Lots of comments about how this isn’t new, or how it’s related to accessibility. The article mentions all this. That’s not what the story is. It’s not a very deep story, but I don’t think it’s quite so trivial as is being suggested.<p>The story is about this info being exposed to users just browsing the site, and the reaction that elicits. Someone seeing the tags inline in their feed by a glitch will tend to have a very different response than someone who is asked to view source and look for it.<p>I believe this is relevant because a regular conversation around here centers around the idea that many folks in tech circles find it creepy or unhealthy for society to have so much info being collected and processed for profit by giant corporations, and how most people outside of tech circles seem not to care at all.
Maybe I'm used to my slow internet connection, but I've been seeing these tags before the images load for a couple of years now - I thought it was common knowledge.
This stuff is in the HTML, you can see it with web inspector, or I think just by hovering your mouse over the image because that looks like it's in the title attribute for the image. This isn't it like something new was exposed inadvertently. I'm surprised The Verge wrote an article about this.
You could also see this if you viewed source when it was fully working, of course. And occasionally before images loaded in if you were on a slow connection. I don't think it's any great secret, but still interesting to see.
Not only is this nothing new as other commenters have observed, these tags have been used by screen readers and other accessibility services for awhile. While we can talk all we want about Facebook using their all seeing eyes for evil (which I agree they overstep a lot of boundaries), these tags are very useful for people who may require them and should not be scrutinized as an invasion of privacy.
What I think is more interesting about this outage is that Instagram and WhatsApp were affected. This means your images are stored on the same servers, and possibly subject to the same AI scanning. I wonder if WhatsApp images are E2E encrypted...
IMHO by now if you're still on Facebook you've made a conscious decision to let a business with an awful track-record of respecting its users' privacy basically have carte blanche over whatever you give to them.<p>I'm sure there are a few folks out there who don't realize this, but most people I talk to about this say they a) hate it but b) don't want to leave the platform because it lets them keep in touch with people. To them, it's worth it. Not to me.
It’s funny how what purely is an accessibility feature done to help “differently advantaged folks” (how these journalists would say) is being turned against them by the media.<p>Reminds me how they are vilifying open APIs and explaining them as a way Facebook “gives away your data”.
it's not about what it means for this community, where we all know the shortcut to the dev console in chrome. this is about regular users of Facebook having their own "they live" moments on social media. where they can see plainly how Facebook regards them as consumers. "oh just show him pictures of DRINK and TEXT, that's all he's into anyways".
Just alt-text. Granted it is a slight insight though, as I assume it's added automatically, but I expect they pull a lot more info from people's images than just what the alt-text shows.
There's also an extension which overlay the alt tags over images: <a href="https://github.com/ageitgey/show-facebook-computer-vision-tags" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ageitgey/show-facebook-computer-vision-ta...</a>
>> Everyone knows the bit in The Matrix when Neo achieves digital messiah status and suddenly sees “reality” for what it really is: lines of trailing green code.<p>Given that the Matrix was a simulation, what it "really is" can't have been trailing green code. What it "really is" must have been electric charges stored in memory circuits. What Neo saw was his own mind's interpretation of the software and hardware underlying the Matrix.<p>Though of course the point about the green text is that it was a spiffy effect, and not a supposedly accurate representation of what computer memory "looks like".
Looks like alt tags for accessibility purposes. Seems like a win win for all users. Easier to find photos and the ability for visually impaired users to get context on what their friends are sharing
This is nothing new, I've noticed that several months ago and talked about that with one of my security friends and he confirmed that Facebook is tagging pictures at least since 2016.
I think I've never seen worst GDPR compliance : big "I Consent" button with no negative counterpart, except a link to the cookie policy where the "opt out" section invites you to disable cookies in your browser and manually edit local storage. Is that a joke ?
Why do they put this data in the alt-tag in human readable format? For what purpose or use? SEO on a personalized platform with very limited access by Googlebot? Just to show they can? It makes no sense to me.