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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'

#111

Post by yellow_postit »

danso wrote: post #78
clamprecht wrote: post #47

Last paragraph of the article: "The new authentication scheme is the second in recent weeks that relies on photos. Earlier this month, Facebook asked users to upload nude photos to Facebook Messenger, as part of an effort to prevent revenge porn. Facebook said it would use the nude photos to create a digital fingerprint against which to compare future posts." Wait what? I had to check whether today was April 1st.

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…

Open source a desktop and mobile tool that generates the image hash w/o the image leaving the device and have the code publicly reviewed seems like one potential approach.

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

#112

Post by ncallaway »

cracell wrote: post #94
danso wrote: 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…

FB removes pornographic content, but it doesn't always do so proactively.

If a user shares pornographic content, it may be visible on the site for a short period of time before the content is removed by Facebook.

The goal of the initiative Facebook was attempting to implement was to prevent any revenge-porn photos from being shared on the website at all. Even for a brief period of time.

From a user's standpoint, one hour of pornographic content available is disturbing but not catastrophic. However, one hour of images of pornographic content of themselves being shown to their friends and family is catastrophic.

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

#113

Post by jpindar »

oblib wrote: post #66
Harkins wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still have your face from scanning your friends' photos and contacts. Combine datestamp, location, messages, and posts over years and Facebook knows who was together for a photo whether or not you've uploaded any or been tagged. Facebook knows the face of everyone who is on Facebook or who knows a few people who are.

No, not really. There are not many of photos of me on the web and any that are were taken from a distance and too low res to id me. I've been stingy about that for a long time. FB doesn't have my phone number and I disabled the email address I used to sign up. I delete all my cookies often and use different browsers and turn off and reset my modem to get a new IP address. I have no apps on my phone, don't use iCloud,…

>don't use the native "Contacts" app, I made my own for that.

That's a good idea. You could then grant other apps permission to see your contacts, but have the app optionally return fake or empty data.

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

#114

Post by swimfar »

reaperducer wrote: post #41
Waterluvian wrote: post #30

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.

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.

Why are they stupid? All of a sudden, with no warning or explanation you stopped posting and responding? If I had a friend like that I might be concerned and reach out to friends or family to see if everything is okay. To me that signifies that they care about you, not that they're stupid. It's not like they filed a police report or anything.

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

#115

Post by eternalban »

alde wrote: post #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.

Count your blessings. They could have additionally asked for a picture that "clearly shows your genitals".

Anywho, once the 'revenge porn' crowd starts hacking around this by chopping the said head from the said images, the central servers of FB are sure to ask for pics of genitals.

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

#118

Post by vixen99 »

1337biz wrote: post #3
garblegarble wrote: post #2

If it can't be fooled by a picture found online (but not uploaded to facebook) then that must mean facebook is indexing images across the internet and analysing all the faces they find... and if it can, what's the point (edit: from a user point of view)?

To have the world's best biometric registry that is constantly updated and optimized by it's users.

its users

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

#119

Post by eternalban »

josephpmay wrote: post #116
cbhl wrote: post #97

Sure, Facebook might delete your photo when they're done, but they probably won't delete any machine learning models that they trained using it.

I'm pretty sure Facebook already has plenty of training data of faces

Excuse me. The issue is biometrics. "We'll delete the picture" =/= "we'll delete the control points and features extracted from your pics".

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

#120

Post by Splines »

danso wrote: post #78
clamprecht wrote: post #47

Last paragraph of the article: "The new authentication scheme is the second in recent weeks that relies on photos. Earlier this month, Facebook asked users to upload nude photos to Facebook Messenger, as part of an effort to prevent revenge porn. Facebook said it would use the nude photos to create a digital fingerprint against which to compare future posts." Wait what? I had to check whether today was April 1st.

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…

I disagree:

- It sets a precedent for uploading nude photos to FB and for them asking for it.

- You need to trust FB to delete the photos when they receive it. Yes, I understand that they probably will, but really, how many systems are those bits going to touch? How many logs are going to have this information? Can you be really sure?

A better implementation would be for the FB client to hash the file and for the hash to be uploaded. Trust issues are still there but at least mitigated to devices that you have some control over.

Evil users that hash legitimate photos can be overcome with the same review system that is being tested today.

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