For anyone curious how Meta could possibly get worse – excellent news.
Meta has used back-to-school pictures of schoolgirls to advertise one of its social media platforms to a 37-year-old man, in a move parents described as “outrageous” and “upsetting”.
The man noticed that posts encouraging him to “get Threads”, Mark Zuckerberg’s rival to Elon Musk’s X, were being dropped into his Instagram feed featuring embedded posts of uniformed girls as young as 13 with their faces visible and, in most cases, their names.
The children’s images were used by Meta after their parents had posted them on Instagram to mark their return to school. The parents were unaware that Meta’s settings permitted it to do this. One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible. Another said she posted the picture to a public Instagram account. The posts of their children were highlighted to the stranger as “suggested threads”.
Hang on, so I need to upload government ID and/or a selfie in order to access “adult material” in order to protect kids but Meta trying to bait men with pictures of girls under the age of consent is perfectly fine? What the fuck is happening?
“Rules for thee, but not for me.”
Don’t post your children online.
Thats the same vibe as: Don’t drive your kids to school, you might get hit by a drunk driver. Meta will take any image, per previous claims, they don’t care if it was public or not
It’s moreso like asking the drunk driver to take your kids to school
No. You ate doing something legal in good faith and the other person is being devious.
Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.
Thats the same vibe as: Don’t drive your kids to school, [because] you might get hit by a drunk driver.
Nope. The poster is choosing to put the PII online, and cannot guarantee privacy. In IT Security, “How do you know” is the most powerful phrase; and for Facebook/Meta/etc, you just don’t.
This is a fundamental rule since childhood (“If you’re coming home late from band practice, stay in a group because of the cougar”) and I’m not sure where you missed it.
The children’s images were used by Meta after their parents had posted them on Instagram to mark their return to school.
STOP POSTING PICTURES OF YOUR CHILDREN ON THE INTERNET. Even IF Meta weren’t going to use the photos for advertising purposes, that shit is still public. Even if you set it to “friends only”, you don’t know everybody on your friend list as well as you’d like to think.
When I give pictures of my children to data mining company and data mining company uses them for weird stuff.
“Who could have seen this coming? They’d been so privacy focused until now!”
2010 they changed privacy policy, even if I had everything locked down, that policy let them use my “friends” access level to glean data. Byebye facebook
Meta is a disgusting company and Zuckerberg is an embarrassment for humanity.
That being said, the parents of those kids are stupid fucking idiots who should feel ashamed for exposing their own kids on such a shithole of social media.
There are a shocking number of people who still think Facebook is a good way for Grandma to see back-to-school photos, and either are unaware or don’t care that ceased to be central to the platform while Obama was in office. Inertia is a bitch. And so is Zuck.
This is just the vast vast vast majority of people.
Us privacy awares are less than one % of the population.
Multiple people within the company allowed that to happen. The brightest minds money can buy. Cumulative experience that can be measured in decades either did not forsee this or shrugged it off as “not their problem.”
Nasty.
Weird that the man assumes those images were chosen to target him, but horrifying that he might be right.
The images drew 1000s new views to the instqgram page, 90% were men. I think we can say it was fed to men
I dunno whether that’s Facebook pushing it more often to men (because their analytics shows it works on their audience) or men clicking on it more often because it works on the Facebook audience.
Both? Which feeds the algorithm
They have thousands of employees who discuss and make decisions before anything changes. Everything Meta does is intentional.
Some fraction of the harm they do is by carelessness rather than malice. That some mindless algorithm designed to find and exploit for advertising purposes the posts that got the most engagement disproportionately selected ones featuring images of cute teenagers does not seem unlikely even if it wasn’t aimed specifically at middle-aged parents…
They’ve intentionally maliciously set up systems where “carelessness” leads to these malicious outcomes.
It’s not fail safe, nor fail secure. It’s fail evil.
I don’t think we can apply Hanlon to anything Meta does.
They have been doing it long enough to know that happens.
