Four awful new privacy-eroding features from Meta in a month
Meta has introduced four controversial features in the past month: using Instagram public photos for AI training, embedding facial recognition code in the Meta AI app, testing smart glasses that continuously record audio and photos, and an Instagram map in Brazil that revealed exact user locations. Most were rolled back or disabled after public backlash.
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.
(My tip? Deactivate or delete your Instagram profile.)
The feature was so outrageous that it took the company only three days to backtrack. In an update to its press release, Meta said it “heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark” and that, as a result, “it’s no longer available.”
It says a lot that Meta’s leadership needs to “hear feedback” to figure out that this kind of madness “missed the mark,” but the truth is nobody there is innocent. I imagine these launches are calculated risks: if it sticks, it sticks, and if it doesn’t, the seed of the idea has been planted; maybe next time society will be distracted by something else (a tactic they’ve used before) or more willing to accept it (straight out of the Silicon Valley playbook).
***
In early June, Wired magazine discovered that Meta had built and deployed a full facial recognition system into the Meta AI app, installed on tens of millions of devices, meant for use with the smart glasses made in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, owner of the Ray-Ban brand, among others. (The ones popular among creeps.)
The next day, the company scrubbed the code from the app, and VP of Communications Andy Stone told the magazine the feature was “purely exploratory” and that “no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”
One decision was made, though: to slip that code in without any disclosure — an app capable of letting Meta/Ray-Ban glasses recognize people just by looking at them, inside the very app that controls the glasses.
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Finally, on July 8th, the Financial Times reported that Meta is testing a new line of smart glasses that continuously records audio and takes a photo every few seconds, with no visual or any other kind of indicator that it’s happening. Like that episode of Black Mirror, “The Entire History of You.”
In a statement to the British paper, the company said it doesn’t comment on “internal prototypes,” but that it follows a “privacy built in from the ground up” approach.
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Nilton reminded me (pt_BR) of another Meta blunder from this same stretch, this one here in Brazil.
On June 10th, the company rolled out a map feature on Instagram in Brazil (pt_BR) that showed users’ exact location. (The headlines, as usual, dutifully included “here’s how to turn it off.”) The fun didn’t last: the next day, the map was disabled, and Meta apologized for having released it “by accident.”
(This feature was released and it’s working in the US.)
Brazilian ONG Ctrl+Z and congresswoman Erika Hilton (PSOL-SP) independently called on Brazil’s federal prosecutor’s office to investigate the “accident.”
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