What reckoning? The settlement benefits Meta immensely. They just got the go ahead to implement age-gating at a wide scale, which will make their ad platform even more lucrative after each account can be tied back to a real identifiable person. They've totally captured the regulatory system, and the media is applauding it.
> That $18bn is certainly more than most companies could pay, but it pales in comparison with the $1.5tn Meta’s own PR team warned the case could cost it had it gone through the courts – and the more realistic $200bn the prosecuting lawyers sought to squeeze from the firm.
The consensus opinion was that the case would have cost them a lot more if it hadn't settled. Truly, the outcome couldn't have been more favorable to Meta. "Reckoning" -- yeah, right.
Meta's stock price went up on the news, which I took to be a sign of the settlement costing less than investors feared it would when they previously priced meta stock. I didn't think about the regulatory capture angle.
> What reckoning? The settlement benefits Meta immensely.
This was one lawsuit. It settled their immediate legal problems with the 47 states and DC that were included in the settlement.
Florida is continuing with its own case against them, and there are also thousands of other pending cases from individuals (89%) and governments below the state level such as school districts (11%).
The present settlement does include an admission of guilt so the plaintiffs in those other suits so there plaintiffs will also have to prove guilt, put they can use a massive amount of material that the states put together in their case.
They can use anything that was presented in open court.
They can also get copies of all the internal Meta information that the state Attorney Generals got via discovery, even if those documents were never presented in open court. They may have to keep them confidential and so can't use them in open court, but they can use them to build their case and depose Meta executives about them.
All in all, the plaintiffs in thousands of pending cases have just been handed a multi-million page trove of evidence put together using the enormous resources of 47 states designed to nail Meta.
Meta is pushing forward every measure it can to record precise identity, age, and income with everything that you do.
They're the ones behind the push for internet porn ID laws.
They're the ones behind the push for device attestation.
They're the ones behind the push for social media ID requirements.
They make more money, we lose freedom and privacy and sleep closer and closer to 1984.
One day the state will punish us for our ideas and associations. They already do to an extent, but it's going to get unbearable once the machinery is in place.
> Meta is pushing forward every measure it can to record precise identity, age, and income with everything that you do.
According to numerous comments in all the threads we've ever had on California's age verification law and the similar laws in a few other states, which move verification client side and do not provide any precise information to the server side, Meta is behind those bills because it wants to not have to store that data.
From what I've been able to tell from various searches, those people seem to be correct, although there seems to be a lot of exaggeration of the amount of money Meta put in to the effort. People seem to often mistake Meta's total lobbying spend in a state for the spending on just that one bill.
Until losing this lawsuit Meta lobbied against the bills that required them to do the work.
Note: I did not recurse into references to reach primary sources so I'm not sure how accurate the sites I found were.
Thank you. This is an expansion of surveillance. Most concerning to me is how few people understand government's access to this data. People treat AI like a diary, and the government can request that data at anytime.
Indeed - Persona is backed by Founders Fund - also linked to lovely companies like Palantir, Flock & Anduril. Some people still (claim they) can’t see the massive dragnet swirling around all of society right now.
It’s especially frustrating with Anthropic because we’ve known about issues with Persona for a while now, with discord. But anthropic leadership I guess is like any company leadership - stupid, blind, and lazy. Just go with the vendor whose name you know.
Anthropic could have EASILY made an in-house solution with < 100 employees. But no, they have to make the same mistakes that behemoths like IBM and Oracle make. Y’all haven’t even IPO’d yet and we’re already entering the “sleepwalk to your grave” phase of the corporate cycle.
In-house would almost certainly mean future prosecution by the US. Using a company connected to Palantir means any employee of the US government that wants to keep their job won't ask questions.
America passes many laws but doesn't enforce the majority of them and allows people to grow largely unencumbered unless their initiatives threaten established players or the system itself.
The Dissident: If you are vocal about the system, you get locked out at every opportunity from the things you depend on to sustain yourself and communicate (social media, housing and banking).
Red Ocean: If you try to compete in a red ocean and don't give a cut to the players in that space you're shut down with frivolous lawsuits for example by buried by frivolous patent or copyright claims, liability lawsuits, and licensure requirements.
Blue Ocean: If you are a compliant person and grow in a blue ocean, once you are big enough to where you can't realistically back down, you are threatened with prison time and sanctions unless you are onboard with the government's actual agenda and its preferred partners.
Secret Societies: Above a certain point you are expected to compromise yourself with blackmail to grow even further and become a part of the brotherhood that actually runs the government agenda.
I'm just a petty conspiracy theorist, but my assumption is their use of Persona was part of "the deal" they've been encouraged to make, and what you're seeing is a company being brought to heel.
The funny thing. I've talked to normies about this. Frequently their response is "good to solves <bad thing>" But they never seem to wrap their head arround this is a tax on non-violators. Using identity verification to stop underage people from seeing porn is never realized that people that are above 18 are put at risk over this, or how it could be extended to now "adult"/"community decided 'obscene' materials" (that's what adult content is) is now restricted. (Which can include medical abortion information, disucssions arround gender, political campaigns that are unpopular, etc)
Many of the people that talk about the “massive dragnet swirling around” are posting all their details to social media and checking in on their Ring cameras, and they’re also volunteering for the persona uploads.
> People treat AI like a diary, and the government can request that data at anytime.
Isn't the case for any US company? I'm working in an european SaaS business, and we consider that any data that goes through Azure or Google Workspace can be accessed by the US government on a whim, even if their datacenter is on our soil.
If it's your customers' data you can use E2EE. If you need to read it, it is probably cheapest to keep everything on EU infrastructure to avoid paying repeat egress costs.
You might also consider shipping software-as-software, which doesn't need cloud resources, and the data can only be searched one customer at a time.
Doesn't say anything about citizenship though. There are plenty of US residents who are not citizens. And a lot of people abroad appear to use US billing address credit cards -- in my last company we had hundreds of people with the same US billing address who appeared to be managing Africa-focused businesses and used IPs that matched that.
> Finally, we’re making a change to the way we handle business customer data for Fable 5, Mythos 5, and future models with similar or higher capability levels. We will require 30-day retention for all traffic on Mythos-class models, on both first- and third-party surfaces. We won’t use this data to train new Claude models, or for any non-safety-related purpose, and we’ve instituted new privacy protections including logging all human access to the data and ensuring its deletion after 30 days in almost all cases (see this post for further details). The data will help us defend against complex and novel attacks (including new jailbreaks and attacks that operate across many requests) as well as help us identify and reduce false positives.
It's not a "project" though; the business Cal.com Inc raised that VC money. Their open source repo did not raise the money.
Did they ever promise to keep their codebase FOSS forever, in a way that differs from what they're already doing over at cal.diy? If not, I don't see why it would be reasonable to expect them to spend a huge amount of money re-scanning on every single commit/deploy in order to keep their non-"DIY" product open source.
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