Not that I'm ever going to use the app, but I'd like to point out as to why the collection of this specific dataset is particularly dangerous.
Threads scrapes Health and Fitness information. Why is this a problem? Because Meta is already illegally scraping hospital websites for your records. Speaking as a data analyst, it doesn't take much (like one line of code in some cases) to match your Threads account to your hospital records in a database. To assume Meta isn't attempting to do so as we speak is naive - there's simply too much money to be made.
In an age where we've had to start underground railroads to help women across state lines to keep the right to choose, combined with the push from the far right to criminalize helping them, this sets up a frightening scenario:
Meta finds that you've scheduled an abortion through the hospital across state lines. With Threads on your phone, they can now track you as you travel to that appointment. It only takes one more step, or a law like this one tailored towards abortion, to notify law enforcement to pick you up enroute.
Combined with Meta's overall right-leaning politics, it just doesn't make sense to make yourself vulnerable to them, especially if you're a member of a minority population or have any sort of health condition. There's simply too much potential for abuse, and Meta has shown itself more than willing to abuse its users.
Because Meta is already illegally scraping hospital websites for your records.
Sorry, but this is just bad web design from the hospitals. This pixel tool doesn't magically appear on websites without being put there deliberately. Literally any tracking tool can capture this stuff on any page that a developer puts it on. This is 100% the fault of the programmer at the hospital (or the admin that made them do it) that decided to put tracking cookies on sensitive pages.
The hospital administrators decided it was more important to get their precious reports on usage from Meta's portal than protecting their patients.
I'm pissed that I've had to defend Meta here, but this one isn't on them.
If I leave my door unlocked while I'm gone, and you come in and steal my laptop, it's still theft. Yes, I'm an idiot, but you're still a criminal.
That being said, I fully agree with you that the hospitals should bear equal fault - the lack of protections around patient records is criminal, and I'd really like to see those whose records were exposed sue both the hospitals at fault and Meta, or better yet, a criminal case from the FTC and the Department of Health.
Not trying to be a hater, but that analogy isn't quite right. The web designers didn't leave their door unlocked. They invited Meta in, put their laptop in Meta's hands, and then said "Please take this. Enjoy." They weren't idiots. They chose to give Meta that data deliberately.
Medical institutions need to be held to account as much as Meta does for everything they do. I agree with that completely.
So now you got me digging into this because I take an absurd amount of pride in my analogies, and it looks like the Meta Pixel tech they embedded was basically like the standard Google Analytics tracking tag on most websites. The hospitals were stupid to install it on their password protected pages, but they were also misled in the fact that Meta's Pixel took far more data than a standard tracking tag, claimed they weren't tracking sensitive data when they were, then claimed to filter the data even though their engineers admitted they couldn't:
The Markup was unable to confirm whether any of the data referenced in this story was in fact removed before being stored by Meta. However, a recent joint investigation with Reveal found that Meta’s sensitive health information filtering system didn’t block information about appointments a reporter requested with crisis pregnancy centers.
Internally, Facebook employees have been blunt about how well—or not so well—the company generally protects sensitive data.
“We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose.’ ” Facebook engineers on the ad and business product team wrote in a 2021 privacy overview that was leaked to Vice.
So, to perfect the analogy, this would be like a hotel installing security cameras in their rooms, and then finding out the company that makes the cameras and runs the network is selling porn starring its customers. Not only that, now that the porn is in their system, it can't be adequately filtered or removed.
The hotel is stupid and liable, but the security company is just flat out vile.
Ok, I'm done. Have an upvote for putting up with that ;)
Someone on my Mastodon feed put this best: People who aren't tech saavy STILL deserve privacy, security and safety.
Hospitals are full of people who understand medicine, not tech. Because that's what they are. Administrators don't even know what to ask to hire a good tech person, and when a tech person gets in there any change they make has a danger of disrupting livesaving systems so they can't do anything anyway. It sucks, but HIPAA still says those records are private and you're not supposed to be looking at them without having a good reason to. The hospitals are liable for not protecting them properly, but Meta is still in the wrong and still breaking the law by scarping for them.
Ultimately, this is everyone's fault but the patients and the patients are the people who are wronged by it.
Anyone who thinks that any meta subsidiary is not trying to gain every piece of information on you and everyone around you is delusional. They want every detail. Do you masterbate? How often? To what? Partners? Cis/trans/nb, het/gay/bi/poly? Where do you do it? How often? Then meta asks, how can we make money off this knowledge and extract every penny. But one of their board members gets outed and it’s all out war, metaphorically speaking.
On one hand, they’re crap jobs. On the other hand, in most economies we have crap jobs not because they’re necessary for productivity, but to give us an excuse to pay people to live.
Maybe if enough jobs are lost to automation, we’ll start to rethink the structure of a society that only allows people to live if they’re useful to a rich person.
Essentially, we’re just still doing feudalism with extra steps, and it’s high time we cut that nonsense out.
I think once workers can be replaced, there will be some virus that wipes out most of humanity. No point keeping billions of people around if they aren’t needed.
Username checks out… suffice to say that a time of increasing social unrest is on the way, when it’s even easier for the haves to sideline the have nots than it already was.
We have crappy jobs because jobs need doing and it was still cheaper to get humans to do it without a substantial loss in functionality. They don’t exist because of some form of social altruism, as evidenced by the fact that as soon as a semi-viable alternative is offered then the jobs are gone.
With the dynamic shifting to automation, prematurely I would add, then employers are seeing a much cheaper way to achieve 80% of what they currently offer.
When I think of crappy jobs I think of a number of different sets.
Busywork for the extra hands in the clerical pool. This is the stuff that defines the careers of a lot of people in developed countries, in which they’re hired and trained, may even work on projects for a while, and then are dropped into a holding cubical and tasked with sometime benign but probably useless (say entering archived paper files from decades ago into the new data system in case we need them someday – I did that.) Here in the states (and according to anecdotes, the UK) we have a lot of this kind of work, and while it should only be a temporary measure between company projects, entire department clerical pools have been stuck in such holding patterns for years at a time.
It happens for two reasons I’ve seen: One, the economy tanks such as during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, in which lower management in a grand effort of humanitarian desperation, tell the upper management that no, my crew are working hard and very necessary in hopes that theirs is not a department that gets eliminated during the downsizing. (These managers in question are covering their own butts too, but ones I talked with recognized that anyone they dismissed would be eating ramen in a month). And two, the mismanagement of responsibility in linking tasks that need to be done with worker pools capable of doing them. Either the managers tasked to making such links are overwhelmed, or the process of connecting pools to duties is distributed so broadly that it’s de-prioritized by everyone. If those tasks are particularly odious (say they involve interacting with a toxic upper manager) then the lower management will find reasons that their own pool is not able to help, and so the company has simultaneous worker shortages and surpluses. For large, multinational conglomerates, this sort of thing is routine.
Jobs that are facades to cover for social or moral obligations that are expected of the company, but (from the perspective of shareholders) are too expensive to actually do, such as the faux tech-support services the US exported to phone banks in India that are limited to some very short troubleshooting trees rather than someone actually familiar with the technical aspects of the product. This is (I think) what the business owner of the article is talking about replacing.
Now what he should be doing is hiring a tech service and including the troubleshooting tree in the manual, what is typically done with household appliances. The workers on that phone bank are being set up with pressure by angry customers to offer some productive solutions, while also getting pressure from management to placate the angry customers, for which they have insufficient facilities. I’m reminded of my own experience being told by upper management I should be spending only fifteen minutes explaining to customers how to install CD-ROM drives (to MS DOS, mind you), which it usually took forty-five minutes to an hour to walk a non-geek through the process.
Such jobs shouldn’t exist, rather the company should actually hire real departments to deal with social responsibilities, rather than front veneers and marketing campaigns, but that’s a problem intrinsic to the system and not one that will be solved with LLMs given the same short troubleshooting trees. (An LLM with a big troubleshooting tree developed by a serious tech team might work, but would require ongoing development and maintenance, and the occasional tech-support call with a human being. Also a better LLM than we have.)
Jobs that are odious because they’re labor intensive, hazardous, tedious, frustrating or otherwise taxing on the worker, and yes there are a lot of necessary tasks that need to be done that fall into these categories. So when you say We have crappy jobs because jobs need doing, I assume you’re talking about these.
Because we’re in a capitalist system that mandates shareholder primacy, our companies first seek out a labor pool they can exploit since they don’t have any other choice. This is classified as bonded servitude, id est slavery but we don’t like to call it that when an enterprise uses human beings like interchangeable, disposable parts. Historically, we’ve hired children, exploited prison populations, immigrants, invoked a truck system, a culture of obligatory productivity, whatever, anything to force our fellow human beings to toil under cruel conditions.
Without an exploitable population enterprises face labor unrest (unions are the least violent version of this we know) in order to improve conditions and compensation, leaving industries to either capitulate and pay extra and provide proper gear or to automate wherever they can.
I imagine in collectives, everyone eventually gets pissed off from drawing straws and start working on ways to make odious tasks less odious, either through automation or improving the conditions of the task that it’s no longer odious, e.g. making actual cleaning as close to Power Wash Simulator as possible.
I mean, if you go to your credit card provider with a copy of the log with their rep, and the rep says “i authorize a refund”, you can atleast make the argument.
Any company scummy enough to trust an AI for this wouldnt give it the authority, though
You still need to employ some humans as a backup when the AI catastrophically fucks up, but for the most part it makes sense. Not all jobs need to continue to exist.
Not every customer service employee should worry about being replaced, but those who simply copy and paste responses are no longer safe, according to Shah.
Financial capitalism is another factor. Investing in the housing to have financial products with high financial return. It’s part of the speculation allowed in our neoliberal economy.
Add that the incomes are the same for decades and you end up with this. Housing or better having a decent place to live has to be a fundamental right.
Working conditions in this industry are not great. The turnover rate can reach 80% sometimes. It can be a difficult, stressful and low paid job that few people enjoy. At the same time, the demand for this work keeps increasing as more and more of consumer activity shifts online and remote. It seems to me that the technology may be a net benefit in this case. The public and its regulatory authority should, however, keep a close eye on developments to make sure humans are not left behind.
I have no doubt that a ML chatbot is perfectly capable of being as useless as an untrained human first level supporter with a language barrier.
And the dude in the article basically admits that’s what his call center was like:
Suumit Shah never liked his company’s customer service team. His agents gave generic responses to clients’ issues. Faced with difficult problems, they often sounded stumped, he said.
So evidently good support outcomes were never the goal.
Agreed. Should we also mourn for the horse and buggy drivers? The gas station attendants? And the whole slew of jobs that have become obsolete over the centuries?
I do think we need something like UBI and I’m not ignoring the lost jobs but shit jobs shouldn’t have to exist. I’ll mourn for the workers but not for the job. Continuing to employee people to do thankless/hard/dangerous/etc jobs is just silly.
I’ve worked in this field for 25 years and don’t think that ChatGPT by itself can handle most workloads, even if it’s trained on them.
There are usually transactions which must be done and often ad hoc tasks which end up being the most important things because when things break, you aren’t trained for them.
If you don’t have a feedback loop to solve those issues, your whole business may just break without you knowing.
I ordered Chipotle for delivery and I got the wrong order. I don’t eat meat so it’s not like I could just say whelp, I’m eating this chicken today I guess.
The only way to report an issue is to chat with their bot. And it is hell. I finally got a voucher for a free entree but what about the delivery fee and the tip back? Impossible.
I felt like Sisyphus.
I waited for the transaction to post and disputed the charge on my card and it credited me back.
There’s so many if-and-or-else scenarios that no amount of scraping the world’s libraries is AI today able to sort out these scenarios.
Yes these kind of transactions really need to be hand coded to be handled well. LLM’s are very poorly suited to this kind of thing (though I doubt you were dealing with an LLM at Chipotle just yet).
We don’t need to keep all bullshit jobs around. The printing press putting hand written scribes out of jobs was a good thing. This is similar. New jobs will be created that will hopefully create more productive work.
Cheaper than outsourcing to poor countries with middling English speaking capability.
Coming to call center lines near you: voiced chatbots to replace the ineffective, useless customer support lines that exist today with the same useless outcomes for consumers but endless juggling back and forth without any real resolutions. Let’s make customer service even shittier, again!
A lot of jobs are just busy work that does nothing and makes nothing. Talking about automating them misses the point of why the jobs exists in the first place.
“I see that you are throwing a ball at a target that is connected to a platform with a human sitting above a tank of water. Here is a AI generated picture of a random human underwater to sate your needs. Ya! I have made this process 200% more efficient!”
It’s crazy how people seem fundamentally incapable of looking at the big picture and ask themselves things like, “what even is the purpose of society? Is this the best society humanity is able to come up with? What if I am not ready to accept society as it is presented to me, what are my alternatives, do I even have any? What are my obligations towards a society that marginalizes me and treats me like a second or third tier human, without any hope of ever improving my lot?”
Ask people if they would rather be free and get everything they want without having to work for it. The answers you’ll get will boggle your mind.
I’m surprised by the number of workaholics that exist, like why do you want to work so much? Go explore the world, learn things, make things, but people want to work instead?
We’ve been permeated by the idea that “you have to be financially productive to be a decent human” for so long, even people against excessive/useless work still sometimes miss the point of this crazy race toward making more benefit regardless of anything else.
Sometimes, reaching the “it works” point is enough, but higher ups never stops there. It always have to be “better/more”.
Hopefully it’ll be the end of capitalism. How is the economical model supposed to function when nobody is working? Where are people supposed to get money from? How is anything going to be taxed?
Realistically though it’ll somehow push capitalism into hyperdrive and enslave the global population under the control of the AI owners.
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