Three stories from TechLinked this week that, when you step back and look at them together, reveal something about the direction we're moving in.
Meta released an AI image generator called Muse that lets anyone create images using the likeness of any public Instagram account. Without asking. Without notifying you. Your face, repurposed as raw material for someone else's creativity, or misinformation, or whatever they fancy. There's an opt-out, naturally, but it's tucked away in settings. You're expected to find it yourself.
Meanwhile, the EU has mandated that all new cars include a driver distraction monitoring system. A camera watches where you're looking. Look away from the road for 3.5 seconds on a motorway, or 6 seconds at lower speeds, and it triggers an alert. The stated goal is road safety, which is a reasonable concern. But we should be honest about what this also is: a normalisation of always-on cameras inside a private space. Once that hardware and infrastructure exist, the uses tend to expand.
And Discord accidentally permanently banned over 8,000 users because their automated moderation system flagged images containing grid patterns. Eight thousand people, locked out of communities they'd invested time and relationships into, because a machine detected something that wasn't there.
Three different domains. Same underlying pattern. Systems that take your image, monitor your behaviour, and moderate your participation are becoming automatic, embedded, and increasingly difficult to challenge. The opt-outs exist on paper but are designed as afterthoughts. The defaults aren't neutral. They're choices made by someone else, applied to you.
If you need to dig through menus to stop your own face being used by an AI, the default position isn't "off." It's a decision someone made on your behalf.
Worth sitting with that for a moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITmMIqiJwOg
#DigitalRights #Privacy #Meta #AI #Surveillance #Consent #SelfSovereignty #DataProtection #TechNews
Meta released an AI image generator called Muse that lets anyone create images using the likeness of any public Instagram account. Without asking. Without notifying you. Your face, repurposed as raw material for someone else's creativity, or misinformation, or whatever they fancy. There's an opt-out, naturally, but it's tucked away in settings. You're expected to find it yourself.
Meanwhile, the EU has mandated that all new cars include a driver distraction monitoring system. A camera watches where you're looking. Look away from the road for 3.5 seconds on a motorway, or 6 seconds at lower speeds, and it triggers an alert. The stated goal is road safety, which is a reasonable concern. But we should be honest about what this also is: a normalisation of always-on cameras inside a private space. Once that hardware and infrastructure exist, the uses tend to expand.
And Discord accidentally permanently banned over 8,000 users because their automated moderation system flagged images containing grid patterns. Eight thousand people, locked out of communities they'd invested time and relationships into, because a machine detected something that wasn't there.
Three different domains. Same underlying pattern. Systems that take your image, monitor your behaviour, and moderate your participation are becoming automatic, embedded, and increasingly difficult to challenge. The opt-outs exist on paper but are designed as afterthoughts. The defaults aren't neutral. They're choices made by someone else, applied to you.
If you need to dig through menus to stop your own face being used by an AI, the default position isn't "off." It's a decision someone made on your behalf.
Worth sitting with that for a moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITmMIqiJwOg
#DigitalRights #Privacy #Meta #AI #Surveillance #Consent #SelfSovereignty #DataProtection #TechNews