Tag Archives: artificial intelligence and Facebook

The Road to Success is Paved with Dirty Secrets

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Amazon.com is the latest to face possible sanctions over allegations it improperly withheld tens of thousands of business records—including some unflattering to founder Jeff Bezos—in defending against an action by the Federal Trade Commission. At Google, a federal judge in San Francisco has ruled the company didn’t properly save evidence in a case brought by Epic Games, and its behavior has become a yoke as the Justice Department seeks to break up the search giant after winning two landmark antitrust cases. A different federal judge recently referred the behavior of Apple to the Justice Department, in part because of alleged efforts to hide documents from legal scrutiny…

Each company is accused of being overly aggressive in holding back internal documents under special legal standing—known as privilege—that should have, in fact, been turned over to the government or lawyers…Maybe it isn’t surprising the companies can’t help themselves in pushing the limits. It is, after all, what has made them so successful as disrupters turned conquerors. In their minds, they are the underdogs, whether they are facing the rise of AI, China or the next Big Thing lurking beyond the horizon. 

Excerpt from Tim Higgins, What Is Big Tech Trying to Hide?, WSJ, May 17, 2025

Like a Lamb to the Slaughter: DeepSeek Collects Personal Data–Nobody Cares

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Amid ongoing fears over TikTok, Chinese generative AI platform DeepSeek says it’s sending heaps of US user data straight to its home country, potentially setting the stage for greater scrutiny. The United States’ recent regulatory action against the Chinese-owned social video platform TikTok prompted mass migration to another Chinese app, the social platform “Rednote.” Now, a generative artificial intelligence platform from the Chinese developer DeepSeek is exploding in popularity, posing a potential threat to US AI dominance and offering the latest evidence that moratoriums like the TikTok ban will not stop Americans from using Chinese-owned digital services…In many ways, DeepSeek is likely sending more data back to China than TikTok has in recent years, since the social media company moved to US cloud hosting to try to deflect US security concerns “It shouldn’t take a panic over Chinese AI to remind people that most companies set the terms for how they use your private data” says John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “And that when you use their services, you’re doing work for them, not the other way around.”To be clear, DeepSeek is sending your data to China. The English-language DeepSeek privacy policy, which lays out how the company handles user data, is unequivocal: “We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

In other words, all the conversations and questions you send to DeepSeek, along with the answers that it generates, are being sent to China or can be. DeepSeek’s privacy policies also outline the information it collects about you, which falls into three sweeping categories: information that you share with DeepSeek, information that it automatically collects, and information that it can get from other source…DeepSeek is largely free… “So what do we pay with? What… do we usually pay with: data, knowledge, content, information.” …

As with all digital platforms—from websites to apps—there can also be a large amount of data that is collected automatically and silently when you use the services. DeepSeek says it will collect information about what device you are using, your operating system, IP address, and information such as crash reports. It can also record your “keystroke patterns or rhythm.”…

Excerpts from John Scott-Railton, DeepSeek’s Popular AI App Is Explicitly Sending US Data to China, Wired, Jan. 27, 2025

 

Why Zuckerberg is Always Winning? the Magic of Free

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Mark Zuckerberg has an unusual plan for winning the artificial-intelligence race: giving away his company’s technology free betting that providing the hottest new technology free will drive down competitors’ prices and spread Meta’s version of AI more broadly, giving Zuckerberg more control over the way people interact with machines in the future… Meta felt the cost of not controlling its own destiny when Apple decided in 2021 to cut off its ability to gather data on their users without asking for permission—something Meta had relied on to target ads. The company said it took a hit of more than $10 billion in revenue in 2022 as a direct result. The company’s stock swooned 26%.

For the AI-giveaway strategy to work, Meta must get its billions of users to look to those free AI services in the same way they flocked to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It wagers that advertising can come later, as it did in the past. Meta’s ability to turn eyeballs into ad dollars is well established…

Meta in April 2024 released its most recent generative AI tool—dubbed Llama 3—free for any company to use and repurpose so long as they have fewer than 700 million users. And it integrated chatbots based on Llama 3 into Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger and on the web.  “All of our properties are free, we help people connect with each other, and we want to help connect people with AIs that can help them get things done,” Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, told The Wall Street Journal. “That’s always been our playbook. That’s what the company ethos is about…

Excerpts from Excepts from Salvador Rodriguez, Facebook Parent’s Plan to Win AI Race: Give Its Tech Away Free, WSJ May 19, 2024