- And I do appreciate how awkward it is for Meta to admit that use case exists. Even in the Oculus Go days there were a bunch of polite euphemisms internally to avoid mentioning "our device has to ship with a browser so people can watch porn on it"by swiftcoder
- If you want to read more about how unsavory aspects of AI-training are off-loaded onto poor workers in third-world countries, would recommend Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". These workers are paid pennies an hour for unstable jobs that expose them to some horrific material.by sheepcow
- Which examples did they cover in the book?by intended
- Ex Meta employee here (yes you are right to boo):
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.
by KaiserPro - have always wondered about this especially post Cambridge Analytica where Meta imposed really stringent requirements for API use even for personal things while it was blatantly obvious that internally it was a different storyby theplatman
- > 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.
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.
by dntrkv - I wonder under what circumstances footage from the glasses are uploaded for classification.
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.
- Always by default I assume.by pfortuny
- I believe the tricky privacy and security issues around smart glasses (and other "personal" tech) can be navigated successfully enough by a thoughtful, diligent, responsive company.
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.
by jmull - Not sure which is worse here - that Meta are recording video from customers' smart glasses, or that they are firing people who talk about it.
- Can I squeeze in the just a teeny tiny bit of… why the hell are you wearing an internet camera on you while naked and/or having sex?
… although I really extend that to why are you wearing an internet connected camera that is obviously going to be monitored by Meta.
- wow, right call, this all feels wrong, and hardly anyone knowsby bookedkit
- Everything having to do with Meta, starting with its very name, has been evil from the start.by OutOfHere
- Or maybe that people are wearing surveillance glasses while they fuck their partner? I know we need to push these companies to not be shitheads, but ultimately you can only be a shithead with the data people give to you (with the exception of things like Flock, who are shitheads with "public" surveillance data).
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?
- The latter, as they can't even claim to have done so by accident, or "it was just bug".
- > "We see everything - from living rooms to naked bodies," one worker reportedly said.
> 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.
by redbell - Meta is a defense contractor. They see the world a little differently from everyone else.
- Tagging, tagging, tagging. That is what "improving...": teaching its LLMs and diffusion models.by pfortuny
- How is this weird? People have been trading away their privacy for the smallest possible gains in convenience for a long time.by chneu