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Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

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Re: Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

#101

I should write a blog post about this, but to those thinking about deleting Facebook, My experience deleting it 5 years ago is summarized as: my friend count went way down, my friend quality went way up. Your results may vary, but the purpose of my comment is not to immediately be worried that Facebook is a mandatory lifeline for your social life.

I may be exceptionally bad at attracting and maintaining friendships. But my experience is that my time between friends is not fungible, and the strength of my friendships are not constant.

For example, my best friends are on the opposite coast. It's not financially realistic for us to hang out in person frequently. The 5 hours a week I could spend sending them letters or calling are not the same as 5 hours I could be spending turning acquaintances who live next door into good friends. Maybe even best friends. It's not theoretically a zero-sum game, of course, but we all know that's not how life actually works and that for one friend to have more of your time/attention means that another loses some time and attention.

What FB has helped me do is to remain easily connected to good friends and acquaintances everywhere. When moving to a new town, finding acquaintances who live there who have common interests with FB is much easier than calling those acquaintances out of the blue and hoping they'll hang out. Most of these acquaintances remain acquaintances, but some become friends -- and the cost of making those friends was substantially lowered.

For remote best friends, FB gives us a way to passively share our lives beyond calling and writing letters. Even if I had unlimited time to spend creating and sending scrapbooks and doing FaceTime, my other friends may not. It's not as good as being together, but I love the option to browse a friend's albums of past recent events on my own time, and then being able to at least experience those memories in a small way.

So I guess I see Facebook has being a very interactive rolodeck. It's not where I conduct my friendships (although I do, to some degree), it just makes maintaining friendships much more efficient. To the point that I keep connections that I would've otherwise dropped, because Facebook has reduced the long-term "maintenance cost". But since it's ultimately a rolodeck to me, I find it easy to ignore and not care what anyone is doing if I don't feel like it, and I have lowered expectations of what I should be getting from FB

Re: Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

#102
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backup codes are available, once you've enabled 2FA: https://www.facebook.com/help/148104135383285?helpref=search...

Well... I don't want to legitimize their "need" for my phone number (which granted they already figure out through contact books of others, they don't even hide that they've inferred it). Phones and 2fa are not dependent upon one another.

Does google voice # work?

Re: Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

#103
>"Please upload a photo of yourself that clearly shows your face. We’ll check it and then permanently delete it from our servers."

>"To determine if the account is authentic, Facebook looks at whether the photo is unique."

The two statements are a bit contradictory. They might delete the photo but they won't delete its signature/fingerprint, because they need the later to check for uniqueness of other accounts.

Re: Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

#104
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't believe it. This is the most absurd thing I have ever heard.

It really does seem like something an elite private club would do to get a laugh out of fooling the proles while smoking a cigar and browsing the pictures.

> they "trust me" ... dumb f*cks

Re: Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

#105
post #94
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a thread about this on HN -- too lazy to look it up now or repeat some of the longer comments about it. But going into this assuming that FB has no ill-intentions, FB's proposal seems by far the best solution in a world of ugly and terrible solutions. For starters, it's intended for victims of revenge porn, which is a fairly extreme category and one in which the harassment is distinctively aggressive and vi…

FB has a no porn policy so wtf do you have verify you are you to get a revenge porn picture removed? "We remove photographs of people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed buttocks. We also restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple, but our intent is to allow images that are shared for medical or health purposes. We also allow photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or…

I've never been a revenge porn victim but I think you might oversimplify the problem. For instance, if a former lover of mine has nude photos of me and distributes them to other people in private channels, I'm not able to even see them to report them. And that's just a one-time stoppage of the harassment.

Re: Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

#106

I mean you need to pick your poison here. You either give facebook more data to validate your authenticity or you allow botnets to influence the social networks. It seems impossible to have it both ways, although I'm willing to hear alternatives in the general case.

> You either give facebook more data to validate your authenticity or you allow botnets to influence the social networks

My basic logic/truth table says there's another (possibly more likely scenario): that you give FB more (intimate) data AND botnets still influence your social networks.

I mean, a bot could simply designate using a given stock image for each of their imposter personas, non?

Re: Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

#107
post #87

>"The company declined to share details to prevent the system from being manipulated. Suspicious activity might include someone who consistently posts from New York and then starts posting from Russia." So in others words people who travel or go on vacation?

Numerous systems that scrutinize IP-based geolocation information already throw up additional security checks when detecting changes. Personally I welcome it, especially when banks do it. It's low-hanging fruit TBH. It massively fucks with those using VPN or Tor but I'm fine with that.

Except that FB isn't a bank and doesn't store one's financial data.

Also this argument falls flat as we are an increasingly mobile population whether that be travel for pleasure or business.

I remember watching in amusement/horror as a friend I was traveling with in Thailand wasn't able to access her Facebook account unless she verified via her phone that she was actually attempting to log into her account from Thailand. It's like you're supposed to check in with Facebook and let them know where you are. So creepy.

Re: Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

#108
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't believe it. This is the most absurd thing I have ever heard.

Sexting is quite common about young adults and so is the subsequent sharing of those photos. Being able to stop that from happening is incredibly valuable. I am just surprised Facebook didn't instead look at a way of running these image hashing algorithms on the device instead.

There is a much better way to stop it happening.

Re: Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

#109
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I walked away from Facebook. Three months later, I got a phone call from my mother (who's not online) because she heard through the grapevine that I was dead. My stupid Facebook "friends" took my silence for something sinister and jumped to conclusions. I ended up returning to Facebook and purging my "friend" list down to just a dozen actual friends.

Really? Wow. I always wondered what my Facebook acquaintances thought when I left. I figured they didn’t care Id left to give it much thought or that I was being a prick and had deleted them.

Most of my facebook "friends" didn't even noticed I've quit some months ago. For those that ask, I say that it consumed too much battery..

Re: Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

#110
post #102
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... I don't want to legitimize their "need" for my phone number (which granted they already figure out through contact books of others, they don't even hide that they've inferred it). Phones and 2fa are not dependent upon one another.

Does google voice # work?

Don't know, I think google voice is only available in US/Canada, no? (I'm not in either of those countries)
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