Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos
152 comments
·June 28, 2025coef2
msgodel
From the very beginning Facebook has been an AI wearing your friends as a skinsuit. People are only just starting to notice now.
d_watt
Perhaps naive to say, but I think there was the briefest moment where your status updates started with "is", feeds were chronological, and photos and links weren't pushed over text, that it was not an adversarial actor to one's wellbeing.
smeej
There was an even briefer moment where there was no such thing as status updates. You didn't have a "wall." The point wasn't to post about your own life. You could go leave public messages on other people's profiles. And you could poke them. And that was about it.
I remember complaining like hell when the wall came out, that it was the beginning of the end. But this was before publicly recording your own thoughts somewhere everyone could see was commonplace, so I did it by messaging my friends on AIM.
And then when the Feed came out? It was received as creepy and stalkerish. And there are now (young) adults born in the time since who can't even fathom a world without ubiquitous feeds in your pocket.
Call me nostalgic, but we were saner then.
prisenco
The early, organic days of social networking are always fun. They never would have pulled in billions of users if they started off how they are now.
safety1st
I mean let's be clear on the history and not romanticize anything, Zuck created Facebook pretty much so he could spy on college girls. He denies this of course, but it all started with his Facemash site for ranking the girls, and then we get to the early Facebook era and there's his quote about the "4,000 dumbfucks trusting him with their photos" etc.
There is no benevolent original version of FB. It was a toy made by a college nerd who wanted to siphon data about chicks. It was more user friendly back then because he didn't have a monopoly yet. Now it has expanded to siphoning data from the entire human race and because they're powerful they can be bigger bullies about it. Zuck has kind of indirectly apologized for being a creeper during his college years. But the behavior of his company hasn't changed.
cornfieldlabs
Couldn't have said it better.
Nothing is a social network anymore.
Everything is a content-consumer a platform now.
People just want to scroll and scroll
mysterydip
Well they had to grow the userbase before they could abuse it :)
lern_too_spel
They were stealing your contacts from wherever they could get them. There was never a time when they didn't abuse their users.
labster
Nah, not from the very beginning. Before the News Feed, The Facebook was great to find people and keep in contact. Following someone’s page too often was called Facebook stalking and was socially discouraged.
Unfortunately parasocial behavior is good for engagement.
cornfieldlabs
I am building one with a chronological feed and no public profiles.
You need to already know someone to find them here.
Check out the waitlist!
https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev/
Edit:
Here are some rough layout designs https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uLwnXDdUsC9hMZBa1ysR...
It's intentionally simple
1vuio0pswjnm7
In addition to exporting one's contacts from Facebook in order to import them into an alternative, there should be a way to use whatever is provided through Facebook's "Download your data" to populate new accounts in the new alternative.
Perhaps it already exists but I have thought about writing something that takes what is provided by "Download your data" and produces a local SQLite database, a local webpage, local website or some combination thereof that is served from the user's computer instead of Meta servers.
However I do not use Facebook enough to justify the effort, and when I do I never look at the "feed".
cornfieldlabs
We don't let anyone find you on the site without your short secret code which they need to ask you for. The code can be changed anytime. You (the user) need to actively ask your friends' code to build up the network. This also keeps the network small since you won't go out of your way to ask someone their code unless you really know them.
A really private place with only people that matter.
motoxpro
What is the difference between this and a group chat? Most people have < 20 people that they know well enough to give a secret code to unless you're a creator or personality, in which care we are back to snapchat.
If the posts are more long form, what is the difference between this and a blog where the "secret code" is the URL?
Or even a finsta account currated the way you want.
I don't say these as a "it's not gonna work" as in consumer its about the experience, I genuinely wonder why the experience will be better
cornfieldlabs
These are very valid questions , thanks for asking them.
> Group chat Group chats work when everyone in one know each other. I have N different circles which don't overlap so group doesn't chat makes sense. Messages in group chat are more "in the face" - everyone has to. I just wanted a place where I can dump my thoughts without feeling like seeking immediate attention.
> Blog PostX is indeed something like a private blogging space. It's something I wanted for myself.
Honestly I am not fully sure how it's going to be used by people but I have built something me and my friends like and use.
pulkitanand
Your landing page talks about all the right goals. postx is a good placeholder name, I recommend ideating a better name for launch. looking forward, wish you the best.
cornfieldlabs
new users will face the empty feed problem since by design one can't find anyone without their code.
No "People you may know" or "select at least N interests or follow N accounts to continue".
I think early adopters will invite their friends to join and that is the only way.
Got any suggestions?
cornfieldlabs
Thank you Anand - for the encouragement and joining the waitlist!
It means really a lot to us.
We are working on a better name and the site!
I'll send you the welcome email manually soon!
DSingularity
Risks people’s mental health? I would say it is pretty obvious that FB and IG are bad for people. Some may have a natural mental fortitude and can survive it without instruction but for the rest of us we need some instructions on how to use these platforms without compromising key aspects of our mental health.
absurdo
I’d like to see a proper study on this that can be replicated before I jump on this train. And I’m a supporter of Jonathan “the kids are not alright” Haidt but let’s not kid ourselves his work is questionable throughout.
It’s easy to dogpile. I’d like to see more proof, that’s all. “It’s obvious” doesn’t cut it for me. For one, we have major societal problems that are being exposed through these platforms, and the mere knowledge of the problem has a negative impact on the individual. Do we shut the platform down because it’s showing us things we don’t want to see, or do we fix the societal problem? And many others.
Llamamoe
Pop some terms into Google scholar and you'll find study after study after study both correlating social media use with worse mental health and demonstrating improvements from reducing use, in children and adults both.
It varies by demographic, but yeah, social media are pretty universally awful for humans, and that's not just conjecture.
suzzer99
I have Fluff-Busting Purity, I'm part of a bunch of Facebook groups, and I only browse on my laptop. I pretty much only see what I want to.
neepi
Read Careless People. It was never about that.
figassis
Would a friends and staying in touch social network even succeed today?
cornfieldlabs
I am trying to find out with the one I am building :)
I wonder how many people can give up effortless doomscrolling to see a limited length chronological feed made up of their friends' posts
wkat4242
Yeah the one difference with some other enshittified things is that I really have the impression that Facebook was always meant to go this way.
It was also one of the first to drop genuine user-sercing features like the old timeline (just all the posts of people you followed which you came there to see) which it replaced with the algorithmic feed which recommended stuff you never asked for or wanted.
Instagram did keep that feature though until 2 years and still has it although it's constantly switching it off.
xyst
These days I treat Facebook as a marketplace for offloading lightly used items.
Social media is dead to me.
cornfieldlabs
Facebook marketplace has surprisingly large number of listings and in my country not even dedicated marketplaces can come close
mrweasel
Facebook marketplace killed or vastly reduced the size of other marketplace platforms in many countries. Strangely it also seems like the amount of fraud rose as people moved to Facebook Marketplace. I guess it was easier for scammers to work on Facebook, needing only one platform to commit fraud in multiple countries, rather than attempting to work on hundreds of local sites.
idiotsecant
What a coincidence, I use it as a market for buying lightly used items.
ants_everywhere
This is why I requested family not to post pictures of my children on Facebook.
They will get to decide what to do with their likenesses when they're older. It seemed cruel to let Facebook train a model on them from the time they were babies until they first start using social media in earnest.
mitthrowaway2
Some cultures long avoided being photographed, because they believed the camera would steal their soul.
It took the rest of us much longer to realize they were right.
wkat4242
I like this poetic way of putting it, though I don't agree with the message.
In Holland we have a saying, what do you bring it your house is burning down? And most people said my photos. This was before the digital age and cloud obviously. We take photos because we care. Stuffing them into everyone else's face has also been a thing at birthday parties but outside that not so much.
strogonoff
Photography stealing someone’s soul is easy to discount as an obvious misconception, but if you think of “soul” as a shortcut metaphor for some difficult to describe sociopsychological phenomena then there is some food for thought in it.
First, for most of us in daily life, once you know you are being photographed you exit any context you were in and enter the new “I am being photographed” context. In some important way, you are stolen from the world around you for a period of time. Your body is still present, but you might be thinking about how this all would look at any later time. This does not apply when photography is specifically arranged by you (common in analog era), or if you are unaware of being a subject photographed (but there may be other concerns about that[0]).
Second, a photo/likeness of you is a proxy allowing other people to relate to you. Keeping in mind that we only ever relate to images/models that we build of each other in our minds (we have no “direct access” to other people), in this case a photo is a shallow (there is little other information than appearance) but weirdly high fidelity (for sighted people) model of you. This is not an issue if the photo is kept just by people you know (common in analog era) or after you are dead, but otherwise if published[1] it means people can somehow relate to “you” without the actual-you knowing or having met them. Some people may feel some sort of satisfaction from this, others it can make uncomfortable.
Third, as someone noted, soul could map to another nebulous concept: identity. It could range from problematic cases (someone pretending to be you to resell work you made) to twisted but benign (stories about people making fake profiles pretending to be successful SV employees come to mind).
[0] If you are secretly photographed[2], this can happen for a number of reasons. Some may imply a missing interaction (if that photographer could not photograph you, maybe they would talk to you instead). Some may be done with intent of sharing your photo in unknown context where again people may relate to you in specific ways that can be unpleasant (e.g., mockery).
[1] Now when generative models start to be trained on what we thought is our private photos, the idea of “published” is blurred.
[2] In most cases here “photo” can be swapped with “video”.
b00ty4breakfast
As is the wont of industrial society, we had to meticulously design and build our demons.
chii
> the camera would steal their soul.
wasn't the camera doing the stealing, but the holder of the photo (facebook in this case)! And it wasn't the soul being stolen, but money!
jaza
No, I'm pretty sure they're stealing souls. That or kidneys.
qntmfred
[flagged]
phyzix5761
Maybe they mean identity by soul which is kind of what's happening here.
heavyset_go
It's a metaphor.
dzhiurgis
[flagged]
jwr
In some countries (notably Poland) Facebook is so burned into people's brains that you can't avoid this, and if you try, people and institutions will consider you a tinfoil hat weirdo and put pressure on you.
Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.
danieldk
Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.
Here (NL) we get a form at the beginning of each school year to mark which uses of photos we find acceptable. E.g. we allow photos in the school portal (which is private and not owned by big tech), but not on Facebook, etc. It's the way it should be done, because there is not much burden on the parents. If the school also wants to put photos on social media, the burden should be on them to make sure that kids for which they don' have an ack are not put there.
A bit harder was initially convincing my parents not to put pictures of their granddaughter on Facebook. They are understandably proud and want to show their friends. But they respect it.
I think in all her life there has only been two violations of our policy. In both cases we contacted the person who published the photo/video and they took it offline.
You just need enough 'weirdos' to make it normal. I know that there are other parents that agree, but not everyone has the gut to stand up to the social media tyranny, but will join if some people set an example.
bojan
Our (NL) elementary school places pictures of the fun activities they do with kids on Instagram, but they blur children's faces, resulting in the photos straight out of the uncanny valley.
I do wonder also if the blur effect they use is one of those that can easily be reversed. I need to check that one of these days.
mrweasel
Same in Denmark. Some companies don't have websites, only a Facebook page, Facebook Marketplace has all but killed the local marketplace sites and pretty much anything related to organized sports and after school activities are coordinated on closed Facebook groups. The last one is the worst one. That's basically telling people that they will hold your child's social life hostage until you join Facebook.
LinkedIn was used in a similar manor, to coordinate meetups for our local Cloud Native meetups, but the LinkedIn algorithms are much much worse than Facebooks, so people would get "You might be interested in this meetup" two weeks after the event.
Facebook basically took over communication, no more mailing lists, no more updates on the website, if there even is a website. You just have to accept Facebook if you want to be notified about changes in scheduling, upcoming events or general information about your kids soccer practise.
mystifyingpoi
For real. I've been searching for a swimming school for our daughter in Poland. The one that looked promising had a contract with clause, giving the school full rights to post any pictures of her in the swimming pool to social media. Of course, parents are strictly prohibited from making ANY photos at all. Fuck them.
throwacct
I don't care if they label me a weirdo. I agree with OP. Please refrain from posting any pictures of my children. Simple as that.
chii
i deleted my facebook account over 15 years ago, and people at the time thought i was weird for doing so. I would feel vindicated today, except i dont, because neither my friends nor coworkers have followed, nor want to despite all evidence to the contrary!
sebmellen
Since Facebook is pulling from the camera roll, not posting is not an adequate defense.
zhivota
Only logical thing to do personally is to take it completely off your mobile devices. You still get caught in the dragnet if you have friends and family posting you.
Also in many places WhatsApp is practically a requirement for daily life which is frustrating. What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.
danieldk
What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.
GrapheneOS comes pretty close to that I think? You can put such apps in a separate profile and cut off a lot of permissions. You can also scope contacts, storage, etc.
latentsea
On Android you can just make a separate user profile for it and do that I suppose.
dzhiurgis
Caught in what tho?
dangus
Recent iOS versions have granular controls over library access to prevent this.
bnjms
It isn’t nice to use though. You select your picture then when you need to add more you’ve got to go back into the settings for that app and select the picture. Then add the picture you selected.
I’m grateful though. We would have called meta malware back when.
sneak
The way you prevent this is by deleting your facebook account and uninstalling the app.
huhkerrf
I did the same. And then my mother-in-law decided to ignore my requests. And then my mother got angry. And then I caved.
fvgvkujdfbllo
They are simply addicted to likes and photos of your children can hook them up easily.
blindriver
There are children who don't even know if they want to be spies or undercover cops when they grow up that have already been identified by facial recognition. There will be an entire generation or more of spies and undercover agents that will have been identified before they had a chance to even contemplate their lives in that field.
pkkkzip
[flagged]
tock
I was writing a response before realising this profile is an AI agent. Is this seriously allowed on HN? The bio reads: "It's largely for my amusement and I like to play games."
aspenmayer
Neither bots nor generated comments are allowed on HN.
Aeolun
They can use Facebook however they want. They just can’t upload pictures taken of other people without consent. That has nothing to do with Facebook and everything with generally applicable laws.
goku12
This is truly egregious. Facebook and Instagram are installed by default on many android phones and cannot be fully uninstalled. And even if asked for consent, many people may choose the harmful option by mistake or due to lack of awareness. It's alarming that these companies cannot be held to even the bare minimum standards of ethics.
As an aside, there was a discussion a few days back where someone argued that being locked in to popular and abusive social/messaging platforms like these is an acceptable compromise, if it means retaining online contacts with everyone you know. Well, this is precisely the sort of apathy that gives these platforms the power to abuse their marketshare so blatantly. However, it doesn't affect only the people who choose to be irresponsible about privacy. It also drags the ignorant and the unwilling participants under the influence of these spyware.
ethagnawl
This is why I just spent weeks tracking down a modern device that I could vendor unlock and install LineageOS on. It's no longer possible on recent OnePlus devices and many people selling other brands on Swappa and Amazon claim their devices are vendor unlockable when they're actually just carrier unlockable. I don't want any vendor's crapware running on my device. I hate that I "have to" use Google Play to function in the modern world but Lineage and MindTheGapps is at least a less bad way to go.
I should sit down and try something like postmarketOS or Mobian as a portable Linux machine is what I really want ...
goku12
That's what I plan to do too. My current device is locked down pretty aggressively. But the problem here is, what percentage of the population has the skill and patience to do it? These companies need to hold only a simple majority of the population hostage. The holdouts like you or me can be eventually peer pressured into accepting the same abuse.
For example, let's say that you avoid a certain abusive messaging platform. But what if your bank or some other essential institution insist on using it to provide their service? We can complain all they want. But they will probably just neglect you until you concede in despair.
To fight this, you need affordable and ethical alternatives for the device, platform and applications. You also would need either regulation or widespread public awareness. Honestly, the current situation is hopeless on that front.
ethan_smith
You can use ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to disable pre-installed Facebook/Instagram apps without root via `pm disable-user` commands, effectively preventing them from running or collecting data.
dylan604
which what, 0.5% of users will know and be able to do?
esseph
That number is way way way way way too high
goku12
That's what I did. But as others point out, how many know about this? And modifications are getting harder by the year. They are relying on these factors to ensure that the majority of the population remains exploitable.
baobun
Bettet make it a script or ansible playbook from the start since you will need to reapply it after system updates.
toofy
how long until we find out that the brand new government/palantir deal is using these photos as well against citizens?
i give it a year or less.
Animats
> i give it a year or less.
Yesterday.[1]
[1] https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2025/06/26/jd-vance-me...
blub
According to the thread on /r/europe that person smoked weed and lied about it on their immigration form.
samtheprogram
I would love a source about the immigration form. That would at least make more sense. Weed is legal in half of the US. As a citizen, I find the story troubling.
The tweets just saying “drug use” and then you hear it’s weed is ridiculous. Why wouldn’t they just state that they lied on their immigration form about drug use?
hedora
So, they engaged in behavior that’s legal at Facebook HQ?
In other news, FB has been using whatsapp metadata to coordinate genocide campaigns in Gaza. What’d all those dead civilians (including infants) do, again?
Presumably they signed a TOS, so it’s OK.
bigiain
I look forward to the schadenfreude I will feel when someone makes the right FOI request and we discover this "feature" was built by Meta at the request of the NSA or the FBI or some other government TLA.
dzhiurgis
If you have so much trouble government I don’t think deleting facebook will change anything.
Jackson__
Curious, is this really necessary? I'd assume the subtotal of public images posted on meta services to be in the trillions.
ipsum2
I imagine many people will react only to the headline and not read the article, but:
"Meta tells The Verge that, for now, it’s not training on your unpublished photos with this new feature. “[The Verge’s headline] implies we are currently training our AI models with these photos, which we aren’t. This test doesn’t use people’s photos to improve or train our AI models,”
As someone who is familiar with the ML space, it seems unlikely that the addition of private photos will significantly improve models, as you have mentioned.
ejstronge
> I imagine many people will react only to the headline and not read the article [...]
I saw this line in the article: "Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images."
It would seem important to share this with people who may 'not read the article'
squigz
Shouldn't it have zero rights over your "camera roll images", which implies to me to be photos saved to a phone but not yet uploaded to Facebook?
mupuff1234
Probably for personalization.
squigz
Hasn't Facebook (and pretty much all major social media platforms) had a clause in their TOS giving them a license to whatever you upload to their services, since forever?
AJ007
Very helpful for ad targeting. As Apple kills tracking and ramps up its own ad business, Meta will need to collect as many signals as possible.
cameldrv
Yeah holy crap can you imagine the data goldmine of all the things they could know about you from analyzing every photo you ever take with AI?
JimDabell
This article seems false.
> On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or themes like birthdays or graduations.”
> By allowing this feature, the message continues, users are agreeing to Meta AI terms, which allows their AI to analyze “media and facial features” of those unpublished photos, as well as the date said photos were taken, and the presence of other people or objects in them. You further grant Meta the right to “retain and use” that personal information.
The straightforward explanation is this: they have a feature where it is helpful to group people together. For instance suggesting a photo of you and a friend to be posted on their birthday. In order to make this work, they need to perform facial recognition, so they ask for permission using their standard terms.
Can they train their AI with it? Yes, you are giving them permission to do so. Does the information available tell us that is what they are doing? No, it does not. In fact, a Meta spokesperson said this:
> “These suggestions are opt-in only and only shown to you – unless you decide to share them – and can be turned off at any time,” she continued. “Camera roll media may be used to improve these suggestions, but are not used to improve AI models in this test.”
— https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/27/facebook-is-asking-to-use-...
Could they be lying about this? Sure, I guess. But don’t publish an article saying that they are doing it, when you have no evidence to show that they are doing this and they say they aren’t doing this.
Might they do it in the future? Sure, I guess. But don’t publish an article saying that they are doing it, if the best you have is speculation about what they might do in the future.
Does it make sense for them to do this? Not really. They’ve already got plenty of training data. Will your private photos really move the needle for them? Almost certainly not. Will it be worth the PR fallout? Definitely not.
Should you grant them permission if you don’t want them to train on your private photos? No.
This could have been a decent article if they were clearer about what is fact and what is speculation. But they overreached and said that Facebook is doing something when that is not evident at all. That crosses the line into dishonesty for me.
BiteCode_dev
This comment should be the top one. I hate FB and I do believe they train their AI using this, but it's a believe, it's speculations.
IncreasePosts
I wonder how many pieces of code at facebook there are with guards like
if (userId == 1) {
// don't add mark's data to training set
}samlinnfer
Don’t worry, I upload Zuck’s photos to facebook for him.
SoftTalker
LOL at the idea that he uses Facebook. None of the silicon valley bigwigs or their kids have anything to do with social media tech except in perhaps very controlled, orchestrated ways. The normal users are just "dumb fucks."
kevingadd
This seems like a liability nightmare. If they're just scanning all the image files on people's devices and using them for training, they're inevitably going to scoop up nudes without permission, not to mention the occasional CSAM or gore photo, right? Why would you want to risk having stuff like that sneak into your training set when you already have access to all people's public photos?
latentsea
The purpose of a system is what it does. To that end it could actually be a plot by the CIA to find targets with this type of material on their devices, which can then be used against them to turn them into assets.
heavyset_go
It's simple, they don't care.
sebmellen
I’m sure they use a provider like Hive to scan all the photos before processing them.
tjpnz
I doubt anyone who works there would care.
aetherspawn
iOS -> Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Photos -> Facebook -> Set limited access
msgodel
You'd have to block nearly every app from ever seeing any image you don't want Facebook getting ahold of including apps that are made by other companies. Almost everyone uses their libraries, they practically have a shell on your phone (which is funny because you're not allowed that on your own device for "security.")
hedora
As much as I’m annoyed when my iPhone makes me do the dumb “give access to these photos to the app” dance, I’m happy they block that, at least.
However, I wish they’d grow a pair and just outright block the FB and other similar dependencies that make such stuff necessary.
I miss the old days when Facebook was simply a fun way to reconnect with friend and family who lived far away. Unfortunately, those days are gone. It feels like an over engineered attention-hogging system that collects a large amount of data and risks people's mental health along the way.