Tag: facebook

A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?

In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet. 

In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh.

The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence. 

They were the sorts of scenes that internet-connected devices regularly capture and send back to the cloud—though usually with stricter storage and access controls. Yet earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups. 

The photos vary in type and in sensitivity. The most intimate image we saw was the series of video stills featuring the young woman on the toilet, her face blocked in the lead image but unobscured in the grainy scroll of shots below. In another image, a boy who appears to be eight or nine years old, and whose face is clearly visible, is sprawled on his stomach across a hallway floor. A triangular flop of hair spills across his forehead as he stares, with apparent amusement, at the object recording him from just below eye level.

The other shots show rooms from homes around the world, some occupied by humans, one by a dog. Furniture, décor, and objects located high on the walls and ceilings are outlined by rectangular boxes and accompanied by labels like “tv,” “plant_or_flower,” and “ceiling light.” 

Keep reading

UK government asked Twitter and Facebook to “tweak” algorithms during Covid

Former United Kingdom Health Secretary Matt Hancock, self-styled as an official who was at the forefront of Britain’s battle against Covid, didn’t seem to feel like he had done enough in 2020 and 2021, so he felt compelled to milk the pandemic cow by writing a book about that “battle.”

But he wasn’t laboring alone, since he had a co-author, Isabel Oakeshott, who reports say is actually opposed to Hancock’s policies and is a lockdown skeptic.

And now, Oakeshott, who had access to official records and Hancock’s notes exchanged with “all the key players in Britain’s Covid-19 story” – as the book’s blurb states – has penned her own “story,” an article based on the collaboration published by the Spectator, whose content draws from the material used for the book.

Keep reading

Meta warns it will remove ALL news content on Facebook if Congress approves Journalism Competition and Preservation Act

Meta is threatening to remove all news content from Facebook in an apparent attempt to pressure Congress over potentially passing the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act that would counter market dominance by social media giants.

The act would ostensibly allow news organizations to negotiate the terms of their content distribution with Big Tech according to the Daily Mail. The move would allegedly impact Meta’s revenue and the company has its fur up over the attempt at leveling the playing field for news.

On Monday, Meta’s Communications Director Andy Stone tweeted that if Congress passes the bill, the company would be “forced” to remove all news content from Facebook and Instagram.

“If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions,” the statement from Meta asserted.

“The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act fails to recognize the key fact: publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves because it benefits their bottom line – not the other way around. No company should be forced to pay for content users don’t want to see and that’s not a meaningful source of revenue. Put simply: the government creating a cartel-like entity which requires one private company to subsidize other private entities is a terrible precedent for all American businesses,” it concludes.

Keep reading

New Zealand admits it has direct access to Facebook takedown portal where it can flag content for censorship

New Zealand’s government has officially admitted that it has partner access to Facebook’s controversial content takedown portal.

This portal is designed specifically for government agencies to flag content to Facebook for censorship. According to The Intercept, which reported on the portal in October, government partners can also use the portal to “report disinformation directly” to Facebook.

And in a recent response to a New Zealand Official Information Act (OIA) request, which asked whether the government has partner access to Facebook’s takedown portal, the New Zealand government confirmed that the Department of Internal Affairs has access. While this was the only government department that was confirmed to have access to the portal, the OIA response also said “we cannot advise if any other government agency has access to the takedown portal.”

We obtained a copy of the OIA response for you here.

Keep reading

Oversight Board tells Meta to stop complying with police requests to censor rap music

Meta’s Oversight Board said that Meta should not have complied with a request from London’s Metropolitan Police to ban a drill music track. Drill music is a rap genre that politicians and law enforcement agencies have associated with gang violence.

In January, rapper Chinx (OS) posted a video of his song “Secrets Not Safe.” Shortly after posting the song on Instagram, Meta received an email from the police requesting the removal of the song. Meta escalated the case to a team for special consideration, and ruled that it violated its policies because it referenced a shooting that took place in 2017 and included what police believed to be a “threatening call to action.”

After the song was removed, Chinx appealed and had it reinstated by a moderator who was not part of the special consideration team. The decision was overruled and the song got banned again after a week, again following a request by the police.

The board questioned whether Meta considered the context, or simply compiled because it was a request from the police.

“Not every piece of content that law enforcement would prefer to have taken down — and not even every piece of content that has the potential to lead to escalating violence — should be taken down,” the board wrote in its decision.

Social media platforms are less transparent about informal requests like the email from the Met.

Keep reading

FBI Director Cannot ‘Be Sure’ Whether Facebook Is Sending User Information to Agents

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday he cannot “be sure” whether Facebook is sending the agency user information without being compelled to do so, an act that would violate the law.

Wray’s remark in response to a question from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) comes after Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a report (pdf) in early November in which a whistleblower suggested that the FBI has a “special relationship” with Facebook “in which it accepts private user information without any consent or legal process.”

The move is part of a program “likely codenamed ‘Operation Bronze Griffin,’” said the report. It alleges that the types of user content that Facebook provides the FBI “have a partisan focus, tending only to concern users from one side of the political spectrum,” and that there is a pro-Democrat bias within the FBI.

On Thursday, Paul asked Wray at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on the report’s allegations, “Is Facebook or any other social media company supplying private messages or data on American users that is not compelled by the government or the FBI?”

“Not compelled, in other words, not in response to legal process?” Wray queried.

“No warrant, no subpoena, they’re just supplying you information on their users?” Paul said.

“I don’t believe so,” Wray responded. “But I can’t sit here and be sure about that as I as I sit here.”

Paul told Wray that if Facebook is supplying the FBI with user information, it would be against the law—the Stored Communications Act, part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986—which “prohibits providers from sharing electronic communications with any person or entity, unless it’s compelled.”

“This was done to protect the privacy of people, so we could feel like we can send an email or direct message to people without having that information given over,” Paul said.

Keep reading

Facebook Censors Posts on Vaccine Harms Because They “Make People Feel Unsafe”

This morning, a friend published a short post on Facebook, drawing attention to how it seemed to him the company was not even bothering any more to refer to the so-called ‘independent fact-checkers’ to justify their censorship. He had re-posted a clip where Fox reporter Tucker Carlson discussed the negative effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, referring to peer-reviewed studies. The clip is available here.

How on earth can peer-reviewed results constitute “misinformation”? The peer review process isn’t perfect, far from it, but after all it is the accepted standard. A first conclusion therefore is that the word ‘misinformation’ does not refer to misinformation any more, it simply refers to any information the censor wants suppressed. The word has become meaningless.

The action, then, is suppression of a certain kind of information, but what about the reason? The reason for suppressing uncomfortable information about COVID-19 vaccines is that seeing this information may “make some people feel unsafe”. What does this mean precisely?

There are at least two possibilities, and here I’m talking only about those who believe in the narrative. The first is that people may feel unsafe seeing evidence that contradicts what they’ve been told by the authorities, the mainstream media and the social media giants; the ‘safe and effective’ mantra. Watching Tucker Carlson’s review of the evidence might make people feel unsafe, uncertain, sceptical towards the propaganda, relentlessly pushed towards them; this is what happens when you discover you’ve been deceived by someone you trusted. You feel unsafe for you don’t know who to trust any more.

Keep reading

Facebook launches new tools to “combat climate misinformation”

The world’s largest social network, Facebook, has announced plans to increase its elevation of “authoritative climate information” and expand its “fact checking” of content that it deems to be climate misinformation.

Facebook will expand its fact-checking tools by increasing the availability of its “Climate Science Center” (a page that contains “factual resources from the world’s leading climate organizations and actionable steps people can take in their everyday lives to combat climate change”) to 165 countries and expanding its “Climate Inform Labels” (labels that are added to Facebook posts and link to posts from the Climate Science Center).

The tech giant has also launched a “Climate Science Literacy Initiative” that will “pre-bunk climate misinformation” by running ads that “feature five of the most common techniques used to misrepresent climate change.”

Keep reading

Be careful what you post: How Facebook and the US government have united against Americans with the ‘wrong’ views

It’s been revealed by sources within the US Department of Justice that direct messages sent through Facebook by American users, along with public postings, have been rigorously monitored, and reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) if they express anti-government, anti-authority views, or if they question the legitimacy of the November 2020 presidential election’s outcome.

Witch hunt on the web

Under the terms of a secret collaboration agreement with the FBI, a Facebook staffer has, over the past 19 months, been red-flagging content they consider to be “subversive” and immediately transmitting it to the Bureau’s domestic terrorism operational unit, without the FBI having filed a single subpoena – outside the established US legal process, without probable cause, and in breach of the First Amendment, in other words.

Just as shockingly, these intercepted communications were then provided as leads and tips to FBI field offices across the US, which in turn secured subpoenas in order to officially obtain the private conversations that they already possessed, and thus cover up the fact the material had been obtained extra-legally. Facebook invariably complied with these subpoenas, and would send back “gigabytes of data and photos” within an hour, suggesting the content sought was already packaged and awaiting legal confirmation before distribution.

It is uncertain quite how many users were flagged, but it’s abundantly clear a specific type of person was of interest to the FBI – “red-blooded” conservative right-wingers, many of whom supported the right to bear arms. No one connected to Antifa, BLM or any other left-wing group was ever informed on. 

It seems not a single Facebook user snitched upon for daring to be possessed of troublesome political opinions was ever arrested, or prosecuted, for their wrongthink, even though some were reportedly subject to covert surveillance and other forms of intrusion and harassment. Their views were consistently found to not translate to criminality or violence – their words were simply brutal condemnations of Biden’s election and presidency, and aggressive calls for protests.

Keep reading

Memphis Maniac Who Live-Streamed Killing Spree Served Just 11 Months After Attempted Murder Arrest, Mayor Reveals

The 19-year-old Memphis man accused of killing four and terrorizing the city for hours Wednesday night as he drove around shooting people was let out of prison after serving less than a year for an attempted murder charge that was plea-bargained down to aggravated assault.

The Daily Wire is not naming the suspect or publishing his photo as part of a policy to deprive mass shooters of the attention they crave. But after police captured him in a stolen car, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said he should never have been on the loose.

“If [the suspect] served his full three-year sentence, he would still be in prison today and four of our fellow citizens would still be alive,” Strickland said.

Records show the suspect was freed on March 16 after serving just 11 months of his three-year sentence. A new law Strickland backed which went into effect in July may have kept the suspect locked up.

The bloody spree began just before 1 a.m. with the apparently random killing of a 24-year-old man in his driveway, said Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who laid out a timeline at a post-arrest news conference late Wednesday. The rampage resumed around 4:30 p.m., when police learned a man had been shot dead in his car.

Keep reading