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Privacy AI Facebook Social Networks Software

Facebook Contractors Categorize Your Private Posts To Train AI (engadget.com) 63

Facebook uses thousands of third-party staffers around the world to look at Facebook and Instagram posts to help train its AI and to inform new products. "But because the contractors see users' public and private posts, some view it as a violation of privacy," reports Engadget. From the report: According to Reuters, as many as 260 contract workers in Hyderabad, India have spent more than a year labeling millions of Facebook posts dating back to 2014. They look for the subject of the post, the occasion and the author's intent, and Facebook told Reuters, the company uses that information to develop new features and to potentially increase usage and ad revenue. Around the globe, Facebook has as many as 200 similar content labeling projects, many of which are used to train the company's AI.

The contractors working in Hyderabad told Reuters they see everything from text-based status updates to videos, photos and Stories across Facebook and Instagram -- including those that are shared privately. And even as Facebook embarks on its "the future is private" platform, one Facebook employee told Reuters he can't imagine the practice going away. It's a core part of training AI and developing the company's products.

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Facebook Contractors Categorize Your Private Posts To Train AI

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  • Hey, it's not like Google and Amazon microphones don't record all our conversations and use those to train their AIs and make funny videos to play at their parties, like FB does, right? ... oh, it's all of them.

  • When Indian IT Contracting firms started handling the USA medical data, it was discovered that the HIPAA & other USA privacy laws didn't cover the IT workers in India. Some of the workers backmailed USA healthcare clients. /. covered that story as well as the Main Stream Media.

    But surely, they've corrected that problem/issue.

    Don't think we need to worry about these Indian IT Contractors -- after all, it IS Facebook doing this, isn't it?
  • How can there be "private posts" on Facebook, or even the Internet in general? By definition it is on a public network.

    • Telecommunications networks (e.g., your landline or cellular phone) are also public networks but conversations conducted over those networks are generally considered private, even to the extent that law enforcement must obtain a court order to listen in when there is evidence of criminality.

  • by ugen ( 93902 ) on Monday May 06, 2019 @05:38PM (#58549056)

    Modern AI is mostly "the mechanical Turk" with a little man inside the box.

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday May 06, 2019 @05:52PM (#58549106)

    Used to train AI? Say hello to Tay [wikipedia.org] for me.

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Monday May 06, 2019 @05:55PM (#58549126)

    "But because the contractors see users' public and private posts, some view it as a violation of privacy,"

    But that's about everybody besides the FB CFO.

    • I think it is the people who are both non-technical and uninformed who feel that "marked as private" means "nobody will ever view this" and that corporate views are a violation of privacy.

      You don't need to do much digging to find governments around the world are mandating that Facebook and other social media dig into "private" and "unshared" posts. Consider after the New Zealand shooting two months ago their government demanded that private posts are reviewed. That kind of outcry happens after any kind of

  • by shanen ( 462549 ) on Monday May 06, 2019 @06:01PM (#58549138) Homepage Journal

    No, you can't get there from here. In the case of Facebook, "there" means the place of respecting people's privacy and "here" means a business model based on selling people's private information.

    If you start from a different place, there are better solutions. The most obvious one is to ask. And politely. If the computer is having trouble understanding what I said, the computer should ASK ME what I said. No good reason to drag other people into the loop.

    That sort of solution approach is completely different from sending a recording of what I said to some mysterious stranger. It's still kind of iffy because I'm not sure how much I want to trust any of Facebook's computers, but it's vastly superior than exploiting a gigantic ToS that says Facebook can record my voice and other personal information and do whatever they want with it, including sending it to other people.

    My own "here" is the belief that it's all a scam, and an increasingly unsustainable one. At the root is confusion about time. The original idea of stock markets did NOT include the idea of profit maximization based on gaming the time. I even think the idea of shorting a stock for profit would have been anathema to Adam Smith. One of today's headlines described the stock price recovery as some sort of surprise? In a flying pig's eye.

  • It bears repeating (Score:5, Informative)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday May 06, 2019 @06:15PM (#58549188)
    If a service is free (like Facebook), you're not the customer, you're the product being sold. More than likely, buried somewhere in Facebook's EULA is a clause saying that in exchange for allowing you to use their service for free, they can use your private posts for a long list of stuff, including training their AI.

    I completely agree this would qualify as a privacy violation - if you were paying for the service. But since you're getting the service for free, it's merely something you agreed to in exchange for not having to pay for the service. If you don't like it, don't use Facebook. I pay for my own website and hosting, and don't have to put up with BS like this. In fact my agreement with my hosting service explicitly states that aside from making backups, transferring to new equipment, and in response to warrants by law enforcement (it's a U.S. host), they don't read or access my data other than what's necessary to provide the hosting service.
  • is their publication?
    Its not a communications system when your content is getting looked at.
  • by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Monday May 06, 2019 @06:59PM (#58549312)

    LOL.. just kidding... dumb fucks!!

  • It's for exactly situations like this. Facebook download "life" option lets you back up all you've posted/commented/liked, then use Social Book Post manager to undo everything you've done in three clicks. You end up with a blank slate, a full list of contacts, a full backup of your and your friends' and "friends" wise and witty posts and comments on your hard disk, and all your posts gone, meaning FB would have to be arsed to retrieve them if they needed them which they won't.

    Even if they were to ban you fo

    • ...and all your posts gone, meaning FB would have to be arsed to retrieve them if they needed them which they won't.

      If you really believe that, you're much more trusting than I am, which is one of the many reasons I've never had a Facebook account and never will.
      • Let's say I liked something once, and now I unlike it. I would imagine a like is implemented as a flag, rather then a record. So if a 3rd party requests all the pages I like, they will get nothing if all I once liked is now unliked. I have no doubt Facebook itself can get the list of everything I ever liked, but Facebook would need to look at me specifically, which they won't do. I also believe they won't give the 3rd party the pages I once liked but don't like anymore, presumably because there is no valuab

        • I have no doubt Facebook itself can get the list of everything I ever liked, but Facebook would need to look at me specifically, which they won't do.

          If so, you have a lot more faith in their willingness to put their user's privacy ahead of the chance for profit than I do. At first, I decided not to get involved with Facebook because I didn't see any need for it; now, I see nothing but reasons to stay away. Facebook's source of income is data mining; why do you think that they'd honor your request to fo
          • I don't think they'd honor anything -- just that they wouldn't bother making an extra step of listing my records that are flagged as "deleted" unless I were an important person. A 3rd party mechanical turk reads everyone's posts, including private ones, for anyone thrown at them, and when he comes to my account he sees nothing. He could tell FB hey this guy has nothing on his accounts, can you give me his deleted posts, but they'd say we're busy, unless he's Assange don't bother us.

  • by burningcpu ( 1234256 ) on Monday May 06, 2019 @07:39PM (#58549434)

    Facebook Contractors Categorize Your Private Parts To Train AI

    And it didn't jump out at me as unreasonably odd

  • WhatsApp messages. Does anybody believe those are private and not read and used for training AI as well? âItâ(TM)s end-to-end encryptedâ - but with whose keys?

  • as many as 260 contract workers in Hyderabad, India have spent more than a year labeling millions of Facebook posts dating back to 2014. They look for the subject of the post, the occasion and the author's intent,

    Even apart from the privacy implications, what could wrong there, lol!

    Language and culture are magically not barriers, because we don't want them to be! Presto, like magic!

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