All your data are belong to Meta

I can't remember the last time I posted on Facebook - or used it more than nosing through the strange Facebook Marketplace offerings in my area - but I sure used to. I've still got a lot of old photos of me, of my family and all my witty observations from my 20s - it's fun to look back on, but I wouldn't want it shared.

But, of course, data was being extracted.

In 2015, Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest 50 million profiles, who then built a system which profiled individual US voters and targeted them with personalised political advertisements (The Cambridge Analytica Files | The Guardian).

It ended up costing them $725m to settle the lawsuit, and they got hauled over the coals in US Congress, where Mark Zuckerberg pled mea culpa and talked about lessons learnt (AOC grills Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica and campaign ads - YouTube).

Lessons learnt. Promises made. The world moved on.

But we appear to be heading back in this direction, as starting on June 26th, UK and European users of the platforms can have data from Meta's platform used to "develop and improve" its AI products.

This training will include posts, images, image captions, comments and stories that users have shared with a public audience on Facebook and Instagram (Bringing Generative AI Experiences to People in Europe | Meta (fb.com)).

It feels like painful stuff but not surprising in the rush to 'AI all the things'. Likely, we'll bump into this more and more over the next year. We can't be too far away from LinkedIn doing something similar - and perhaps I'm giving them content even writing this.

The point of this rant is to say, that if you are in an organisation where you are talking about using AI, think of the ethics first - think of your users first. Perhaps it is the right thing to do, but if you are doing it to sell a couple more white goods - then is it worth it?

I'll leave with this - if you are a Facebook veteran, you might remember a message getting posted on people's walls, almost weekly - claiming that Facebook was allowed to resell our data, to share our pictures. Round and round it went, like a chain letter:

"In response to the new Facebook guidelines, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings, professional photos and videos, etc (as a result of the Berner Convention)."

I raised my eyebrows and thought less of the people who posted it. Everyone knew it was always a hoax - never real. But perhaps now I need to apologise to my mum - she was correct for posting this all along.