Which is why there is a role for gov in regulating privacy and mandating interop between platforms. Asking people to “just stop using them” isn’t a realistic ask.
Facebook solves this problem extremely well. I still remember the “good old days” of poorly managed Wordpress sites, shared Google calendars, mailing lists, and texts, and I’m not particularly keen on going back to that.
The sad truth is that there is nothing on the market today that solves this problem in a combined package, and you can add discoverability to the mix. If you’re interested in X you can search for it on Facebook and 9/10 times you’ll find what you’re looking for, from menus for restaurants to opening hours. Yes, Google does this as well but somehow people (here) are more aware of the feature on Facebook.
Now a lot of that stuff is on WhatsApp.
I dumped Meta probably a decade ago, and anyone who wants to get in touch with me does so through e-mail.
But I still have two relatives stuck on FB Messenger. Even if I contact them via SMS, they still respond to my dormant account in FB Messenger, because Messenger is where all of their friends are. To them, it's the only messaging app, and have no idea why it doesn't work sending messages to me.
Imagine living without a phone, or whatever is equally important in your area. Sure, it is possible, if you're at the right level of masochism.
I just don't think anyone can be using Facebook/IG, especially persistent mobile apps, while have any real concern about tracking.
Does FB still run their Tor onion service? That seemed to be the only possible way to use these products in the past without being subject to extreme tracking.
SMS is not an option because, again outside of the US, people pay by SMS sent.
There are plans for Whatsapp interop but probably only in the EU.
https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-interoperability-messag...
Countries like Mexico or Spain have adopted it as the default form of messaging. Only today I used it to chat with our lawn maintenance guy, our car washer, and someone who's repairing our espresso machine.
I could maybe try to convince friends and family to use another app but I won't be convincing an entire country.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-...
- “Meta has a new stand-alone AI app. It lets you see what other people are asking.” https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ai-app-public-feed-warn... (may 2025)
- “People are seemingly accidentally publishing their AI chat histories with Meta’s new AI app” https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/05/05/meta-ai-chatbot-discove... (may 2025)
Note that the first link states that conversations are private by default and that user error is likely involved[1]. Mozilla’s use of text emphasis almost implies otherwise[2].
[1]: “To be clear, your AI chats are not public by default — you have to choose to share them individually by tapping a share button. Even so, I get the sense that some people don't really understand what they're sharing, or what's going on.”
[2]: At least that’s how I understood “_Make all AI interactions private by default_ with no public sharing option unless explicitly enabled through informed consent.” at first glance.
Anything for the sake of growth or perceived growth, up to and including privacy violations.
It almost seems like a radical art project, philosophical statement, or social experiment around transparency. Like, hypothetically in some alternate universe if they did no KYC, and just published everybody’s transactions, your peers could inspect your transactions, the police could just look and see if you were transacting with criminals… sort of like open source transactions. Maybe that was the original idea? And then eventually they got some actual customers and said “shit we’re a real company now, let’s put the social experiment on the back burner, add an opt-out, and start doing in-house kyc.”
Which then begs the obvious - if you're buying drugs, then don't put you're buying drugs or paying off your bookie.
For extra credit, let's put this stuff on the blockchain. Crime is solved!
Thank you for your service.
It's been my experience that I need to take full responsibility for the effectiveness of my communications.
A few years ago, I threw together a PowerPoint show, based on Randall Munroe's Communication comic[0]. I did it for an organization I participate in, that is full of some of the worst communicators I've ever encountered.
It astounds me, how people that get paid to communicate, don't understand the fundamentals.
[0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V... (You need to view the slide notes, or it doesn't make any sense).
It seems like the xkcd comic itself is pretty hard to follow. It would probably be better with dialog.
Probably doesn't matter. My experience is that most folks have no intentions of doing what it prescribes, so it's kind of wasted effort.
I stared at it for quite a while, before it “clicked.”
Once it did, the message was obvious.
The PowerPoint was designed to be presented. It’s not particularly useful, just being read. It really needs a narrator that can explain the concepts.
The idea is that it’s possible to communicate effectively, even when it seems impossible, as long as we are willing to take responsibility for the message, and figure out how to make it work. In order to do that, we need to understand the message, the recipient, the context, and the medium.
It also shows how we can lose the message, when we get sidetracked by the messenger or the medium.
That's not my understanding of the XKCD comic, if that's what you mean.
Also, I don't find the comic to be hard to understand. It takes a little work but it's pretty clear.
In the app there is a "Share" button at the top right. After clicking you see an interstitial with a big "Post" button at the bottom. When you click that button, the chat is shared.
There are so many examples of this. There was a poster that attempted to reduce needle reuse by showing the same needle degrading after multiple uses. The problem is that was not very dramatic (also not where the risk lies) so they increased the magnification at each stage to make the degredation seem worse than it was. People recognised this and the primary message amongst their target demographic was anti-drug campaigners lie to you.
I'm not sure how much this will damage Mozilla. Perhaps not much because they have already lost so much mana. Before coming to the comments and reading this thread, I had already thought to myself, "Can I really trust what Mozilla says anymore?".
Perhaps that makes it even worse. To have doubts that are so quickly confirmed suggests not only that you can't trust them, but you reliably can't trust them.
I want to like and support Mozilla, I'm posting this from Firefox, that makes me one of the few sticking with them. They make it so hard sometimes.
- Mozilla acts as an antitrust sponge for Google and in exchange gets lots of money
- Mozilla is encouraged not to make Firefox better than Chrome. They thus under-invest in Mozilla, Rust, and core browser tech.
- Mozilla spends all of its money on irrelevant efforts like VR, shitty platform plays, half-baked AI, and insane exec comp.
It's a drop in the bucket for Google's peace of mind.
If Mozilla wanted to be a next-gen serious company, they would become a developer tooling and platform company. They'd keep developing Firefox and Rust, they'd build up an ecosystem around Rust and WASM, and they'd be the best in the world at it. Deploy websites, micro services, and run CI with Mozilla.
Rust is infectious and growing, WASM will eat the web and the data center, and Mozilla is completely sleeping on it. What's sad is how much of a hand they had in developing it all.
They threw away the stuff that mattered.
Is there any evidence of this kind of corruption? It always seemed like misguided altruism to me, or at worst a serious lack of focus.
Like, in lots of other app contexts, you can hit "share" and then get a modal that gives you options (do you want to share it via WhatsApp or messages or email or ...) and only after you select a mode and a recipient does it actually get shared -- but if you make a "share" button whose behavior is "immediately publish", people might reasonably be surprised if they actually just want to share the results with a specific trusted person who they expected to select next in the interaction.
If Meta is turning that "searchability/discoverability" on by default when a share button is activated on an AI chat - or worse, if they're not even giving this industry-standard option - that would both explain the confusion, and be a terribly unexpected dark pattern. As the parent notes, the activation of a share icon is not informed consent.
It is worth noting of course that per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185913 ChatGPT will now be required by law to retain a record of all chat history for courts and lawyers to review, but at least that data won't be made fully public.
Both of those are different from a willing and intentional dark pattern of making things publicly discoverable!
I’m the first to bash on meta but there are things that they are not responsible for.
Or does it just post it onto the public feed?
Or they don't exist in the first pLace, or they're now deleted repos, or they used to be public but went private, etc.
This entire page assumed you know everything about it, assumes you know about some kind of issue involving private chats leaking, and assumes it's been proven they training on private chats.
I'm not interested in trusting Meta at all and I can completely believe they are doing something horrible but this page doesn't give even 1/10th of the information needed.
People think this is about giving away embarrassing information. Think if you are using AI to explain a contract, explore a business deal, etc. The sensitive information could be very valuable.
And behave accordingly.
I agree there are huge privacy concerns with meta, but hyperbole that anyone can immediately see is false isn’t the right way to convince people.
https://about.fb.com/news/2023/12/default-end-to-end-encrypt...
I have no idea
> sold
I very strongly doubt it. There’s no evidence that Meta sells user data, despite people having confidently claimed for many years that they do.
But regardless, none of this is the same as the messages being public, which is what was originally claimed. Facebook selling my messages to nefarious companies that want to profile me, while bad, would be quite different from them being accessible to anyone who wanted them.
The major reason Firefox has a large market share is simply because Google is that much more abusive to users -- and that's not a great reason.
Whiche case? Can you elaborate?
Google paid others to give preference to their search engine. Among those paid is Mozilla, who may lose this payment from Google if the court decides to block such payments.
Yeah if Google stops paying FF it's game over for them.
Why is HN obsessed with suggesting strategic decisions for this company in particular? It’s like the most popular thing to have an opinion about, and only on HN.
Mozilla's credibility is a threat to the powers-that-be in the industry. I wonder if that drives a lot of it:
Attacking the messenger is a very popular tactic now. You can see it on Fox, for example. Attacking the messenger changes the topic - it makes the messenger the topic, not the undesired thing - and the messenger often responds by embracing this new topic by defending itself. The undesired thing is forgotten and to the degree it's remembered, the attack is discredited.
What exactly are they complaining about?..
They are private by default. It's basically the same as every other AI chat app.
Make your website strip trailing spaces off autofillled emails instead of saying they are invalid.
It's really not hard, I can manage it.
In the app there is a "Share" button at the top right. After clicking you see an interstitial with a big "Post" button at the bottom. When you click that button, the chat is shared.
Am I seeing something different than anybody else? Why would Mozilla lie like this? Most of the "demands" are already satisfied.
> Shut down the Discover feed until real privacy protections are in place.
Everything is already private by default and you can see what is public.
> Make all AI interactions private by default with no public sharing option unless explicitly enabled through informed consent.
This is true already
> Provide full transparency about how many users have unknowingly shared private information.
Meta shouldn't have to do this
> Create a universal, easy-to-use opt-out system for all Meta platforms that prevents user data from being used for AI training.
This already exists (EDIT, looks like only for EU users. Personally I don't believe this is related to the public sharing claims)
> Notify all users whose conversations may have been made public, and allow them to delete their content permanently.
This already exists
I think Meta fully expected this feature to be used by people who are excited about their conversation with the AI and wants to share it publicly. Just like we see with OpenAI Sora.
There's not much to win for Meta if users instead are unknowingly sharing deeply personal conversations.
That's really what you think? And what they think? That people are so enamored - in droves - with their exchange with a chatbot that they're trying to share it for the world to see?
Maybe I'm the old fogey who doesn't get it, but it's just hard for me to believe that this is something many people want, or something that smart people think others earnestly want. Again, I may be the outlier here, but this just sounds crazy to me.
I don't personally think the feature makes a lot of sense in Meta AI.
However it's a lot more likely their product team genuinely thought it might do, than it is likely they intentionally wanted to give users a bad experience and risk more bad press (again, Meta would benefit nothing from people sharing by mistake).
It has problems for sure, but if you aren't "enamored" with AI then I don't think you've actually tried to use it.
I am incredulous that a primary use case of a genAI chatbot is sharing your chat conversation publicly. It's easy to see why people would do this for genAI images, videos, or even code; I even understand some occasional sharing of a chat exchange from time to time. But routine, regular interest, from regular people, of just sharing their text chat? I do not understand that at all.
META expectations=/= expectations of a reasonable human that has used other "share" buttons before.
Sharing to a text message is private. In contrast, sharing to social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, and LinkedIn makes the content public. The destination determines the audience.
That is the TYPICAL share behaviour. If what META is doing with their new app is obscuring this typical behaviour and a "share" click directly going to the public, that would violate the defacto behaviour users are accustomed to when using the share button.
It just opens a modal so you can choose to post. You have to make a second click to confirm.
If you index on chat apps, you're correct, if you start from Meta's social apps, which they said they have, you are incorrect.
A button that always shares content with the general public should be called "Publish".
(We'll discuss cache invalidation next time.)
And shared ChatGPT chats are often indexed by Google, so they become public. Although I agree it's not exactly the same because of the lack of builtin discovery
As for google I assume it’s true if you post your chat somewhere (I.e Reddit). For most of shares these chats never end up being on the internet (I.e stay in private chats in messengers). So it is different again.
Overall it is pretty much predator behavior exploiting people’s need to share their chats to get them doing something unintended and good for Meta. This being said whole idea of an app with chats as posts is quite lame, so not sure if it will stick.
It seems to be mostly generated pictures though.
To think that anything used on AI is going to stay private is nice, but not likely.
I agree with you that privacy right now is fragile at best. Disagree that it needs to be.
Please explain. I don't think that privacy should ever be fragile.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/184-million-...
> Meta shouldn't have to do this
And couldn't either. How would they know if users shared unknowingly?
Maybe. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.
As others have mentioned, the core problem with Meta today is the dark patterns. They move, edit, and remove UI elements specifically to optimize against whatever behavior they want the user to take. I'm always amazed when things end up posted, shared, or alterated in a way I did not intened or can't even remember having taken an action against. Things just seem to happen with Meta products… even for accounts that are idle.
And if you spend enough time with Meta products, you'll start to realize that no two users are guaranteed to have the same experience. There is no standard experience. The experience changes based on region and langauge and honestly who knows what else. They are constantly testing and optimizing for dark patterns in production. Spend an hour with the Meta Business Suite. The entire platform is essentially a dark pattern labyrinth of broken links, broken features, and UI elements that go nowhere or to deprecated functions. One team is trying to get you do X and use feature Y, and another team is trying to get you to do Z and use feature W. Business Suite just mashes it all together. You could freeze the codebase today and study Business Suite for months and you'd find that it's dark patterns all the way down.
Why would Mozilla integrate a random 3rd party service without asking?
Why would Mozilla send your browsing history to Cliqz?
Why would Mozilla integrate Google tracking without ability to block?
Why would Mozilla sell your data?
Why would Mozilla install a telemetry service that gets reenabled after update even if you disabled it?
Why would Mozilla lie like this?
Because it's Mozilla.
The irony by making that checkbox mandatory for submitting a privacy protest form
But sure lets write an article with zero details and just the right amount of buzzwords and engagement bait that it’ll make it to the top of HN and sustain today’s outrage cycle. We’ll go back to “Google is bad” tomorrow.
Has a righteous, bossy tone that doesn't seem earned by case particulars or its (anonymous) author.
"Mozilla: Improve your messaging. Now."
(The viewport only covers 1/4 of my phone screen and I can scroll it around in the black abyss)
- When you have a chat it has "Share" button
- When you click on the button it shows you a draft of the chat with "Post" button
- Clicking on the "Post" publishes the chat to public and sends you to "Discover" tab
- From published chat you can click on "send" icon to send link to the chat to someone else
IMO it is in fact dark pattern and goes against of how people perceive "Share" action. The fact you can't share without making chat public is also not cool.
For example top discover post I see right now is stylized picture of a baby, with original photo available if you open the post. I'm pretty sure the person who posted it was trying to share the picture with their relatives/friends.
Overall: Meta at its "best", better to say sorry rather than ask for permission...
Perhaps Zuck wants to look like a good tech-bro by smiling at Joe Rogan and advertise "I am one of you guys, I too do BJJ", but in his soul he is a filthy snake who lies all the time ("FBI forced me and I railroaded you but 3 years later I come clean")..
"...it's my nature, said the scorpion."
I recommend this extension. It blocks this ridiculous bullshit.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/undistracted-hide-f...
I very commonly see things like Google acquires this, Google acquires that, even in cases where the acquirer is actually Alphabet, but I almost never see anything about Facebook, because everyone's now calling them Meta. Maybe I'm fighting a losing battle at this point, but I will never forget their past actions nor malicious intentions just because they tried to change their name.
I know the brand "Facebook" still exists for the social network, but Meta is still Facebook at its core. Same people, same values, same data harvesting. They're just using other methods to get at your data, abusing trust that maybe people wouldn't have given to Facebook if the name change hadn't occurred.
I think I must feel a little bit like Louis Rossmann must've felt when Time Warner Cable changed their name to Comcast. He still holds all of their former misdeeds against them and I think it's a real shame that more people don't do that for Facebook.
Sure in plenty of people's minds Meta is still its own entire dystopia and a half, but it still feels to me like they've all forgotten the precedent that Facebook set all the way back when that name was the one they put on their dystopia.
WhatsApp is a chat program I use almost every day. Owned by Meta.
Oculus was a brand of VR goggles, but now the brand name is Meta. Owned by Meta.
iambateman•11h ago
An example? A screenshot?
I don’t understand, after reading, when this is happening or how.
JimDabell•11h ago
https://about.fb.com/news/2025/04/introducing-meta-ai-app-ne...
I heard that some people are using the AI in it without realising that they are sharing their prompts publicly.
charcircuit•11h ago
You have to explicitly hit a share and post button in order to post to your feed.
marcellus23•10h ago
JoBrad•10h ago
jonny_eh•9h ago
vini•11h ago
"Meta’s rollout of social features in its stand-alone AI app, released last week. Those quiet queries — “What’s this embarrassing rash?” or “How can I tell my wife I don’t love her anymore?” — could soon be visible to anyone scrolling through the app’s Discover tab."
https://www.fastcompany.com/91327812/metas-ai-social-feed-is...
ot•10h ago