Comment by RGS1811
16 hours ago
I have a hard time understanding, given the abundance of bad faith and predatory behavior Meta has displayed over entire span of its existence, why anyone would want to consult with its "personal AI" or grant it access to "all aspects of your life".
There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined, most people don't give a shit and are just trying to minimize cognitive effort. My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day because it would mean less planning.
> There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined
Is there tho? I have Facebook account but don't use it in any meaningful way. I'm certainly not feeding it any new data. I'm curious to know what percentage of that 3 billion are zombie accounts like mine.
There almost certainly is. I think on HN people aren’t really aware that they don’t represent the median internet user super well. I would wager if you were to tally every late millennial and zoomer across the west, Instagram usage would probably be near 90%. Facebook usage among older people is also still absolutely rampant, at least anecdotally. Not to mention WhatsApp usage which is huge everywhere but the US seemingly
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Who knows for sure, but Meta's own financial disclosures[1] report over 3.6 billion "Family Daily Actice People (DAP), which represents the de-duplicated number of people who log into at least one of Meta's core properties (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp) daily.
At even 1% of that figure, that's a heck of a lot of people.
1. https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
I placed an ad on Facebook as an experiment just to see what the conversion rate would be.
It's for real estate so you can't select age ranges.
The view count grouped by age (highest views to lowest) was:
- 65 to 75
- 55 to 65
- 45 to 55
And almost all women.
In other words, there are a LOT of older women on FB.
Outside of US/Canada and a handful of countries with their own chat apps like China, WhatsApp is like... THE global method of internet communication.
India is 1bn-something people and they're pretty much all on WhatsApp
Yes, of course. Wikipedia has a quick summary of the most popular networks ranked by monthly active users. Facebook is #1 and Meta owns three of the top five. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...
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> Is there tho?
Yes.
> I'm curious to know what percentage
A fraction of one.
Same with most topics that HN considers sensitive, such as privacy concerns. >99% of people just don't give a shit.
Almost everyone in south asia, Latam, and Africa with a smartphone uses whatsapp daily. I mean the penetration rate is actually crazy. In my latam country 92% of internet users are whatsapp users. In india, the figure is 97%.
So how many billions is that before throwing in IG and FB?
Yes
You're probably a techie so statistically an anomaly.
Also WhatsApp is absolutely huge around the world and wherever I go it doesn't seem like it's slowing down.
FB Marketplace is great.
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I’m sure there is a percentage of accounts that are zombie but there’s no doubt that Meta has an absolute shit-ton of daily users. All else aside, in most countries outside the US WhatsApp is the primary messaging medium.
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, so I'm not trusting Meta with much, and it's the only way I can reach quite a lot of people. A lot of people I know trust them begrudgingly (primarily with Instagram, because all of their friends are on it as well).
People don't need to love a company to use its products. The perceived benefit merely needs to be bigger than the perceived cost.
WhatsApp is E2EE, but Meta controls both ends. Instead of reading your plaintext on the server, they read it on the client. Not that tricky.
I presume the hardest part would be avoiding detection via decompilation and other reverse engineering techniques. Not familiar with that space (can anyone here shed some light?), but it seems likely that an entity with Meta’s resources would be able to figure that out.
E2EE probably protects well against bulk data collection (traffic analysis would sniff out sending 2x volume of data pretty quickly). But something more subtle and targeted, smuggled out in various fields of various protocols, would be hard to detect.
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This assumes completely techo-rational actors that continuously monitor cost-benefit analysis, other alternatives and switch products when one outweights the others.
This is even further away from the reality where people have breakdowns because their app icon moved location and is not in the usual spot.
The average person is optimizing towards energy use minimization by default because life is already hard enough with plans, kids, etc.
Use incentives and we will arrive at closer truths than by claims and expressions.
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> WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted,
- Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when
- backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained
- even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext
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someone's questioning that claim legally: https://www.pcmag.com/news/lawsuit-alleges-that-whatsapp-has...
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3.6 billion (de-duped) daily users!
https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
Honestly I am in that camp, but Facebook is kind of a special case for me. I don't really care about giving Google or Microsoft or OpenAI or Anthropic all of my personal data, but Facebook is a bridge slightly too far.
One thing they could try eating is glue on their pizza, helps the cheese stick to the toppings
This comment is one of the most dystopian things I've read on this site.
>My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day
I guess a lot of the AI enthusiasts are already pushing the "I automated my daily life decisions to this awesome AI. I now have more time and more brain power left to be productive!" angle.
I think the phrasing is a little extreme. Rather than “tell them what to eat” I’d say something like “everyone wishes they had a personal assistant”.
I could do a lot better at meal planning than I do. I rotate between relatively few dishes. An AI that finds recipes and automatically adds the ingredients to my shopping could be interesting. Technically it’s “telling me what to eat” but it’s not like I’m taking orders from it.
I had that conversation several times with friends outside of tech. The universal reaction is just a shrug - "my life is boring, what do they care".
And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. In practice, it's a trade-off most people are comfortable making because they can't think of anything that some trillion-dollar tech company, or the FBI, or the FSB, would ever want to do to them specifically.
It's the same reason why the market share for Firefox is a rounding error.
> hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy.
Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
> Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information.
My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general).
It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.
And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial).
The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.
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I get this, and I’ve said similar things about privacy and security in the past, but Meta in particular has a history of intentionally using customer data and behavior to the detriment of those customers. Creating experiences designed to ensnare, addict, and ultimately harm their users. This goes beyond paranoia about security or privacy. It’s handing your drug dealer the keys to your house.
For a lot of companies, you can usually assume incompetence when they end up doing something terrible, but Meta is the strongest "Anti Hanlon's Razor" example. You have to always assume malice with those guys.
Fact is most people don't really care. And they don't really know why they should care either. All the problems feels like something far away, while they are being exploited and sold without fully realising.
I dont think anyone knowing full and well would be comfortable with it. At least that would dumbfound me.
This is probably why they are launching now. There's no real other competitor right now in the nicely made managed openclaw space for personal use (or at least, very very early. Maybe Grokbot can be considered the lead competitor but afaik it did not gain mindshare). Instinct is supposed to come out soon and by not being associated with Meta it'd be really appealing just on that front vs this. But being first to market is a real reason to use it and chance to gain lasting market share.
There's something like 177 million facebook users in the US. Most probably have Facebook/instagram/etc installed on their phones, streaming their location data/etc, without a worry in the world. Most would probably very much enjoy the utility of this agent.
If you can't understand how the general population, the target customer for Meta, would think of using something like this, then it almost certainly means your entire social circle is within the same tech-aware bubble that you are in here. ;) I have a few non-tech people that I talk bounce this sort of thing off of, periodically, as a reality check.
The ratio of privacy_reduction:convenience that most people are willing to tolerate is enormous.
It’s the life of a parasite. You don’t care if it takes just a bit from you. And it eventually protects you from worse parasites. (Like the us blocking china)
Ya, I'm not sure why anyone would choose to use this over any other option that doesn't sacrifice your privacy.
Well.. I think I can imagine why.. ;)
I might use it for helping manage Facebook marketplace listings as that is data that is already on meta.
You are right, sometimes the simplest answer is the right now. Don't trust Meta. Life is going to be much simpler. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me continuously for 20 years, shame on me.
For this reason alone it's DOA for me.
Because people are apathetic by nature until things become a real problem.
It's not just Meta, either. How often do we have people on here talking about how amazing Chinese models are when the list of security breaches involving the Chinese government is extensive?
People want something easy, quick, and free. Do those things and they'll let you get away with anything.
Every single HN post about anything Meta-adjacent starts with a comment like this. Guys, we get it, the hive mind of HN doesn't like Meta/Facebook/Zuck. Fine. But can we actually comment on the technology and tools rather than the company for once?
The technology is an agent you name. You give it a face. Maybe tune the personality. And, it only gets useful as you grant it more and more access to your accounts.
The technology is produced by a public company. And, in this case, the company is useful context for this story since it has just recently agreed to pay about $18 billion to resolve a multistate lawsuit claiming it intentionally designed addictive platforms that harmed young people's mental health.
You cannot detach the technology from the company. It's definitely not a neutral artifact.
This comes up a lot here! Your comment reads like a lot of similar HN "Can't we just talk about the pure technology? Why do you all always have to bring up ethics/politics of it all??" As if these things are separable. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. As soon as it touches society, it necessarily gets dirtied up with messy things like law, ethics, corporate responsibility, capitalism, profit-seeking, public good. The technology is never separate from the environment around the technology.
It's impossible (or at least dishonest) to try to simply discuss the pure technical aspects of The Torment Nexus.
Nice try Meta stock holder!
Posts about Meta must bring up general distrust of the company and its leadership. Posts about Google have to mention them sunsetting products often.
It's just tradition at this point.
Why are all the seemingly smart people on HN so narrow-minded to the point of speaking idiotic nonsense? What do you think their 3.6B MAU are, all bots?
Based on what passes for “engagement” and “content” on their platforms, I’d estimate that a majority of their users are exactly that.
So my country has somewhere between 100-200 million MAU for facebook ane.
Facebook marketplace is huge here.It's basically our craigslist. Hobby groups/communities are also huge. If I wanted to find the local jogging or chess club, I'd use Facebook.
Just remember that outside your bubble there's a whole wide world with billions of people living in it
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The company has been known to lie before
And the thing is, network effects are killer. I'm on it because you're on it because Alice is on it because Bob is on it
But, Facebook has apparently been known to censor links to competition (I'm less clear on this). With Myspace they had a tool where you could import contacts into Facebook from Myspace, but not the other way around
Damn yeah why do people even use Facebook or WhatsApp or instagram? How does a company become a multi billion dollar company at all? Guess what.. it’s because people use it and don’t care.
That’s the godawful truth. The other thing you need to realize is not only do people don’t care, but people like you know exactly why meta makes billions. It’s obvious. You seriously expect me to believe you don’t know why a company like meta makes billions? Come on.
It’s sad but thats the way things are. I see someone pretend they don’t get it but if you take the time to think you’ll realize… We all get it. We just can’t face it.
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