Thread by @SHL0MS

this is fucking crazy: some product manager at Meta decided their new AI app should post all conversations to a public feed by default. the app is full of boomers and young children talking about incredibly private or bizarre things, often with full audio recordings

picked this one because it's not particularly sensitive and doesn't have identifying info but i saw people preparing court statements, uploading sensitive financial information, etc. it's admittedly incredibly entertaining but also fucked up

they knew obviously this was going to happen. they have years of data showing that no one would opt in if given the choice, and if you make something default opt-out then 99% of users never will

many of the really sensitive posts have people commenting to let them know it's public. some of the posters never seem to see the comments while others express surprise and confusion that their posts are public. i assume many of the worst ones have already been deleted

the username is public too of course

googled this guy and he has 10 yrs left on a 17 yr sentence. ChatGPT is telling me the most likely explanation is he is cooperating with the feds for 35(b) reduced sentence. not something you want publicly posted while incarcerated!

re community note - wording was indeed incorrect, turns out these are shared inadvertently by the user. imo that is a *slightly* less bad look for Meta, but thousands of users are still posting sensitive things unintentionally so it’s pretty self-evident that the UI is misleading

this shouldn’t even be a feature at all, very few people seem to be using it intentionally, so whatever reason there is for it happening is still on Meta

like okay, it’s not by default, my bad. still reading dozens of posts by grandpas researching sex tourism and typing “delete this” once they figure out it’s public

also if you’re 80 years old and finally learned that the way to save something or send it to your granddaughter is to hit the little button that says “share”, you might reasonably presume that on this new app the word “share” means the same thing