A follow-up point to Friday’s post about Meta unceremoniously shitcanning its entire contract with Sama, the Kenyan contractor that employed over 1,100 contractors to serve as Mechanical Turks for Meta’s AI efforts, after a few of the contractors told investigative reporters about the incredibly private things they witnessed from footage captured by users of Meta’s AI Glasses.
There is no point getting any more outraged or disgusted at Meta for firing these contractors than you already were in the first place. They had to fire them. The moment this investigative report was published in late February, the fate of Sama’s Kenyan operation was sealed. They were toast. The key to understanding this is that Meta runs a criminal enterprise. Most of the organized crimes Meta commits aren’t crimes against the legal code (although some are), but rather crimes against public perception and human decency. Remember what they did with Onavo, their VPN product? Was that illegal? Dunno. Was it outrageous? Hell yes.
Let’s just concede for the sake of argument that there’s nothing illegal about the way Meta was sending video footage from users’ AI Glasses to contractors in Kenya to review. I presume they’re still doing it today, just with different contractors, in a different computer cubicle sweatshop, perhaps in a different country. Nothing to cover up legally. But just the plain description of what they’re doing fills people with a visceral repulsion. However, people only have that visceral reaction if they know what’s going on. Part of the whole premise is that the whole thing has to be kept on the q.t.
