I only give Facebook Messenger access to photos that I need to share. Not more, because I don't trust them not to abuse our relationship and misuse anything they can put their hands on, including photos and documents I don't mean to share.
Am I wrong and paranoid? Maybe, but it's not my fault that that's my perception of big tech. It's their own actions.
And that an average Joe doesn't realize how much access to his private life he gives them? Looks like somebody decided that these predatory tactics are not cool and even people not in the know should be protected.
In the old days, it was also considered strange to give away your more personal property to a stranger for free. Diaries were private. Preserving privacy is just a normal thing people do. Technical literacy just shows you ways of doing so that others might overlook due to a lack of technical literacy.
Not everyone keeps their lives private. Even in the old days, people have published memoirs, zines, pamphlets, whatever. This isn't strange. Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, or in some cases, people chase the fame or fortune they perceive influencers have. Meta feeds on this psychologically. It doesn't help that students, farmers, union labourors, etc. don't trust their future is bright...
The point is, dismissing this as technical illiteracy downplays the research into the dark patterns that Meta employees to extract this info from users... As the charge suggests, Meta gets these photos “without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them”.
This seems far from paranoid and rather more like a sane default. It’s on of my favorite features regarding sharing photos. On desktop if you want to send photos to a site you would upload them one by one, it would be madness if a site requested “Oh yeah just upload your entire photos directory just in case for more convenience, we promise we’ll only use the ones you select ;)”
> According to Italy’s regulator, Facebook requested access to the gallery via a single authorisation valid for the entire app, preceded by a generic notice requesting enabling of other features, which did not allow users to understand that they were also authorising suggestions from their gallery.
Yeah, I think normal people will accept the app permission to their gallery in order to send a photo. It seems reasonable to be able to opt-in to this very basic functionality of a messaging app without also implicitly consenting to FB training ML models on your entire library.
I wish articles like this would be more technically vigorous.
What actually happened here? Was the Facebook app uploading every photo on your phone in order to run a bit of ML to help recommend images that might be a good fit for specific posts? Were they doing ML stuff on the device directly? Were they doing anything else with the photos aside from powering this "suggested image" feature?
I get that Rapporteur.com might not be the best venue to answer these questions, but I'd be shocked if any coverage of this story got into the details of how this stuff actually worked.
This can only be the beginning, otherwise it's just the cost of doing business for a company with the business model of polarizing the world and profiting off of it in the 100s of billions or even trillions.
I know there will be lots of back and forth about whether or not Meta deserves this fine. But the broader question I have is whether there are regulators anywhere that allow companies to pre-register their products and get a "compliance certification" beforehand.
That is, there are obviously lots of gray areas in regulations. I would be less sympathetic to the view that these aren't just cash grabs by governments if these governments provided a service to say whether a particular product in a current form was compliant. This is essentially what the FDA does with drugs, why not with other consumer products?
Just this week in reported a racist slur, literal, not something ambiguous, they responded after a week saying they didn't find anything wrong with it.
That's why. They want that rage, that's what makes them money. And in EU hate speech is forbidden.
It's irritating how many comments here are calling this a "stealth tax" or otherwise implying this is done primarily to raise money.
How about you either follow our laws or get out of our market? There is no special entitlement for American companies to just do whatever they want, we have rule of law and it applies to them as well.
At the very least, don't complain when you get fined for breaking the law.
I agree and actually think EU countries should be much harsher on the fines and developing sovereign alternatives. One of the big reasons the US tech industry has gotten so out of control is that no big blocs outside of the US seem to have much interest in regulating, and the US doesn't have an incentive to regulate when it makes our upper classes rich.
Ideally, I'd like to see some fines on the level of "we are just going to have to either change our business model, or stop providing service to the EU".
I've never worked at an American social media company and never intend to. The software at this point is like a bad drug addiction for most people that use it.
Especially since this is a fine, not a restitution of any kind. There is zero intention to give this money to any victim of this behavior, it goes linea recta to the state only.
So you can celebrate this, but ... why? It's not going to change anyone's behavior, and it won't help anyone.
If that is wroth 805M fine I am sure there will fine Samsung and other TV makers by at least 10x that for listening to you even when TV is off and then actually re-selling your data to 3rd parties (which Meta doesn't do).
That is to say this fine feels very disproportional to me.
EU member states won't hesitate to milk the tech cows of the silicon valley. I feel good about it. The data-hungry social apps with addition forced by algorithm, unleashed by the mega tech on the world, should be countered.
While I'm unhappy about lots of the regulation coming from the EU lately; this is one of the things that has the potential to actually make the world a better place.
Now I'm imagining something like "When I copy and pasted that text from my uncle Gigi that said that Facebook was not authorized to use my content, they didn't respect that!"
I only give Facebook Messenger access to photos that I need to share. Not more, because I don't trust them not to abuse our relationship and misuse anything they can put their hands on, including photos and documents I don't mean to share.
Am I wrong and paranoid? Maybe, but it's not my fault that that's my perception of big tech. It's their own actions.
And that an average Joe doesn't realize how much access to his private life he gives them? Looks like somebody decided that these predatory tactics are not cool and even people not in the know should be protected.
Meta is one of the companies that motivated OS developers like Apple to add granular permissions to photos for the exact concerns you have.
If I was you I’d go further. In fact, I have, I deleted all my Meta accounts.
Encourage your friends and family to move to something better like Signal.
In the old days, it was also considered strange to give away your more personal property to a stranger for free. Diaries were private. Preserving privacy is just a normal thing people do. Technical literacy just shows you ways of doing so that others might overlook due to a lack of technical literacy.
Not everyone keeps their lives private. Even in the old days, people have published memoirs, zines, pamphlets, whatever. This isn't strange. Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, or in some cases, people chase the fame or fortune they perceive influencers have. Meta feeds on this psychologically. It doesn't help that students, farmers, union labourors, etc. don't trust their future is bright...
The point is, dismissing this as technical illiteracy downplays the research into the dark patterns that Meta employees to extract this info from users... As the charge suggests, Meta gets these photos “without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them”.
I went further and uninstalled all Meta apps from my phone. It's just too risky.
This seems far from paranoid and rather more like a sane default. It’s on of my favorite features regarding sharing photos. On desktop if you want to send photos to a site you would upload them one by one, it would be madness if a site requested “Oh yeah just upload your entire photos directory just in case for more convenience, we promise we’ll only use the ones you select ;)”
I remember when Facebook had this function to auto-upload all photos, in private, so that you could then easily publish them from your desktop.
Of course, this was before I was smart enough to know they didn't do this out of the good of their hearts...
> According to Italy’s regulator, Facebook requested access to the gallery via a single authorisation valid for the entire app, preceded by a generic notice requesting enabling of other features, which did not allow users to understand that they were also authorising suggestions from their gallery.
This sounds so benign to me.
Meta ripping your entire personal library to slam you with manipulative ads? Doesn’t sound benign to me.
Yeah, I think normal people will accept the app permission to their gallery in order to send a photo. It seems reasonable to be able to opt-in to this very basic functionality of a messaging app without also implicitly consenting to FB training ML models on your entire library.
sounds like actual malware behavior
I wish articles like this would be more technically vigorous.
What actually happened here? Was the Facebook app uploading every photo on your phone in order to run a bit of ML to help recommend images that might be a good fit for specific posts? Were they doing ML stuff on the device directly? Were they doing anything else with the photos aside from powering this "suggested image" feature?
I get that Rapporteur.com might not be the best venue to answer these questions, but I'd be shocked if any coverage of this story got into the details of how this stuff actually worked.
The original page itself doesn't give too many details either
https://www.garanteprivacy.it/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/d...
It’s Meta. Answer to the above is “yes.”
This can only be the beginning, otherwise it's just the cost of doing business for a company with the business model of polarizing the world and profiting off of it in the 100s of billions or even trillions.
Do they ever pay those fines?
Yes
I wonder if in a few decades we will look back at social media algorithms as psychological weapon.
I know there will be lots of back and forth about whether or not Meta deserves this fine. But the broader question I have is whether there are regulators anywhere that allow companies to pre-register their products and get a "compliance certification" beforehand.
That is, there are obviously lots of gray areas in regulations. I would be less sympathetic to the view that these aren't just cash grabs by governments if these governments provided a service to say whether a particular product in a current form was compliant. This is essentially what the FDA does with drugs, why not with other consumer products?
This is a very valid point.
My dream is for Facebook to be sued into nonexistence
For what?
Just this week in reported a racist slur, literal, not something ambiguous, they responded after a week saying they didn't find anything wrong with it.
That's why. They want that rage, that's what makes them money. And in EU hate speech is forbidden.
It's irritating how many comments here are calling this a "stealth tax" or otherwise implying this is done primarily to raise money.
How about you either follow our laws or get out of our market? There is no special entitlement for American companies to just do whatever they want, we have rule of law and it applies to them as well.
At the very least, don't complain when you get fined for breaking the law.
I agree and actually think EU countries should be much harsher on the fines and developing sovereign alternatives. One of the big reasons the US tech industry has gotten so out of control is that no big blocs outside of the US seem to have much interest in regulating, and the US doesn't have an incentive to regulate when it makes our upper classes rich.
Ideally, I'd like to see some fines on the level of "we are just going to have to either change our business model, or stop providing service to the EU".
I've never worked at an American social media company and never intend to. The software at this point is like a bad drug addiction for most people that use it.
Fining big tech is just easy money these days, they would rather pay it ans move on than deal with litigation.
Especially since this is a fine, not a restitution of any kind. There is zero intention to give this money to any victim of this behavior, it goes linea recta to the state only.
So you can celebrate this, but ... why? It's not going to change anyone's behavior, and it won't help anyone.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50497009
If that is wroth 805M fine I am sure there will fine Samsung and other TV makers by at least 10x that for listening to you even when TV is off and then actually re-selling your data to 3rd parties (which Meta doesn't do).
That is to say this fine feels very disproportional to me.
EU member states won't hesitate to milk the tech cows of the silicon valley. I feel good about it. The data-hungry social apps with addition forced by algorithm, unleashed by the mega tech on the world, should be countered.
While I'm unhappy about lots of the regulation coming from the EU lately; this is one of the things that has the potential to actually make the world a better place.
Now I'm imagining something like "When I copy and pasted that text from my uncle Gigi that said that Facebook was not authorized to use my content, they didn't respect that!"