Meta

As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court — even if they were wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills and resources in litigation.

White man, looking sideways, with a worried face.Mark Zuckerberg
Meta CEO and co-founder

Maybe Zuck should put those superintelligent AI lawyers to work on Meta’s own lawsuits. Even with the best (flesh-and-blood) lawyers money can buy, the company keeps racking up losses in U.S. courts, accused of harming minors with its addictive apps. The latest was last week (6th), in New Mexico.

The line above comes from a lengthy essay by Meta’s CEO, “The future is for everyone.” Does anyone still take this drivel of platitudes, lies, and empty promises seriously? This must be the fourth or fifth one he’s put his name to. None of them have aged well. There was the one about encrypted messaging on Instagram in 2019, the “global community” one from 2017, the metaverse one from 2021 again… notice the pattern.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This app alerts you when it detects Meta camera glasses nearby

App

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.

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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.

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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:

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Facebook and Instagram are paradises for scammers, reveal Meta’s internal documents

Reuters shed light on Meta’s lucrative business built on selling fraudulent ads on its platforms — Facebook and Instagram. Internal company documents obtained by the news agency show that 10.1% of Meta’s 2024 revenue, or US$ 16 billion, came from fraudulent/scam ads.

A December 2024 document shows Meta running an average of 15 billion fraudulent ads per day. Those add to 22 billion pieces of suspicious “organic” content (unpaid) — from hacked profiles offering crypto schemes to promises of miracle cures in groups, and fake listings on Facebook Marketplace.

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Revisiting Facebook

In March, in a rare moment of sobriety from the artificial intelligence drug, a revamped Mark Zuckerberg — gold chain around his neck, wild hair — promised that Facebook, or at least part of it, would return to simpler times, when the social network was… well, a social network. An innocent era when he himself looked like a wax figure rather than a wannabe rapper.

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A less affectionate approach to technology

It’s almost impossible to escape WhatsApp and very difficult to get rid of Instagram. For many, it’s also undesirable. Friends, relatives, loved ones, and the entire presence of many businesses are only available on one or the other (or both).

In 2022, when I wrote about a “more affectionate approach” to technology (pt_BR), I had recently returned to using these and other commercial platforms. I lowered my defenses in an attempt to be more present, to participate more.

The problem with companies like Meta is that every concession on our part is exploited to the fullest.

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This option disables Meta AI and increases privacy in WhatsApp conversations

Remember when WhatsApp was just a lightweight messaging app? I miss those days. Today there are so many features, so many announcements of new stuff that sometimes useful ones slip by unnoticed.

By chance, the other day I came across “Advanced chat privacy,” available in group and individual conversations. It was released in April.

When activated, three things happen:

  • It disables conversation export. This makes it harder to forward messages to third parties and process them with external AIs, like Google’s NotebookLM.
  • It disables automatic media downloads.
  • Finally, it disables access to Meta AI, Meta’s annoying AI that, by default, can be invoked by typing @meta in a conversation.

Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), there isn’t a global button to activate advanced privacy in all conversations; only within each conversation’s options.

Given the impossibility of using a better app, like Signal, it’s a good option to activate when sensitive topics are being discussed.