From Facemash To Pervert Glasses
CNET’s Scott Stein wrote a careful breakdown of the privacy nightmare Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth made for society and his boss Mark Zuckerberg:
Do Meta’s glasses have third-party contractors potentially looking over your data? Yes, sometimes -- if you’re using AI services. If you’re not using those AI services, then according to Meta, you should be OK. But even then, I don’t know where that “AI services” wall gets clearly drawn. And that’s one of my biggest concerns.
Stein’s careful reporting makes clear he’s trying to navigate the space where Meta flacks try to downplay aggressive data gathering and analysis with the reality that the words they use don’t actually definitively say anything meaningful — they aren’t in the user agreement — and their words do nothing to create trust in Meta or the “AI Glasses” product category it tries to define.
Read again Mark Zuckerberg’s comments in The Harvard Crimson after his social network experiment, Facemash, pulled the ID photos of his fellow classmates into a tool used to rate their appearance.
Zuckerberg wrote on his site:
“I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”
After Facemash went viral and he had to apologize, bolding added:
“I hope you understand, this is not how I meant for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter...I definitely see how my intentions could be seen in the wrong light,” Zuckerberg’s apology letter said.
When I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket recently to capture a photo of the Wi-Fi password on display before I sat down, I noticed a worker quickly move out of the way of my photograph. The moment educated me as to the reality faced by many others living in the United States. In writing about this now, I’m committing myself to trashing all pairs of the Meta AI glasses I’ve acquired. They aren’t worth reselling.
At a concert last weekend, the musician Lights pulled out her Ray-Bans and captured the audience that gathered for her event. If she has cloud media turned on, do her images get analyzed by AI? Stein’s careful reporting makes clear that there’s nothing but hazy answers here from Meta. And with such hazy answers, it is not far-fetched to imagine the images we produce with them used as a dragnet.