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OpenAI had them classify CSAM, so Sama fired them as a client back in 2022. https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
We're 4 years on, 3 years since that report broke. Not a single thing has improved about how tech companies operate.
It’s a terrible job, I wouldn’t want to do it, but someone needs to. Perhaps one day, AI will be accurate enough to not need it, but even then you need someone to process complaints and waivers (like someone’s home photos being inaccurately flagged).
Different situation.
Facebook has to do CSAM moderation because it's a publishing platform. People will post CSAM on facebook, so they must do moderation.
And "just don't have facebook" isn't a solution because every publication of any sort has to deal with this problem; Any newspaper accepting mail has this problem. (Albeit to a much more scaled down version) People were nailing obscene things to bulletin boards for all recorded history.
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In contrast, OpenAI has no such problem. It did not have CSAM pushed onto it, it actively collected such data itself. It could have, at any point before and after, simply stopped scraping all of the web indiscriminately and switched to using more curated sources of scraped data.
The downside would be "worse LLMs" or "LLMs being created later", which is a perfectly acceptable compromise.
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This is not to say that genuine content flagging firms have no reason to curate such data & build tools to automatically flag content before human moderators have to. (But then they also shouldn't be outsourcing this and traumatizing contract workers for $2-3 an hour)
But OpenAI is not such a firm. It's a general AI company.
The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server. CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers.
Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.
Westeners are too expensive and unwilling to do it. AI is a business model that requires poverty and extreme inequality to function. Yes other businesses do that too, but they don't claim it's a solution to everything while it actually has very special human requirements.
There are more reasons why these jobs are located in developing countries, it's not only the price of labour. Imagine for a second, these annotations would have to be done in the US. The public outrage would probably be audible across the Atlantic. This is another form of imperialism.
Granted the latter is kinda happening distantly on YouTube where you can’t talk about “ suicide “ so everyone self censors…
you must be extremy priviledge to think that way, even as EU I would be glad to do it for the minimum salary. For your info, a terrible job for most human is a job that is extremly hard physically at the point of destroying your health. That said, like many people, I would find it much more interesting than many boring job. [If someone read this, please hire me for this, in exchange I would work the 5 first hour for free]
If script writers gave the company this name in a fictionalization it would be rejected as too on the nose.
Safety and user pain is a part of tech which seems largely ignored, even on sites like HN.
I really have no idea why this ignorance prevails; commenters seem to genuinely be unaware of what goes on in Trust and Safety processes.
I mean, most users would complain about content moderation, but their experience would be miles ahead of what most of humanity enjoys when it comes to responsiveness.
I believe this lack of knowledge, examples, and case history is causing a blind spot in tech centric conversations when it comes to the causes of the Techlash.
Unfortunately this backlash is also the perfect cover for authoritarian government action - they come across as responsive to voters while also reigning in firms that are more responsive to American citizens and government officers than their own.
But it's not really a fascism thing. While fascism does love the oppression of women, and the current crop of fascists have a notable connection to the Epstein case, this is a lot more boring.
Sam Altman's not a fascist, he's a wet noodle who sucks up to the Trump administration for money. He's not even good at it. The way his company handled CSAM does cast aspersions on Altman & the accusations from his sister, but all other evidence suggests he's just a moron acting recklessly. Not identifying the problem ahead of time, and acting poorly in response.
In the case of Meta. We know who Zuckerberg is. The company got it's start as, in crude terms, a sex pest website. The original "Facemash" website forcibly taken down by Harvard. This is not some new consequence of this turn to fascism, Zuckerberg's always been like this, and the actions taken against him were clearly not enough to avoid the company culture following his precedent.
Great! Now do people with smart TVs and people with smart phones
Aren’t there already posts and articles on how to ensure that TVs don’t farm information from us?
If you insist on the glasses, wear a fake GoPro.
I went to the beach, jet skiing. One of the guys had Meta glasses.
I liked the footage.
The danger with creep glasses is that many people don't know what they are, they can be used with the LED disabled so they're perfect for filming people without their knowledge, and "these are prescription glasses" has a good chance of working. In a place with a "no recording devices" policy, "could you put that gopro away" has wide social acceptance/support, "take those glasses off" less so.
So did the Meta's LLM training model as well as the contractor across the globe reviewing your footage.
There's also nothing stopping us from stigmatizing the use of smartphones in public. Even a slight discouragement of it would be progress. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Name a more iconic duo.
I do not care which country the outsourcing company is in. When criminals go global, protection whistleblowers should go global too.
Not that I am remotely interested in defending Meta, or optimistic that they would proactively address privacy issues. But I don't feel that sympathetic to the outsourcing company here either.
I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I'm just going off what is said and not said in the article. If I were whistleblowing about something like this, I would take pains to describe what measures I took internally before going public. I didn't see any of that here.
EDIT: Look, to be clear, I think it's bad that naive or uninformed people are buying video recorders from Meta and unintentionally having their private lives intruded on by a company that, based on its history, clearly can't be trusted to be a helpful, transparent partner to customers on privacy. I think it's good that the media is giving people a reminder of this. I think it's good that the sources said something, even though the consequences they suffered seem inevitable. But to me, there is nothing essentially new to be learned here, and I don't know what can or should be done to improve the situation. I think for now, the best thing for people to do is not buy Meta hardware if they have any desire for privacy. Maybe there are laws that could help, but what should be in the laws exactly? It's not obvious to me what would work. I suspect that some of the reason people buy these products is for data capture, and that will sometimes lead to sensitive stuff being recorded. What should the rules be around this and who should decide? Personally I don't know.
Why reflexively defend a massive tech corporation caught repeatedly violating the law?
Because it is the natural expansion of the quote attributed to Upton Sinclair:
> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires
Congratulations, you have a bright future in politics and/or tech CEOing.
> 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.
> Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.
It's total fantasy. I've worked in big tech. Casually uploading and providing company/contractor access to non-redacted intimate photos or pictures of the insides of people's homes vaguely "for the purpose of improving the customer experience" would not pass even a surface-level privacy or data-protection review anywhere I've ever worked. Do Meta even read what they are saying?
Hell, I know of a major firm that decided QA was not needed for their trust and safety process.
Another common issue will be SEA Arabic speakers tasked with labelling Middle Eastern Arabic content, because accents and cultural dialects are not a thing.
I’ve had people at FAANG firms cry on my shoulder, because they couldn’t get access to engineering resources at their own firms.
There was the famous case of meta executives overriding T&S policy and telling them that what content was news worthy during the Boston bombing. On a separate incident, they told their team that cartel violence was not newsworthy when friends in London complained about it.
When you say this is fantasy, what do you mean precisely?
I'm reminded of Bo Burnham's wonderful "That Funny Feeling" from 2021's "Inside", where one of the absurd examples he offers in the lyrics is:
edit 2: OK, I see what you mean. But I'm wondering if it should be possible to consent to this via T&C. Basically the same issue as with many online services, turned up to 11, sure. And it involves OTHER people, who have not consented.
Stuff like this used to be outrage fuel even when it was more of a social experiment, e.g. the documentary "We live in public" or the "Big brother" TV show. By now, I'm sure there have been millions of influencers doing similar things, but it's very much not considered normal?
Streaming to an unknown number of employees might be considered different from streaming to the public, sure.
But the core question here is whether there's informed consent, and, IMO also, if it should be possible to consent to this when the other party is a company like Meta and the pretext is not deliberately seeking attention (like influencers and streamers do).
edit, clarified social media comparison
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?
but i do agree that people just have become too trusting with our tech overlords, and its that trust that makes them continue to do shit like this over and over.
… although I really extend that to why are you wearing an internet connected camera that is obviously going to be monitored by Meta.
Of course, anyone who opened a newspaper in the last 10 years or so would know better, but I can definitively see some people not giving a fuck about it.
I never understood the appeal of upskirt pictures. But I think that taking videos of non-consenting participants/victims is the current version of the upskirt photo craze.
i think its a mixture of fetish (panty-fetish is a whole craze in some parts of the world...) and voyeurism, like the appeal _is_ the lack of consent. I recently saw on reddit there was a whole deluge of non-consensual porn being uploaded to a certain site and once that news broke, visits to that site spiked. I think that just says a lot about society as a whole.
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.
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.
You can discard them after tagging+using them for learning.
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.
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.
They did when I was there. every time you got close to user data an "interstitial" would pop up asking you for a ticket number and justification. There were a bunch of tools that ran searching for people accessing user data.
For example in boot camp you'd create a page that pulled your profile details. this was to introduce the idea of "ents" (the API that manages the social graph) and mercurial. You could, if you wanted to then traverse your friend graph. as soon as you did that, it'd trigger one the automated rules and your account would be suspended and you'd be yeeted within hours.
The point was, if you were doing something legitimate it was fine, but if you stepped out of line, the automated systems would find out and fire you on the stop.
also as everything is done through remote dev boxes, _everything_ is recorded (along with all the files on your laptop, and the regular screenshots, plus all the browser history and keystrokes) Data exfiltraition is super hard, hence why there are hardly any "angry nerd extorts girl" type stories. Its not because meta isn't full of angry nerds, it because its really really difficult to get at user data without getting caught.
Its not a mistake that this data got into contractor hands, it was a decision that took lots of time, numerous legal reviews and signoff from Zuck himself.
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1. The first rhyme that came to mind was bow, but I realized there was a problem with that example.
:)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/row#dictionary-en...
At this scale, this sound like some insider joke contract made up only to make some hustle on the side capitalizing with stock options on the possibility of adhoc news trading bots glitching out on the keyword, here "x.com/sama" signals.
So it doesn’t surprise me that Meta didnt renew/cancelled a contract that is a net negative for them. Arguing over the reason seems fruitless as no reason is needed per the terms of the contract (I assume since breach of contract wasn’t brought up by the sub).
You are the frog being boiled.
The latter is literally illegal, at least in my country and I hope in any civilized country. If your point is that there's no difference between glasses and other forms of creep cams and the glasses should be illegal too, I concur!
Aren’t there countries that make it mandatory to blot out faces of people on videos if they didn’t consent?
There is no expectation of privacy in public.
In the US at least, any private homeowner/renter can deny entry to their property, barring legal warrants and exceptional circumstances. A business can have a policy, and is generally legally protected as long as the policy is 1) equally applied, and 2) does not violate ADA... A court would have to weigh in if glasses are allowed or not for ADA... but I suspect there's already a case where a movie theater banned such glasses and they would probably(?) win, since such individuals could be expected to have non-recording glasses.
I do not remember every single person I see on the street. What makes it Ok for some guy who will also forget me to create a stored, persistent, AI processed set of videos of me?
I do find the idea of a glasses version of an action cam quite cool, but we are talking about smart glasses from Meta here, which is a different thing.
We are talking about a network of streaming cameras moving around, filming.These videos are stored, still without any specifics about a purpose or when the data will be deleted.
Besides, the filmed people do not choose or consent to be filmed, they might not even be aware that they are filmed. This is not like a phone where you at least have a chance to see it. The person doing the filming chooses to film. Or they might not be aware they are still filming. They might also be one update away from always on. If Amazon did it with Alexa, Meta can do it with the glasses.
Of course, there are CCTV, but, at least in Europe, their use is very specific. You have to be informed about who to contact about the data, as well as the purpose of the recording and how long it will be stored. There too the scope is much more limited than a random guy filming people without their consent.
The collection is one problem. The usage is another. We know they are used to train AI for unspecified use, generative AI? Something else? Under the GDPR the purpose of the collection should be known, but in that context it is extremely murky.
Based on existing technology, it would be possible for them to use facial recognition on these videos to track individuals, building profiles as they go, including location. These profiles could even be linked to the identity of people who have been tagged in photos before. While it might be extremely difficult now, it might be possible later. Making it possible might even be what the AI training is about. The data exist, and it is unclear how long it will be kept, or whether the purpose of processing will change.
It would be bad enough if it was any company, but we are talking about Meta, a company that brought us the Cambridge analytica scandal. A company that knowingly let its users be scammed by ads for profit. Profit over ethics has been part of their DNA from the start, not an exception.
It's the same with phones. I know blind people who have been harassed for holding their phones up to things as though they are taking pictures, but in fact they're using the camera on their phone to render signage legible to them, or having their phone (or a person on the other end) read it.
Banning this in a way that doesn't in practice cause problems for visually impaired people would be difficult. It might also be difficult to do in a way that doesn't harm, for instance, accountability for cops who are acting in public.
The impulse to "ban" is sometimes a bit naive imo.
Because nobody knows how to put a dot of nail polish on an led they don't want seen, right?
I assume that every single person who still works at Meta has done that personal calculus and decided that they fall on the "this is fucking amazing, important work" side.
And the five or six HNers that bought the Apple goggles.
“Yes, we all know it, and we keep those app installed regardless“.
Maybe a company with those standards should not get our business. Oops, no wait, maybe they mean the Friedman Doctrine standards? In that case they are entitled to do any and every thing to make a profit. No matter what the harm.
[edit: add last two sentences]
So that when I say that they really do have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using their internal systems to violate user privacy, it's not because I'm eager to defend them. It's just true (at least, it was when I was there). There are internal systems dedicated to making sure you have access to what you need to do your job, and absolutely nothing else. All content you interact with through internal tools is monitored and logged. If you get caught trying to use whatever access your job gives you for anything other than doing your job, security immediately escorts you out of the building. This is drilled into new hires early and often. For everything Meta gets wrong, they really do take this seriously.
(I do think these smart glasses are super creepy and I'm not defending Meta's data collection practices.)
But that can't be the problem. They're collecting the data that users send them. To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable.
And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?
If Facebook were designed with a different set of incentives that prioritized the user, fostered positive engagement, and better respected individual's privacy and data sovereignty - setting a better standard for the whole industry - I feel there wouldn't be all this fuss today about banning social media accounts.
Same for "Meta reads your E2E whatsapp messages". Meta does many things, is probably massively net negative for civilisation, but it doesn't do that.
They don't boil live kittens either, I believe. Doesn't seem relevant though.
All advertiser support agents were given super-read on all profiles & pages, and I never once observed a CSR being questioned on their use of this access in any way.
The man is without any redeeming qualities.
When did FaceBook make the world not-worse?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226756
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47225130
If you truly want to atone for your sins, you have a long way to go. I don't blame you for having worked there, I've worked at places that are only a little better than Meta (which is hard considering Meta is at the absolute bottom of the entire ladder, including Peter Thiel companies, thanks to Meta's sheer scale of carnage). But its time to completely come to terms with the reality, rather than stopping halfway to try and feel better about your resume.
The irony is meta wants to implement verification to protect kids. Meanwhile it's doing everything it can to exploit them most at every single level for profit and for the love of the game. Billions of dollars, the world's most advanced computers all dedicated for it
They just got fired for "piercing the veil". They committed the sin of bringing attention to the invasion of privacy.
Mostly, I'm just surprised that anybody would be naive enough to take a camera provided by Facebook into a sexual encounter and expect anything else.
If you read, eg, Buffet, he makes the point that a manager donating to a political cause, whether the Heritage Foundation or, God forbid, something as far right as the SPLC, makes that donation with money that otherwise accrues to the shareholders. The manager therefore creates an agency problem, where he might pursue his own interests at the expense of the owners.
If they are aligned, the manager can retain the earnings and create a dividend for the owners, such that they can then make the donation directly. If they are not aligned with the owners, they are redistributing wealth.
I am not surprised that the Left advocates for backdoor wealth redistribution, but I would prefer they be honest about it.
There was an example in the article where a user’s glasses kept recording the user’s wife after he took them off. That’s bad but on the user, not Facebook.
Seems similar to a situation where someone takes nudes of someone without their consent and then sends them off to a lab to be printed. The lab isn’t doing anything illegal or unethical printing them when they ask the user “are these legal” and the user replies “yes.” Unless you want to stop photo printers from ever printing nudes, I think the responsibility is on the user, not the firm.
And people do record porn for personal viewing. They probably didn't know it was being viewed by meta employees as well.
Meta isn’t lying, you should assume other companies are doing it too, Tesla did it with their cameras, and assume others like any company has access to your camera, I would even assume CCTV cameras too. It’s why for anything sensitive, try to use open source stacks, you might lose some of the features, but it’s a needed compromise.
Or they might start scanning for "problematic" behavior, a bit like the Apple CSAM fingerprinting initiative.
So not one part of me would ever buy Meta glasses (or the Snap glasses before that). You simply don't have sufficient control over the recordings and big tech companies can't be trusted, as we've witnessed from outsourced workers sharing explicit images. And I bet that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would get these and trust Meta to manage the risks.
Things like audio scanning your living space using those Alexa smart speakers with ultrasonics to get an image of not only everything in your space, but where you are in that space as well.
That technological use case only came out within the last five or so years, maybe closer to eight. Either way I could see that coming before it became a thing just because ultrasound imaging of your unborn child is a thing ultrasound imaging of the sea floor is a thing so why wouldn’t ultrasound imaging of your living space be a thing by a company who wants to know what you buy.
I never ever ever had Alexa I only ever had a Google home because I got it for free with GPM but I almost never used it because I hated the idea of it always listening.
I already regret Wi-Fi because they figured out now how to look through walls with that.
These users probably didn't know where it would end up.
1. Meta AFAIR paid/compensated people — contractors or recruited via ads — to have them submit their data. There are strict privacy protocol and reviews in place to distinguish data use in these cases vs gen public. This is not to say the process is perfect, but if these users are gen public, I would be very shocked.
2. Hiring contractors to submit data is a more controlled environment VS recruitment of gen pub via ads to submit data, but the former has more well understood privacy disclosures than the latter. This means in practice asking contractors to wear glasses and "move around their surroundings naturally and do things" goes well with basically the privacy practice "the data your are submitting we can view and use all of it for purpose X and nothing but X". BUT this framing is with ad based recruited people — which are general users who willingly submit data — is much much harder. My suspicion is they are running ad based recruiting in general public and while those users may have signed a privacy statement it is very surprising that they did not tighten the privacy practices around the use of the data and who has access.