Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos in your camera roll you haven't yet
74 comments
·June 28, 2025pyman
polishdude20
I keep my Facebook account mainly because I use messenger for a lot of interactions with friends. I never really go on Facebook itself. I don't get the self congratulatory fest that goes on when deleting your account. I get the same feeling and outcome by just not using it.
repeekad
I don’t think it’s self congratulatory to get an “I was right” in about an article where meta is covertly asking to train their AI models on your entire private camera roll
add-sub-mul-div
You're still enabling them in a way that others who have deleted their accounts are not. You're contributing to the network effect problem.
p2detar
Maybe relationships are more important to GP than attitude. I know what GP means and I was even recently asked to join a Messenger group of friends. I declined but only because I have other comm channels and I dropped FB and Messenger years ago.
MOARDONGZPLZ
Facebook is the worst. I haven’t had the app itself in a decade, but use the mobile version in a mobile browser to catch up on friends’ posts. I hope they go through with Zuckerberg’s idea of removing all connections, at which point the lift to reconnect is too great and I will actually delete my account (and I was one of the first FB users when they expanded to my school just after Harvard).
fredley
The best time to delete Facebook was many years ago. The second best time is now.
gambiting
Unfortunately, many of the old forums for various non-IT-related hobbies have disappeared and moved over to facebook groups and there is no alternative as such. Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers, there are some fantastic communities, but if you are into cars or mountain biking or watches or fellwalking/hiking etc......you really don't have any alternative to facebook. I'm trying to never just passively browse the main feed because it very quickly turns into pure trash, but there are communities there that are worth participating there and which don't really have any other online space.
aunty_helen
Yes the death of forums is one of the huge hidden costs and another great reason to hate fb.
Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility.
We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.
hoistbypetard
I disagree about the goodness of discord (and facebook) compared to old style forums or (better yet) mailing lists with archives.
Searching the forum archives is much worse with facebook, slack or discord than it ever was with even the jankiest phpbb forum or mailman list. Hell, before they grew it up, Yahoo! groups were better from that perspective. And a big part of what made forums for either tech or non-tech hobbies so nice was the ability to search and reference prior discussions.
I was actually hopeful that "login with facebook" and "login with discord" would bring those more search-friendly alternatives back a little bit, but so far I haven't seen it.
lxgr
> Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers
No, even that is terrible compared to forums – it doesn't get indexed by search engines!
spacemadness
Yes, this makes me sad how so many hobby groups are trapped within FB. It’s usually hobbies with an older demographic.
qoez
It's worth it to miss out on that information to delete your account. I don't have one and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything
add-sub-mul-div
We can always find words to justify being a follower instead of a leader. We shouldn't. Being in the space that the Eternal September has chosen to congregate to have access to the most hikers isn't a hard necessity.
hoistbypetard
Too many people I know still use it. I created mine (and keep it) to prevent someone from impersonating me to my friends and acquaintences, and use it as a directory where friends and acquaintences can find my contact info and vice versa. I avoid feeding them any new data (other than acknowledging or blocking friend requests I receive) but deleting seems worse for me than being present but inactive right now.
willsmith72
I completely agree, and haven't had the meta/twitter/reddit apps in years. But facebook does keep me around (or at least keep me from deleting my account) through marketplace. I've now found my last two apartment rentals there, both of which were nicer and cheaper than alternatives on dedicated rental sites.
I find keeping an account open solely for desktop marketplace is a fine compromise
nikolayasdf123
deleted it in 2018. happy ever since. did not regret for a moment
reaperducer
I got locked out of Facebook right about that time. Looking back at the last eight years, I can say without qualification that it did wonders for my personality, my mental health, and the way I interact with other people.
A couple of times I've looked back at my messages and photos from the annual data downloads I did back then. I can't believe how angry I was, and that I would think it was O.K. to talk that way to perfect strangers.
Then I dig a little deeper, and see that the early messages were fine. I was a nice to strangers. But as my Facebook use continued, the tone and unpleasantness of the messages becomes palpable. It's like watching a malignant Facebook disease spreading in my own brain. Kind of horrifying now that I put it into words.
Glad I'm Facebook-free today, and enjoying life almost as much as someone in an Apple commercial.
gambiting
I was going to say Instagram is much worse in terms of keeping you hooked but then I remembered who owns it.
pyman
Facebook is way worse than Instagram.
I've never, ever seen an algorithm as evil and anti-social as the one Facebook's programmers created. At one point, it was showing my family and friends a comment my cousin had made about a politician, and they started getting into heated arguments with him. And this kept happening again and again. It honestly felt like the algorithm was trying to polarise entire families and friend groups, driving engagement by surfacing exactly the things people disagreed with or didn't want to hear. During the pandemic the algorithm drove everyone insane.
At one point, I compared Facebook to a virus. It hijacked conversations, infected relationships, misled people, and distorted their perceptions of others.
arccy
Yeah facebook is definitely worse, though it's kind of like twitter: any action can become an item in other people's timelines.
instagram is still bad now that they push more ads and content from people you don't follow onto you, but at least it's only things that are explicitly posted, and it's easier to maintain multiple profiles with different feeds
jofla_net
Its just "giving users more of what they want", said the owner of Marks Meats. I dont think a take on technology and society could be more naive.
mslansn
All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost.
unfolding
they don't want your money - they want your attention
xrisk
They want your attention because it makes them money. It’s not attention for attention’s sake.
reaperducer
All companies want you to give them more money no matter the cost.
This is false; and considering the hundreds of thousands of companies that people encounter every day that do not operate with your singular mindset, I can only assume the comment was not made in good faith.
bgwalter
They are still pushing the "AI dominance over China" argument to clueless politicians.
The anti regulation clause sneaked into the "Big Beautiful Bill" ($5 trillion new debt) facilitates consumer exploitation and has no impact at all on military applications.
If China dominates consumer exploitation, let them and shut off their Internet companies.
Strangely enough, why not invest $500 billion in a working fusion reactor if these people are so worried about U.S. dominance?
simonw
There's a big active thread about this here already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44401406
I think the TechCrunch headline is slightly more accurate than the Verge headline, which is "Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos".
In both cases they imply training models is happening when that's not been confirmed.
(Facebook could help here by answering press inquiries about it, which they apparently have not done.)
namuol
> In both cases they imply training models is happening when that's not been confirmed.
It is safest to assume that your photos are being used for training.
iLoveOncall
Yeah, I read the title of the other one and thought it was just about pictures you sent through Messenger or put in private on Facebook, so I wasn't too bothered (because I assumed they'd do this already), but actively reading your camera roll is next level.
palata
> but actively reading your camera roll is next level.
Now that it was established that they wrote malware to bypass tracking protections, nothing surprises me. Apps written by Meta are malware, as far as I'm concerned.
BiteCode_dev
While I agree the articles are click bait since this as not been confirmed, it's not far fetched to assume that a giant corporation with a terrible track record and a big legal department worded their TOS like this because they intend to use that capability.
Nevermark
Exactly.
Given Facebook is about as voracious an actor of surveillance as has ever existed, their track record of respecting few red lines until they have been caught crossing them egregiously, and the bright spotlight Zuckerberg is currently shining on their AI ambitions, it defies reality to imagine them forgoing any data they can get there hands on.
You just know there is a dashboard that summarizes all potential data sources, and engineers wake up with the shakes and sweats, after dreaming that Zuck was standing behind them, with furrowed brow, and pointing to a stat that shows 2% of someone’s most private information still hasn’t been plundered.
Ok, a little hyperbolic. But he & Meta are relentless.
thanatos519
I like how the headline is truncated. I was thinking of 'seen' or 'taken' but turns out it ended with 'shared'.
alex_young
Could be more fun options:
- Photos you haven’t yet known you’re in.
- Photos you haven’t yet deleted.
- Photos you haven’t yet thought better about taking.kQq9oHeAz6wLLS
Soon with their AI, it'll be "photos you haven't yet taken"
cwmoore
What do you like about it?
How is it the photos are shared when they’re not shared?
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS
Perhaps you're not aware, but starting a sentence about something you don't like with "I like how..." is basically a form of sarcasm.
cwmoore
Ok, good info. So GP means to evoke the type of information shearing garbage some of us are wise enough to expect from unaligned and underspecified human-emulating but self-serving autonomous digital systems, and not comment on their sincere affection for information loss in clickbait titles that. . .
jfengel
That's true, and people should learn to recognize it. But in general, sarcasm is easily misunderstood in pure text. You read it with a tone in your head, but they can't hear it.
Also, it's best to avoid it a site like this with many non-native English speakers. It's an extra layer of difficulty.
harvey9
In this case it might not have been sarcasm. The headline cut in just the right place to let you fill in the blank for your own amusement.
puttycat
Some time ago I asked on HN "will you go work for Meta?" [1].
I'm so glad I didn't pass their (ridiculous, redundant) set of interviews.
Anon1096
So you failed their interview and then proceeded to post a whole thread to get validation that Meta's not a good company to work for? And you're still posting about it a year later? Talk about sour grapes.
huhkerrf
I mean, the very first two replies on your link are "yes" and the third is "maybe."
Doesn't seem very unanimous to me.
(My comment makes less sense now. OP had originally said the replies were unanimously negative, but has since edited the comment to remove that.)
demarq
Question to the Meta engineers on here, do you ever speak out about this internally?
windex
I mentioned this on another thread. I tried my best to avoid FB, but then they acquire products like WhatsApp to then hoover up personal data again. This shouldn't be allowed. PII and personal data should be bound to the original terms on which the product launched.
Zuck should find a quiet part of the internet or the metaverse to curl up and fade away. The guy just doesn't have any redeeming qualities.
ProllyInfamous
My local DNS rules (PiHole) block all Google & Facebook products.
It's actually kind of fun seeking/using less-global alternatives, even if just for the different perspectives.
e.g. Bing maps is my favorite way to explore cities (yes, I know they're a MSFT product, their code/login doesn't permeate across my internets).
righthand
Why MS Bing maps? The UI is nice or are there extra features that make it great for exploration? And by exploration do you mean physical or digital?
phendrenad2
Meta products are such a bad deal for users.
I wish there was an alternative to Facebook and Instagram, even if it had no users. We, as users, can solve the "no users" problem for you. Facebook and Instagram became popular, contrary to popular belief, not because it had "critical mass" or some Hoffmanite bullshit like that, but because it had the technical community using them, and they brought their friends and family.
Someone just needs to build it.
huhkerrf
This, sadly, just doesn't live up to reality. It wasn't the technical users that made Facebook popular. It was college students, and not the CS ones. I remember, I was there.
As for Instagram, again, I was there. Had that been a platform primarily for a technical audience, it wouldn't have taken it off.
The one platform you can say this about is Twitter. That, undoubtedly, started off with a much more tech audience, and grew so popular due to API integrations.
As for someone just needing to build alternatives. There have been dozens upon dozens over the years. Where are they now?
krapp
Alternatives such as the Fediverse are doing just fine, despite HN's categorical rejection of anything that doesn't match the big corporate platforms in scale and revenue as "viable."
p2detar
My impression about Fedi is that it’s much bigger than most people think it is, but those who are in it don’t like talking about it a lot.
righthand
You have to accept that attitude exists here because HN is a forum hosted by a VC firm. The reality is that the fediverse doesn't really have a huge economic impact and the people who swim around the capitalism waters think that stinks. Even though the fediverse by default is perfectly fine this way.
cpersona
There's a future where people (or AI) will take pictures, AI will edit and post the ones that will be liked, and then AI will like pictures based on previous like history.
barbazoo
We’re on here are privileged. I feel bad for the billions of people that aren’t aware of or unable to see how truly terrible that organization is for societies and the planet.
harvey9
I don't think this privilege counts for much since we all live in the same societies, and even among hn users there are few people with meaningful influence over Meta.
Anthony-G
Similar to how Cassandra’s gift of prophecy was actually a curse because she was unable to use her foresight to avoid or mitigate the predicted misfortunes and tragedies.
bee_rider
> Unfortunately for end users, in tech companies’ rush to stay ahead, it’s not always clear what they’re agreeing to when features like this appear.
At this point, is there really a lack of clarity? I think we all know Facebook is going to interpret any permission to look at anything, as full permission to do whatever the hell they want with it.
There are people who care about this, and people who don’t. Telling ourselves there’s confusion… I think is not going to produce an accurate model of reality.
I think these social media companies are evil. I just don’t see the point in deluding myself into thinking that they are outsmarting everybody. It is a difference of priorities, not smarts.
b0a04gl
this shifts meta ai from reaction to anticipation. before: algo sees what you post ,reacts. now: it sees what you might post ,decides how to shape it. your intent used to live in the gap between photo taken and photo shared. they're moving compute into that gap
The joy of deleting Facebook in 2021 is something I'll never be able to put into words.
A company that's right up there with gambling and tobacco: designed to keep you hooked, no matter the cost.