Opt-out process: requests must be written longhand by the requester on parchment, witnessed by a clergyman of the church and the constable of the town. The request must bear the seal of the governor and must be sealed in beeswax on the night of the full moon. It must be placed on the next ship bound for Menlo Park at dawn the next day. Requests lost to piracy, shipwreck, or overall apathy of the recipient will not be honored.
> “if your objection is honoured, it will be applied going forwards”.
It is absolutely wild being in the "before times" (i.e. before any real legislation is applied to the use of data for AI training) and seeing statements that basically amount to "eh if we feel like it, we'll exempt you".
Not very often you see an "if" in statements like this.
>In the case of ImageNet, the current state of the art accuracy is obtained by Facebook AI’s weakly supervised ResNeXt-101-32x48 model. It delivers 85.4 percent top-1 accuracy, outperforming by a significant margin the recently published EfficientNet network. . The model is pretrained on one billion public Instagram images, which contain 1,500 ImageNet-related hashtags.
Yeah, I'm at the point that anytime bigTech comes out with information means they are no longer concerned about being told "no" because they've already done it and have the information they need already.
The opt-out form on Instagram has a "Send" button that pops up a dialog saying it's sent an email, please enter the code in that email to submit your opt-out. But after trying multiple times, no email has arrived. Oh, what a fucking convenient breakdown of your systems, Zuck.
EMails related to 2FA and account recovery never arrive either from Instagram.
Instagram locked by account for posts that I didn't make (I don't post on IG, nor did anyone else post on my account) and gave me 90 days to appeal the decision. As I had 2FA turned on every recovery method involved an EMail (not my idea).
So I could not appeal and they locked my account forever. To me not a great loss.
This is why we’ve migrated to Apple Photos. It’s a paid service. If Apple’s terms change, then we just migrate to another service or host it ourselves though I doubt this will happen since privacy is a feature that Apple marketing keeps touting. What Facebook is doing seems fair though since no one is paying them to host photos.
Do you think they'll delete your data just because you chose to lose access to it? They are supposed to in the EU, but then again, they are not supposed to use your data in this way here either.
I think that it became their data as soon as you uploaded it to Facebook. That's probably what the terms of service says, not that I've read it. Ultimately the lawyers decide whose is what.
From my time working on data infrastructure at Facebook, deletion policies are respected (permanently delete user data within X days). This was in 2018, though, so things may have changed.
I've never uploaded pictures of myself to Facebook, other than a few profile pictures, so you'd think I'd be in the clear, right? I doubt it. My friends have uploaded pictures with me to FB. I never authorized Facebook to use my image in my friend's pictures to train AI. I never authorized FB to use my friends to manually train FB's classifier by tagging the pixels representing me with my name. Yet here we are.
Honestly, this is the only reason I keep my account open. I'm waiting until they're forced to honor account close/deletion for ALL users, not just EU or California residents. I'm sure any data attached to the account will have been shared around more than the village bicycle by then, but it's my best bet I think to wait until I'm sure it's closed before I just kill my own access to it.
The only reason this isn't bigger news is EU protections that state they have to tell their people, why this is in Ireland news and nowhere else.
I'm sure it's in the TL;DR TOS in the US already accepted long ago in simply continuing to use facebook services. Zuck said it best when he called facebook users dumb fscks himself.
Didn't they get in trouble for doing this 10+ years ago with the facial recognition fiasco, got caught and their hand slapped, and issued a "so sorry, won't do it again, we promise, pinky swear this time"?
This company's (and really many of its peers') sociopathic behavior is right out of a late 80s sci-fi thriller.
From the full screen cookie dialog preventing me from reading this article:
We and our 71 vendors process data for the following purposes:
Use precise geolocation data. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Store and/or access information on a device. Personalised advertising and content, advertising and content measurement, audience research and services development.
No no, don't look at what I'm doing when I'm complaining about someone else doing the same thing. THEY are doing much worse, so that means I'm not bad as long as someone else is worse.
I stopped using Facebook in 2012, and "deleted" my account in 2016.
I would bet good money that they still have everything I ever posted in their databases (with a "deleted" flag set), and that there is absolutely no way for me to reject consent for them to use all of that to train their bullshit engines.
When I heard about this I sent the note below to legal@fb.com.
--
To: Meta / Facebook
Re: AI training
I am a user of your platform in <Country>.
I’ve recently been given to understand that you plan to start utilizing my personal data (photos, posts, etc) to train your AI models. I am writing to make it clear that I DO NOT consent to this use of my information.
I tried to find a setting on your website to “opt out” and have been unsuccessful.
Be advised if you utilize any of my data for training without my consent, I will litigate to the full extent of the law, including seeking an order to compel the destruction of any resulting models, weights, data, source code, etc. that has been generated from it. Should such an order be granted it could be a very expensive consequence for Meta given the likely size of the resulting dataset that would have been “tainted” with inputs from my personal data.
Further, I strongly advise you make this an “opt in” process for users – in addition to mitigating your legal risk, it’s simply the right thing to do. Expecting that you already somehow have permission for such an invasive use of your users’ data and constructing the feature as “opt out” is, frankly, contemptible.
1) They can laugh all they want. My aim was to make it crystal clear and on record I do not consent.
2) I understand your reaction, and that's an amusing analogy, but it's presumptive to assume I lack means to follow through.
3) I agree one email is a drop in the bucket. If you're similarly appalled I encourage you to act on your principal and signal it's unacceptable, in whatever way you choose. Even sending a tweet is better than apathy.
Large tech companies make transparency 180's all the time after realizing too late they hatched a PR turd. Enough of an uproar over a variety of channels could conceivably have some effect. I agree they're unlikely to abandon training altogether, and I'm not advocating that, but a clear and working Opt-Out button would be a good start.
Seems they are violating The Privacy Act of 1974
The Privacy Act of 1974 is a federal law that governs our collection and use of records we maintain on you in a system of records. A system of records is any grouping of information about an individual under the control of a Federal agency from which information is retrievable by personal identifiers, such as name, social security number, or other identifying number or symbol. Under the Privacy Act, Federal agencies may not disclose information without consent unless certain exceptions apply to the disclosure. The Privacy Act provides protections to individuals in three primary ways. It provides individuals with:
the right to request their records, subject to Privacy Act exemptions;
the right to request a change to their records that are not accurate, relevant, timely or complete;
and
the right to be protected against unwarranted invasion of their privacy resulting from the collection, maintenance, use, and disclosure of their personal information.https://osc.gov/Pages/Privacy-Act.aspx
I say seems, because even though they aren't a federal agency, they should be held to the same standard at a minimum. It's our data, they don't own it, and they don't have a right to injure us for it.
> because even though they aren't a federal agency
Exactly. So Facebook is not violating the Privacy Act and your comment is irrelevant.
When you voluntarily chose to use their service you agreed to give them your data. It's now their data to do with what they like. If you don't like it don't use their service. Pretty simple concept that hasn't changed in the last 20 years.
> Seems they are violating The Privacy Act of 1974 [...] I say seems, because even though they aren't a federal agency, they should be held to the same standard at a minimum.
"It seems you just committed criminal perjury! I say seems, because even though you aren't lying under oath in a court of law, you should be held to the same standard at a minimum."
No, dangit, "seems" is not some kind of magic word to bridge objective reality with a daydream.
