THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT THE WAY I HAD HOPED: Meta Glasses Send Nude, Bathroom Photos Unknowingly to Kenyan Workers for Review.
Meta Glasses sends video and audio recordings to human reviewers in Nairobi, Kenya, according to a recent investigative journalism report from Svenska Dagbladet, a Swedish outlet. This includes sensitive recordings of naked bodies, bathroom activities, and unblurred bank card numbers. “In a large office complex, long rows of employees sit in front of computer screens,” Svenska Dagbladet reports. Thousands of people work at this center for a Meta subcontractor, Sama. They review the images and audio sent across the world by often unsuspecting users of Meta’s innovative VR Glasses.
The investigation included interviews with workers at the data annotation center who have all signed non-disclosure agreements and thus are speaking anonymously to the journalists.
“We see everything – from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker said. “Meta has that type of content in its databases. People can record themselves in the wrong way and not even know what they are recording. They are real people like you and me.”
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This report comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is facing multiple lawsuits alleging failures to keep children safe on his social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook.
Flashback to 2019: Facebook Paid Contractors to Transcribe Users’ Audio Chats:
Facebook Inc. has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe clips of audio from users of its services, according to people with knowledge of the work.
The work has rattled the contract employees, who are not told where the audio was recorded or how it was obtained — only to transcribe it, said the people, who requested anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. They’re hearing Facebook users’ conversations, sometimes with vulgar content, but do not know why Facebook needs them transcribed, the people said.
Facebook confirmed that it had been transcribing users’ audio and said it will no longer do so, following scrutiny into other companies. “Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago,” the company said Tuesday.
As Christine Rosen of Commentary wrote that year in an article titled “What Is To Be Done About Facebook?” This is a standard pattern for Facebook when caught: “From the company’s earliest days, Facebook’s leaders have adopted a remarkably consistent approach to the exposure of problems and missteps: a mercenary variation of the ‘ask for forgiveness, not permission’ strategy. Any time the company does something irresponsible or privacy-violating, Zuckerberg issues an apology on Facebook and Sandberg appears on television programs to reassure an anxious world that Facebook will do better. As Zeynep Tufekci observed in Wired: ‘By 2008, Zuckerberg had written only four posts on Facebook’s blog: Every single one of them was an apology or an attempt to explain a decision that had upset users.’”
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
