Meta Roundup: Chatbot Says the Company 'Exploits People', Injecting Code Into Websites and more

posted by hubie on Sunday August 14 2022, @12:47AM

from the out-of-the-mouths-of-babes dept.

Chatbot Says the Company 'Exploits People'

Meta's new prototype chatbot has told the BBC that Mark Zuckerberg exploits its users for money:

Meta says the chatbot uses artificial intelligence and can chat on "nearly any topic".
[...] Meta said the chatbot was a prototype and might produce rude or offensive answers.
[...] The chatbot, called BlenderBot 3, was released to the public on Friday.
The programme "learns" from large amounts of publicly available language data.
[...] "His company exploits people for money and he doesn't care. It needs to stop!" it said.
[...] BlenderBot 3's algorithm searches the internet to inform its answers. It is likely its views on Mr Zuckerberg have been "learnt' from other people's opinions that the algorithm has analysed.
[...] Meta has made the BlenderBot 3 public, and risked bad publicity, for a reason. It needs data.
"Allowing an AI system to interact with people in the real world leads to longer, more diverse conversations, as well as more varied feedback," Meta said in a blog post.

Meta Injecting Code Into Websites to Track its Users, Research Says

upstart writes:

Meta injecting code into websites to track its users, research says:

Owner of Facebook and Instagram is using code to follow those who click links in its apps, according to an ex-Google engineer
Krause discovered the code injection by building a tool that could list all the extra commands added to a website by the browser.
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been rewriting websites its users visit, letting the company follow them across the web after they click links in its apps, according to new research from an ex-Google engineer.
The two apps have been taking advantage of the fact that users who click on links are taken to webpages in an "in-app browser", controlled by Facebook or Instagram, rather than sent to the user's web browser of choice, such as Safari or Firefox.
"The Instagram app injects their tracking code into every website shown, including when clicking on ads, enabling them [to] monitor all user interactions, like every button and link tapped, text selections, screenshots, as well as any form inputs, like passwords, addresses and credit card numbers," says Felix Krause, a privacy researcher who founded an app development tool acquired by Google in 2017.
In a statement, Meta said that injecting a tracking code obeyed users' preferences on whether or not they allowed apps to follow them, and that it was only used to aggregate data before being applied for targeted advertising or measurement purposes for those users who opted out of such tracking.
"We intentionally developed this code to honour people's [Ask to track] choices on our platforms," a spokesperson said. "The code allows us to aggregate user data before using it for targeted advertising or measurement purposes. We do not add any pixels. Code is injected so that we can aggregate conversion events from pixels."

Meta (Facebook) Sued Over Alleged OnlyFans Terrorist Blacklist Scheme

takyon writes:

Lawsuits: OnlyFans bribed Instagram to put creators on "terrorist blacklist" [Updated]

Through the pandemic, OnlyFans took over the online adult entertainment world to become a billion-dollar top dog, projected to earn five times more net revenue in 2022 than in 2020. As OnlyFans' business grew, content creators on rival platforms complained that social media sites like Facebook and Instagram were blocking their content but seemingly didn't block OnlyFans with the same fervor, creating an unfair advantage. OnlyFans' mounting success amid every other platform's demise seemed to underscore its mysterious edge.
As adult entertainers outside of OnlyFans' content stream looked for answers to their declining revenue, they realized that Meta had not only allegedly targeted their accounts to be banned for posting supposedly inappropriate content but seemingly also for suspected terrorist activity. The more they dug into why they had been branded as terrorists, the more they suspected that OnlyFans paid Meta to put the mark on their heads—resulting in account bans that went past Facebook and Instagram and spanned popular social media apps across the Internet.
Now, Meta has been hit with multiple class action lawsuits alleging that senior executives at Meta accepted bribes from OnlyFans to shadow-ban competing adult entertainers by placing them on a "terrorist blacklist." Meta claims the suspected scheme is "highly implausible," and that it's more likely that OnlyFans beat its rivals in the market through successful strategic moves, like partnering with celebrities. However, lawyers representing three adult entertainers suing Meta say the owner of Facebook and Instagram will likely have to hand over documents to prove it.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) terrorist content database is shared between social media giants, and being added to it can result in bans across multiple platforms.

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