Meta is culturally broken and utterly incapable of shipping an original product that we can trust. I would ask “what did they think would happen?” but their DNA only deals with the problem when it impacts the bottom line. The conversation between Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg is still as relevant as ever — Kara Swisher asking Cook what he’d do in Zuckerberg’s position, and Cook answering, flatly, “I wouldn’t be in this situation.” Eight years on, nothing about that exchange has aged.
Take it all together, and it’s one of the clearest indications yet that Meta is struggling to control the narrative about how its flashy glasses are being used by the public. The eyewear’s concealed cameras, in particular, have sparked a thorny debate over privacy and consent. It remains trivially easy to record somebody in public with them without their knowledge.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-ban-creeps-ai-pervert-glasses None of this is new, and that’s the damning part. The first thing Zuckerberg ever shipped was Facemash — a hot-or-not built in a dorm room in 2003 out of photos he took from Harvard’s house directories without asking anyone. Twenty-three years later the product is a pair of glasses instead of a web page, but the shape is identical: collect first, get consent never, apologise only if the pressure gets expensive enough. He isn’t failing to control the narrative. He’s running the same play he opened with, at a scale where the people being photographed aren’t even his classmates anymore — they’re everyone standing near him.