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  • Hacker News
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.

    by reliablereason
  • 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.
    by HarHarVeryFunny
  • > "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 cancels the contract with the outsourcing company they contracted to classify smart glasses content after employees at the company whistleblow about serious privacy issues with the content they were paid to classify.
    by gorbachev

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