People still use the Facebook spyware app on their phone?
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos in your camera roll you haven’t yet shared
(programming.dev)
Young people have Instagram spyware on their phones and old people have Facebook spyware.
Forgot WhatsApp there, de facto messaging app in my part of globe, be it young or old…
Same here. I wanted to include it too but it is not as quite bad as the other two(at least I hope so because I can't avoid it). But yeah you never know with these Meta apps.
Oh it’s just as bad, believe me. Have restricted its access to only pre-selected photos, disabled running in background but that’s about all I can do. It has to have access to my contacts to be usable, and who knows what they do with that data.
Actually, contacts access isn't strictly necessary! I run it with the permission disabled, and although it complains regularly, it still works. I don't have any issues with having to remember people's numbers either since they're recognisable from the profile pictures and because I talk to the same few people usually
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Oh so many.
More people use Facebook today than in 2015 when you were using it.
About 2x more people.
Is that mainly in India and Southeast Asia? For some people there Facebook is “the internet”, almost like a modern day AOL. Zuck would jizz himself if he could send you free trial CDs twice a week packed with his spyware.
This page has all the information you might need on the topic. India is on top, but the US is a solid second place.
some additional relevant statistics
united states barely saw 1% growth year over year and are projecting that growth to continue to slow.
India has nearly 3x the users of the United States. the u.s. is still second because it's the country it started in, but it's not far ahead of the 3rd and 4th place countries. India is an extreme outlier.
unfortunately they don't break down the age demographic by region, but I'd bet that if we specifically look at daily active users in the United States the age demo would skew much older.
so, it seems like it's similar to what many fast food restaurants have been experiencing lately. the growth opportunities in the United States dried up so the decided to push like hell everywhere else. i bet the growth they saw in India over the last decade was explosive. probably bigger than anything they had ever seen before. bigger than when it was still growing in the u.s.. meanwhile they project that over the next decade in the u.s. they'll see maybe 8% user growth and that's pretty optimistic.
so we probably won't actually see much Facebook marketing in the u.s.. the only way they can capture more u.s users is by buying more apps, like when they bought Instagram.
this does seem to imply that the part of the world where Facebook has become a fact of life is very specifically India. I'm sorry to hear that for them.
194 million US users? That’s got to be bullshit. That’s almost two thirds of the population. Even if they claimed half of the population, I would still call bullshit.
Maybe I would believe 1/2 of people over 60. And that goes down as we lower the age. If we’re talking under 30 years old, I might believe 1/5, maybe.
These fake numbers are how they defraud advertisers and data broker scammers.
Facebook is damn near a necessity in the area I live because no one wants to host their own websites. I've still not given in to making an account, but I'm starting to feel the struggle of not being able to contact small businesses.
So, I can imagine some of those users are multiples of the same person if they also have an account for their business
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My parents still do
"Nice dick bro, ever wondered how it would look in a Studio Ghibli movie?"
That brings up a good point though. Based on just the screenshot here, it seems like the user wont have a choice of what gets uploaded. People keep some pretty raunchy photos on their phone sometimes. Even kids might have some questionable photos. This is just asking for trouble.
How long will it take for a sfw kid picture with pink cloths or a splash of red to be misinterpreted, generated and tied to that user? There was already a time on youtube when blood red cloths were getting people demonetized for gore.
No telling what else they do with your pictures once they're on Meta's servers. Literal spyware (as if it hasn't already been for a long time).
Imagine having your nudes accidentally ghiblified, with the originals stored indefinitely on Meta's servers.
Imagine Palantir connecting to it and when you apply for a job denying you that due to that specific photo.
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If you’re still on Facebook, you’re probably not aware of what this means or why it’s a bad thing.
Fuck Facebook. Fuck Meta. Fuck Zuckerberg. Fuck the oligarchs. Fuck LLMs/AI. Eat the Rich.
This is just gross. Just another privacy invasion from the company that decided to track and de-anonymize people around the internet even while those people were doing all the right things to prevent it.
The distressing thing for me is knowing that a lot of my friends (and exes) are exactly the sort of people that'll just absent-mindedly click OK without reading it and share every single photo they've ever taken of me; photos which Facebook's facial recognition will easily tag.
This is exactly what they expect to happen. Who reads the fine print?
Why do any of you still use facebook?
FB itself for a community group, and Messenger for my family group chat 🤷
The group now has a presence on Discord, but there are still 26 times as many members on FB. In Hungary many people still use FB as their main social network. At most they also use Instagram, but that obviously doesn't work for closed discussion groups.
Fediverse is still mostly Westerner.
While on Facebook, there are a ton of community from SEA, East Asia, Africa, Middle East, and so on.
Also, Facebook Lite makes the poorest people in my country to be able to access social media without using too many internet quota.
The variation of groups is far beyond any social media, even Reddit or any other community site. You can get thousands of variation of Minecraft groups that exactly suits your community needs. Or maybe just a city chicken fried seller community.
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Facebook works perfectly fine in browser, there's literally no need for that shit app.
It actually doesn't, they lock you out of messenger unless you're using the app
Get thee to messenger.com then. Save it as a PWA and its like having the app but you give Meta as little as possible.
messenger.com does not work on mobile, except if you switch your browser to desktop mode. It's quite hard to use it, even lots of text become smaller, so lots of people wouldn't keep using that
Works just fine if you put your phone in desktop mode.
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don't have Facebook on your phone?
better yet, don't have Facebook?
zero sympathy for anyone caught in this, you've all been warned for at least a decade on what supporting Facebook means, why get upset about this now?
My mom has facebook and also has my photos.
Unless we can get EVERYONE to respect each others' privacy, arsoning meta ceo until next one gets scared is the only option.
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The LAST thing I'd do with my mobile phone is install Facebook or Instagram. What a nightmare.
Unless you run a custom ROM, like LineageOS or GrapheneOS, you most probably have some Meta apps installed at system level.
This is Meta Services, as a system app which can only be disabled, on my work Samsung.
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I don't have many pictures of myself on my own phone. Most pictures of me are on the phones of the people who took them.
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Don’t use their app. Web only.
Also, don't use their website.
When you share with Facebook, you share with Trump.
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Remember when zuck asked for your nudes?
https://www.aol.com/facebook-asks-users-send-nude-144105362.html
Facebook is just socially accepted malware.
Because plenty of people care very little about data or security but see all those people on there... so explaining how it is bad matters little as they've used facebook for over a decade
Nb4 a "bug" causes that setting to be true for all users just like with the cambridge analitica scandal
They are probably gonna use it to train AI so no thanks(even tho i have not used Facebook in a while).
Well look on the bright side. AI is about to become really good at drawing penises under fat bellies.
Crazy framing
I bet a lot of people will slow because they will not read it or not really understand what they are accepting. Some will even share the new AI creating as something nice while they are giving up their private photos to Meta
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