And I just wonder how many times this has happened before, but gone unnoticed or swept under the rug.
When the NSA does it it’s fine.
When Facebook does it to train it’s models it’s fine.
When individual employees do it it’s fine until the government notices and raises a stink. Then it’s a problem.
Something in this article strikes me, and that is the “download” part. Downloading this data was protected by internal security checks… But what about accessing the data without downloading it? Is that fine?? How much do these employees actually have access to? Most users probably haven’t enabled the message encryption.
they have access to everything, the issue pointed by the article here as you stated was downloading it
i don’t know why it surprises me… I know that the data is not encrypted, and that it is stored on their servers, but still, I thought the users had at least some minimum of privacy, at least from individuals working at Meta.
well in theory they have controls to access this data now but i don’t trust them anyway
back then it was free for all, just like Tesla employees watching people having sex
I worked for a call center 10+ years ago, and if I searched for customers, which I had not talked to, in our internal CRM system, it would be flagged in an internal system, which potentially could end with employees being fired. I was an inbound customer service rep, and the only thing i thing i could get access to was their name, address and their phone bills… So, yeah, it just surprises me that the policies around accessing “private” data is so Laissez-faire.
yeah it is wild, i dealt with similar policies when working as a support agent for Epic Games: we had access to certain info from every user but everything was logged and suspicious activity was very often reviewed
my guess is that support agents like myself were outsourced, so they had to comply with these policies and i suppose it is the same right now with meta and their moderation staff
Snapchat had similar news about misuse
what else can you expect from the company funded by “They trust me. Dumb fucks” Zuckerberg?
These are the companies we’re supposed to trust they’ll implement Chat Control or similarly intrusive technologies properly.
This seems like oddly quaint news. My assumption for years has been that they are all doing the same thing.
WTF is wrong with people uploading private things on Facebook?
Most Facebook users don’t know any better.
Still, it’s like hiring a well known repeat sex offender to babysit your kids.
They don’t know that this is a common problem. The vast majority of daily users have no knowledge that Meta is evil. They’re probably not even aware of Meta as a company.
It’s easy to think that this stuff is common knowledge, but just by being here you’re likely way more informed about technology, politics, and privacy than 90+ percent of people.
This isn’t even the first time this has happened.
Seems people have to relearn this lesson every few years:
If you don’t want something to be public, don’t put it on the internet. “Privacy” controls from these companies fail regularly, sometimes by design. If you put something on the internet, it will be public eventually.Can’t he just say he’s using them for training his AI? That seemed to work for Meta.
If you keep your photos on someone else’s computer, you get what you deserve.
