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Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras

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Re: Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras

#101

Post by niek_pas »

qwertox wrote: post #50
zupreme wrote: post #45

This is why iOS is badly in need of a “Task Manager” and of an “Event Viewer”, so that users may easily audit what resources each app is currently accessing, and which resources they have accessed in the past, including logging each instance of camera or microphone use by any app. Apple has the power to easily mitigate these concerns - yet they do not. Why?

There could be an industry wide agreement to reserve the top two pixel rows for realtime visual feedback of sensor use. 1st quarter of the display refers to the microphone, 2nd to the camera, 3rd to GPS and so on, with standardized ways of notifying what is happening, ie blinking means it's currently active, red that it has been used at least once during the last 5 minutes or so, with more detailed information in the…

There could be, but there won't, because that would be aesthetically unpleasant.

Re: Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras

#102

Post by Raphmedia »

rmrfstar wrote: post #95
numpad0 wrote: post #67

Being lawful-evil person I am, I once imagined a “news” app such that display content or suggestion ever so unnoticeably slightly change depending on how user behaves judged by device camera. A facial expression ML model would be trained beforehand so camera data would not have to be collected, but only pushed to users along app updates, and content would be analyzed and encoded at server side to determine what users…

> Being lawful-evil person The word you are looking for is "sociopath". Oliver Wendell Holmes' "bad man" is an analytical tool, not a recommendation. There's nothing inherently evil about the mood-detection feature you have described, provided it is deployed with continuing and informed consent from the user. The feature is already deployed on billboards in public spaces, although this instantiation is evil as "users…

Please don't throw mental health diagnosis willy-nilly around on the internet. Not only is it impossible for you to make such a diagnosis, it is rude to both the community you are using as a punch line and to the poster.

Re: Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras

#103

Post by bagacrap »

wheybags wrote: post #21
can16358p wrote: post #9

Don't want to be the devil's advocate here but just because camera is on doesn't mean anything is being recorded. As an iOS developer who worked with apps that access camera frequently, I can confidently say that it's just a UX optimization. Starting the camera takes a brief few hundred milliseconds which is easily noticable from a user perspective. By keeping the camera ready, they are making the experience smoother…

If this was the case, they wouldn't have claimed it was a bug. Besides, big tech companies have lost the benefit of the doubt.

Fb* has lost benefit of the doubt.

I don't understand why people read yet another story about FB's bad behavior somehow conclude all of big tech are bad guys. Is it really so hard to keep them straight?

Re: Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras

#104

Post by redwall_hp »

can16358p wrote: post #22
pferde wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't keeping camera on increase battery drain, though? Also, with Facebook being evil and all, what's stopping them from hopping on "hey, the camera is already on, let's not waste that, and use the incoming visual data for something while we're at it" line of thinking eventually?

It does, indeed. Not like constantly recording though. I think they apply some heuristics that keep the camera on in the background (e.g if you open on story camera frequently and on the main screen, but not while at a screen when camera is not accesible). Otherwise the device would become noticeably hot, but I haven't encountered such an issue.

The way that would make sense, for that particular example, is to start the camera up when the user begins the interaction to open it. Like how https://instant.page/ works. If it takes 200ms to get the camera running, do it while the gesture to swipe over to the camera is in progress. It will take more than 200ms for the user to physically move.

iOS has events for gesture start, in progress, finished and cancelled.

Re: Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras

#105

Post by soylentcola »

spunker540 wrote: post #100
danShumway wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to have people post more photos and keep those metrics up But... that is data harvesting. When you upload photos to Facebook, you are giving them that data. That's not a conspiracy, that's just how Facebook's TOS works. It gets to look at the photos you upload and use that data to help build its internal profile for you. What's your definition of data harvesting? I would say that getting people to upload useful dat…

Photos and videos of people are not generally useful for ads. You know what is valuable? Actual purchase decisions sent in by advertisers. Photos and videos of people’s dogs and food and kids etc is strictly to entertain the other Facebook users and keep them coming back. An advertiser is willing to pay tons more to serve an ad to someone who has bought similar products in the past, and is likely to buy their product…

I would imagine that on a large enough scale, analysis of photo contents, timestamp, location, and correlation with any other FB/app activity at that given time/location can provide a ton of new data points to add to their behavior modeling algorithms.

There may not be obvious one-to-one connections that we would make from the information we see in a photo, but the more data points that can be fed into a model, the more accurate the model becomes.

Re: Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras

#106

Post by numpad0 »

rmrfstar wrote: post #95
numpad0 wrote: post #67

Being lawful-evil person I am, I once imagined a “news” app such that display content or suggestion ever so unnoticeably slightly change depending on how user behaves judged by device camera. A facial expression ML model would be trained beforehand so camera data would not have to be collected, but only pushed to users along app updates, and content would be analyzed and encoded at server side to determine what users…

> Being lawful-evil person The word you are looking for is "sociopath". Oliver Wendell Holmes' "bad man" is an analytical tool, not a recommendation. There's nothing inherently evil about the mood-detection feature you have described, provided it is deployed with continuing and informed consent from the user. The feature is already deployed on billboards in public spaces, although this instantiation is evil as "users…

Existing implementations only detect moods and collect data for analysis, my idea is if you're just going to do open-loop brainwashing, you don't have to know users at all so it could be done without "invading privacy".

> sociopath

ok, I mean no harm to humanity, but, um,

Re: Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras

#107

Post by soylentcola »

userbinator wrote: post #89
loriverkutya wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because my mother is using an iphone and nothing you described would make sense for her. She is pretty good with tech and understands how computers and phones work, but she just does not want to browse a process list to see which process is using the camera.

but she just does not want to browse a process list to see which process is using the camera. How do you know until you've tried? At the risk of provoking a tangential discussion, I don't think keeping users "in the dark" about what's happening is ever a good idea. They don't have to learn if they really don't want to, but deliberate opaqueness is bad --- if anything, it only leads to more learned helplessness and ig…

Additionally, even if the main user of the device will never pull up a task manager or usage log, that info can be useful for a friend, relative, or hired technician who is trying to help them figure out what's going on with their device.

Instead we have to explain to people that their photos aren't "in" the photos app and their music isn't "in" iTunes. It's the thing you mentioned: file managers will just confuse people so let's not include one. Easier to have them think of files as "living" in the apps we assign to open them.

Re: Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras

#108

Post by koonsolo »

rbg246 wrote: post #54
can16358p wrote: post #9

Don't want to be the devil's advocate here but just because camera is on doesn't mean anything is being recorded. As an iOS developer who worked with apps that access camera frequently, I can confidently say that it's just a UX optimization. Starting the camera takes a brief few hundred milliseconds which is easily noticable from a user perspective. By keeping the camera ready, they are making the experience smoother…

So you are saying.. A developer went to their tech lead and said 'hey we can make the app much better by leaving the camera on all the time saves 200ms on camera startup time' Tech lead: this is brilliant no potential problems here Tech lead to management team: got this great new feature, we leave the camera on all the time makes the app 200ms faster. Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no c…

I see you don't have much experience in development. It probably went more like this:

business: "Opening the camera seems slow", dev: "it takes 200ms for the system to start it", "Can you make it faster?", "Not really, unless we keep the camera on", "Do that!", "Won't it have privacy issues?", "Don't worry about that".

EDIT: And in the end business is correct, because nobody really cares about this. Every happy instagrammer keeps happily instagramming.

Re: Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras

#110

Post by mceachen »

spunker540 wrote: post #100
danShumway wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to have people post more photos and keep those metrics up But... that is data harvesting. When you upload photos to Facebook, you are giving them that data. That's not a conspiracy, that's just how Facebook's TOS works. It gets to look at the photos you upload and use that data to help build its internal profile for you. What's your definition of data harvesting? I would say that getting people to upload useful dat…

Photos and videos of people are not generally useful for ads. You know what is valuable? Actual purchase decisions sent in by advertisers. Photos and videos of people’s dogs and food and kids etc is strictly to entertain the other Facebook users and keep them coming back. An advertiser is willing to pay tons more to serve an ad to someone who has bought similar products in the past, and is likely to buy their product…

I'd hesitate to discount the value of photos.

Photos have quite-accurate GPS and frequently-accurate compass heading. Add face detection and you have location tracking for everyone in frame.

Online tracking is valuable for ad targeting, but physical tracking is as well, especially for brick-and-mortar businesses.

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