when has Meta ever not broken their contractual obligations (I am being serious here)? are we seriously discussing/expecting any sort of privacy related to Meta?

you can pay whatever they want, they will train and use your data, I figured this is not something that should be discussed but obviously I have been mistaken...

> when has Meta ever not broken their contractual obligations (I am being serious here)?

If you are being serious, then you have a wildly distorted view of the world. No organisation can routinely break all of their contractual obligations. If you think Meta are doing this then you are not seeing Meta, you are seeing a fictional bogeyman.

This is one of those situations where we are both completely baffled by the position held by the other person.

The fact that Facebook has so much experience taking advantage of people's private data is one of the reasons I believe them when they say they won't be doing it when you pay them for that service.

How does money change that trust? They certainly have breached their word on this in the past (for non-paying users of Facebook).

Because they didn't have a financially backed contract with those non-paying users.

This is what the Muse Code launch blog post says:

  We're also beginning to accept requests for zero data retention. Contact Meta sales to request this.

https://developer.meta.com/ai/resources/blog/build-with-muse...

Zero data retention and "we don't train models on your input" are different things.

Retaining data is common for investigating abuse.

does the contract enable the customer to monitor/search Meta to ensure they are honoring the contract? if there is no mechanism for that it means very little. Though I bet/hope some will feed them "watermarked"/unique but worthless things and watch for traces of that to pop up in models or something like that, but that's hatdly enough to just take their word for it.

That tends to be what discovery in lawsuits is for.

That's circular reasoning, how would there be a lawsuit if customer have no way of knowing?

Sensible companies don't take that risk.

Sensible companies don't do a lot of stuff Meta has already been caught doing - sometimes with real consequences (but never enough to actually deter them, of course) - in the pursuit of more data.

Sensible companies also don't gamble $80B on something obviously stupid like the Metaverse.

And intellectually honest people don't engage in circular reasoning and then rather than acknowledging it just repeat it, yet here we are.

Are you calling me intellectually dishonest?

Please justify that.

> The fact that Facebook has so much experience taking advantage of people's private data is one of the reasons I believe them when they say they won't be doing it when you pay them for that service.

To me, their history suggests that they know more than most about how to get away with breaking both the spirit and the letter of the rules, and that they are motivated to enrich themselves without regard for what rules are broken.

I would not know which to expect, spirit or letter, in any given instance.

However, even if they were to surprise me by being perfectly meticulous about the letter of the rules from now on, I have so little trust in them that I would expect some technicality somewhere in the language of the contract.

This. Without a massive cultural shake-up and turnover of upper management, why would expect them to behave any differently when they've been rewarded so heavily for this behavior in the past? Meta is ultimately an advertising and data brokerage company -- they make money selling and leveraging user data and behavior and are "bound" by fiduciary duty.

Honestly, I wish the tech community would do a better job identifying the actual individuals who are making these decisions instead of associating them with the brand they're under at the moment, because it's not THAT many people. Like, if you look at only the 100 tech sector companies included in the $NDXT index, how many individuals hold a VP or above title there, and how difficult would it be to trace key decisions at different times made at different companies to the individuals holding those positions there plus board membership and major shareholder identities (with the caveat of known unknowns here) and make a sort of ethical index and trace that along their careers with company moves, promotions, board appointments, shareholder decisions, etc? Go a step further and link that to financial performance and I'm sure folks at quant firms are already ten steps ahead of where I'm going with this, but I care less about profiting off of this data and more about surfacing it to show that it's people and more specifically, specific individuals driving these decisions.

I respsct the F out out you and all your work but I am completely baffled by this line of thinking, we are talking about Meta here…

I just cannot comprehend this level of corporate villainy that boils down to:

Let's have two pricing levels. One will be 11.5x more expensive than the other. For the cheaper one, we will get their express permission to train models on their inputs. For the more expensive one, we will still treat their data EXACTLY the same, but we'll lie to them and say that we won't. I've checked in with legal and they raised their sherry classes and toasted "Gentlemen, TO CRIME".

Because data a user doesn’t want you to train is probably much better data?

Knowing Meta anything is possible. It’s not like they never shafted their paid customers. They have been overcharging advertisers by showing wrong metrics for years. I’m sure at some point they will come out with raised hands and admit to this “glitch” they found during an internal review.

What I love is the idea that this is more likely to happen at Meta than at Anthropic, Google, Microsoft or OpenAI... or in the PRC!

There's contractual cover, there are lawyers all over the USA ready to make themselves very rich by creating a class action over it... you don't have to worry! Or, you do, but frankly, only MI6/CIA/Mossad can save you now.

No one has to say it and plan it out loud. But the data will be sitting there. The incentive to improve the model for enterprise use will only get stronger. It doesn't take much for one engineer or team to go rogue to hack a benchmark. There was a whole cheating controversy with llama 4.

What does cheating benchmarks have to do with breaching financial user agreements? To use your argument: all it takes is one whistleblower to get the company sued for billions of dollars.

What does unethical behavior have to do with unethical behavior? What does looking at data you're not supposed to look at have to do with looking at data you're not supposed look at? Please don't be obtuse.

People whistleblow on Meta all the time. Most recently they got fined half a billion for suppressing child safety research. Kids getting groomed. It doesn't make a difference to a company that has a net profit of $60 billion a year.

> I just cannot comprehend this level of corporate villainy that boils down to:

Easy to comprehend. Trust lost is hard to gain.

Though, it is extremely competitive of Meta to make Muse Spark (Grok 4.5 / Qwen 3.8 Max level model) available cheaper than DeepSeek v4 Flash / MiMo v2.5 / GPT 5.6 Luna, regardless.

Again, this Meta we are talking about.......

We can make this fun, within 18 months from now, there will be some story / whistleblower like "a inadvertent defect was found that allowed your 'private' data to be used in our training endeavours, we sincerely apologize and have already addressed the issue" - if this does not happened in this timeframe I will donate $1k to a charity of your choice.

"they 'trust me'. dumb fucks."

The only difference between students doing it then and professionals doing it now is the students had no positive, glaring reason to mistrust.

I can't understand the psychology of people who think like this.

You really think a throwaway quote when Zuckerberg was a college student applies nowadays?

You really think Meta would risk getting a massive (losing) lawsuit on their hands, in exchange for what? Middling amounts of training data?

> You really think a throwaway quote when Zuckerberg was a college student applies nowadays?

What does "nowadays" mean? What changed?

> You really think Meta would risk getting a massive (losing) lawsuit on their hands, in exchange for what?

And what is the risk? Food companies are at risk when they put addictive chemicals into food because they get controlled regularly. What is the equivalent here?

Meta literally ran a man in the middle attack to spy on it's user's encrypted network traffic when they used third party apps [0]. More recently (and relevant to this issue), the engaged in industrial scale piracy to get training data for their LLMs [1]. The idea that they have changed since Zuck was a college student creeping on his female classmates and now wouldn't commit actual crimes against their own users in order to get a bit more data is just demonstrably false.

[0] https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/facebooks...

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

+1

The credulity amazes me but mixed in with the brilliant minds here are some real 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires'. It's embarrassing, all right.

Throwaway? Which one.

"Dumb fucks"?

"If you need information on anyone at Harvard, just ask"?

"I'm going to fuck them [Winklevoss twins] in the ear"?

Applies nowadays? Ok, when? When he copied Snapchat into every single product? When he retracted all his messages on Facebook? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818) When he explicitly killed Instagram (buying it) because 'they can hurt us'? Do you want more examples...?