The Verge 播客复盘扎克伯格采访：Meta眼镜隐私争议与青少年安全

It’s a big week for Meta. The company just kicked off its big Connect conference on Wednesday, and the new Muse AI agent appears to be an early hit. I’ve been using it — it is surprisingly good.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has obviously been out there taking a victory lap and participating in a lot of interviews about all this. So of course, we asked for him to appear on Decoder. Meta declined my interview request for whatever reason. But luckily Mark just did a big interview with our friend and former colleague Alex Heath on the Sources podcast.

So I figure we could just highlight some moments from that conversation and I could point out some obvious gaps in what Mark is saying about the company right now, and hopefully the next set of people who get to talk to him can ask him some follow-up questions.

So here’s some of the things I would love to ask Mark Zuckerberg if he would join me here on Decoder. Let’s start with Mark’s comments on the Meta Glasses.

Mark Zuckerberg: So we actually feel quite good about the product. I mean, phones don’t have a light, but I mean, people go around recording people all the time.

So I think it’s very important to note that the entire tech industry really wants passive surveillance devices to fit into the same category as phones — for you to understand everything from Flock cameras to Ring doorbells to Meta Glasses the same way that you might understand a smartphone.

Now, there are some very obvious differences here that I think are worth really pushing on in these conversations. For example, if you want to record someone with your phone, you have to take it out of your pocket, open the camera app, and literally hold it in their face. This is a physical action that is meaningfully different from having a pair of glasses on your face with a light and just passively recording someone.

That physical action means that you have to announce your intent to do something with your body and other people can react to it. Obviously, you don’t do that with Meta Glasses. You just start recording and people can notice if there’s a light or not, but the big physical announcement that you’re about to begin recording is not present.

So I think one of the reasons the entire tech industry is so eager to fit these passive surveillance devices into the same kind of mental framework as smartphones is so that no one has to question whether there should be a new social etiquette for these devices. Instead, you’re like, “Oh, it’s just a smartphone. I already understand how to use that.” But importantly, that also brushes over the fact that we did have to create a massive new set of social rules and norms around smartphone recording.

We did live through the entire Black Lives Matter movement because smartphone recording allowed people to record the police, and we as a society didn’t quite know what to do with that information and maybe still don’t know what to do with that information. I would just push on this over and over and over again.

Do you want there to be constant recordings of everyone? Do we think that smartphones allowing everyone to record everything all the time is good? Do we think being able to livestream everything all the time was good? If you could reboot that in a new form factor that allowed for easier and more passive recording, what norms would you change?

There’s already examples of this inside of Meta, where they know the Meta glasses are being used to harass retail workers and women, and they have started down-ranking those videos on Instagram to provide less incentive to make them. So I think a version of this question you could ask very directly is if you know some of the content that is being made with these glasses is so bad that you’ve down-ranked it on your own distribution platform, what is so good about these glasses that make it worth having these debates over and over again?

All right, let’s get back to Mark’s comments on Meta glasses.

Mark Zuckerberg: When we launched the glasses a few years back, we communicated pretty clearly about these steps that we put into it. But like you said, there’s now many, many, many millions of people who’ve gotten the glasses more than had them when we just started launching the product. So I think some of that communication that we did at the beginning, a lot of people either maybe-

Alex Heath: Didn’t see.

Mark Zuckerberg: Or they forgot about it or they didn’t see at the beginning or they just weren’t paying attention to it because the glasses weren’t a big thing. Now that I think we’ve achieved a level of mainstream… well, at a minimum, I think we need to go and make sure that we communicate about what we’re doing and that, yes, we think that this is important and, in fact, so important that we designed it into the product from the very first version that we shipped multiple years ago.

All right, let’s stop here. So I would ask some very simple questions here. What is important? Is it the privacy of the user? Is it the privacy of the person who might be being recorded? And what is it that you thought you were communicating clearly at the beginning that got lost?

What I think Mark is trying to say is at the very beginning, they announced that the glasses would have a light, that the light would be on when you’re recording, that they thought it was obvious that there was a camera in the temple. Over time, as more people got the glasses and more people experienced the glasses on other people’s faces, it was not clear what that light was or what it meant. Now, Mark thinks they have to do more communication about specifically the light existing.

My response to all of that is it doesn’t matter what Meta says. This is the essential truth of every piece of mainstream consumer technology. The users define the product. If you sell millions of gadgets to people, they will use them in ways you never expected. It’s those emergent behaviors that often define the next version of the product.

Probably one of the most famous examples of this is Twitter. Twitter didn’t invent the hashtag or the @ reply or any of a million features that we associate with Twitter. Users on Twitter invented those features, and Twitter adopted them because its users had figured out a way to use the service in ways that it had never even contemplated.

This is broadly true of everything. It’s true of computers, it’s true of smartphones, it’s true of social platforms, and it is true of Meta Glasses. The ways people are using them have nothing to do with Meta’s intentions or its communication about recording lights at the beginning or now.

So I think the natural follow-up question we should all be asking is how much control does Meta have over bad actors who are using these glasses to harass people? Because just telling more people that the light indicates recording isn’t going to stop it.

Are they going to do more things like down-ranking videos of people harassing retail workers? Do they think the other platforms will follow their lead? Does Meta think that creating negative incentives for how people use a camera with content moderation will actually solve the problem? Is there anything about the history of content moderation that suggests that that’s true, given Mark’s own history with content moderation?

Next up, Mark talks about teen safety and Meta’s recent multi-billion dollar teen safety settlement.

Mark Zuckerberg: I think it would’ve been possible to have explained along the way how seriously we took those issues, and we just didn’t because we thought, well, people are showing that by using the product so much they still like the products.

Okay, let me stop there. The claim in many of the social media lawsuits is that the product is addictive. The reason people keep comparing social media to Big Tobacco is that smoking is fun and people enjoyed it, and it was killing them.