Meta

0
Two photos of a bus stop ad. On the left, the normal version, showing a woman wearing Meta glasses. On the right, the same woman in a drawn
Pictures by Hyperallergic.

According to the website Hyperallergic, the London-based activist group Everyone Hates Elon pulled off this intervention on a bus-stop ad for Meta’s new pervert smart glasses created in partnership with celebrity Kylie Jenner.

Depending on the angle from which someone views the ad, Kylie’s photo transforms into an X-ray of her skull, and the message changes to read “We’re always watching.” Kind of like those “3D images” for kids.

Everything about this story is wonderful, from the activist group’s name to the surgical vandalism to the not-so-subtle nod to the classic They live, John Carpenter’s 1988 film in which a pair of special glasses reveals subliminal messages hidden behind advertisements.

Everyone Hates Elon has a track record of this kind of intervention.

Four awful new privacy-eroding features from Meta in a month

This comment from Bruno, on Bluesky (pt_BR):

Instagram launches new tool that drains your entire bank account and kills your family. Here’s how to turn it off 👇

Instagram doesn’t (yet) do that. His joke references the recent news that photos from public Instagram profiles could be used to generate new images on WhatsApp with Meta AI, Meta’s generative AI, which also owns Instagram. The press picked it up and led with “Here’s how to turn it off” in the headlines.

(more…)

These tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

Meta — the same company that declared in 2021 that by now you’d be living in the “metaverse” — sold a few million camera glasses for pervs and, all of a sudden, the next future envisioned by Mark Zuckerberg’s unhinged mind is one where we all walk around wearing camera glasses powered by “artificial intelligence.”

Yes, Silicon Valley CEOs believe the best way to curb screen addiction at 20 cm from your face is to strap screens 20 mm from your eyes.

(more…)

The excellent The social network (2010), which dramatized the founding of Facebook, is getting a “companion piece” this October: The social reckoning.

This time, it will depict the events surrounding the release of the “Facebook Papers” — internal documents leaked to the press in 2021 by Frances Haugen, a former Meta (then still Facebook) engineer.

The first trailer shows Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, which I think is a strong casting choice: the voice is uncannily close, and Strong in character comes across as just as odd as the real person who inspired the role. (In the first film, Zuckerberg was played by Jesse Eisenberg.)

Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay solo and is also directing. It’s a shame David Fincher didn’t come back to helm the sequel — sorry, the “companion film.” The trailer didn’t give me enough confidence that we’re in for something on par with the original.

How AI chatbots manipulate you and undermine your privacy

At the risk of being among the first victims of artificial intelligence in a potential machine uprising, I keep my interactions with today’s generative AIs (or AI chatbots) strictly transactional.

I open the site, ask or request what I need, get the answer, close the site. No names, no pleases, no thank-yous, no small talk. I avoid anthropomorphizing them as much as possible. I treat them for what they are: statistical machines churning out words that make sense, not a new form of sentient life — at least, not yet.

Keeping a transactional relationship with AI chatbots is, for me, a way of keeping the line between us clearly drawn, to ward off an unlikely — but not impossible — “AI psychosis,” the kind of spiral where someone genuinely believes the AI is alive.

A newly published report by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), authored by researchers Ruchika Joshi, Adinawa Adjagbodjou and Michal Luria, gave me further reasons to stand by that approach.

(more…)

Nothing has changed on Instagram; Meta has always read your DMs

Since May 8th, Instagram stopped offering the option of direct messages (DMs) with end-to-end encryption (e2ee). The announcement was made quietly on a page in Meta’s help documentation, which reflects the importance of this feature within Instagram — close to zero. In reporting the news, however, the media did a poor job, stretching the truth or even resorting to misinformation, inflaming public opinion for no good reason.

I am the first to criticize Meta, which is why we must be careful with our accusations, lest we weaken the real arguments against it and its practices.

(more…)

This app alerts you when it detects Meta camera glasses nearby

With the success of Meta's camera glasses, there is now a risk of being recorded without consent or knowledge and ending up exposed in a crude video on TikTok or Instagram.

The manufacturers claim that a subtle light on the frame indicates when they are filming. It is not always easy to see the light, and anyway it is trivial to disable it.

(more…)

The new version of Nova Launcher, a popular launcher for Android, brought an unwanted new feature: advertising trackers from Meta and Google. On Exodus, a non-profit app auditing platform, you can see the changes from the previous version (8.1.6) to the new one (8.2.4).

Nova Launcher was purchased by Sweden's Instabridge a few months after the launcher's creator left Branch, the company that bought the app in 2022 and promised to open its code — which never happened. Instabridge has confirmed that it is testing ads in Nova Launcher and that it will not display ads to those who have Nova Prime (paid version).

Is it possible to live without WhatsApp?

Let's get straight to the point: living without Instagram, Facebook, and Threads (lol) is easy. The only setbacks I can think of are missing out on Facebook Marketplace listings and the lack of information about restaurants, cafes, and clinics that insist on limiting their digital presence to Instagram. It's inconvenient, but workable.

In many parts of the world outside the US, the “big boss” of those who decide to get rid of Meta is WhatsApp. And how could it not be? Some research on phone habits shows that up to 99.1% of Brazilians over the age of 16 use the messaging app. Here, it is ubiquitous; the standard means of communication for many people and companies.

(more…)

I tried to build a WhatsApp bot. Meta banned me before it left the drawing board

by Alessandro Feitosa Jr

Part of most people’s learning curve when they start coding is trying projects that, with luck, might become useful to themselves and others. In May I wanted to get a better handle on the WhatsApp API. I set up my local environment, logged into Meta’s developer platform and started poking around.

I grabbed a test number the platform provided, sent a “Hello World” and tried a few basic commands for the architecture I was sketching. A few weeks later I had to set the project aside.

When I tried to pick it up again a few weeks ago, I was alarmed by the message on Meta’s developer page:

(more…)