Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#71

Post by YetAnotherNick » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 6:00 PM UTC

ben_jones wrote: post #68

sharkweek wrote: post #58

Here's where Facebook's brand reputation sits in my mind today: I do not believe them at all. I do not believe they've had some change of heart regarding "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." I do not believe they intend to not use this technology in some other privacy-invading way. Trying to figure out their real angle here. Avoid regulation? "Good" PR at a time when they despe…

The system no longer provides FB the same value it previously did. So they're taking it down, now that they've collected billions of images. Will they be deleting the trained models too? All artifacts and inferences? Hell no.

"the social network will delete the face scan data of more than one billion users."

I believe it because facebook has nothing much to gain by lying about this small thing(after all they still have all the tracking data) and hell lot to loose by lying this straight face among employees.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#72

Post by thegreatdukd » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 6:00 PM UTC

mminer237 wrote: post #43

Jenk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely one should be able to just tag _the album_ instead of each photo? I always figured this constraint was kept as a happy convenience so that Facebook have a steady supply of training data for their face recognition service. If they are shutting that service down, maybe they'll let us tag albums?

My wedding album has like 200 photos in it. I definitely had relatives who didn't want to look through them all and just asked me to send them the photos with them in it.

I doubt Facebook won't offer some unsupervised face clustering for albums, they will just remove tagging from images. Google Photos offers me pictures of distinctive people found in my gallery without giving me their names.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#73

Post by pempem » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

slownews45 wrote: post #35

It's always confusing to see what the internet police go after. Total scams ripping thousands to hundreds of thousands off from people (tech support scams etc). Crickets. An opt in feature on the facebook platform that is useful (at least to some). Multiple Attorney General press conferences :)

Are we not going after both?

Let's marshall the energy. I'm sure we can find it. Wanna lead the charge?

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#74

Post by classified » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

sharkweek wrote: post #58

Here's where Facebook's brand reputation sits in my mind today: I do not believe them at all. I do not believe they've had some change of heart regarding "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." I do not believe they intend to not use this technology in some other privacy-invading way. Trying to figure out their real angle here. Avoid regulation? "Good" PR at a time when they despe…

To me FB is the embodiment of that old joke about politicians: You know they're lying because their mouth is moving.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#75

Post by donatj » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

Vrondi wrote: post #65

slownews45 wrote: post #35

It's always confusing to see what the internet police go after. Total scams ripping thousands to hundreds of thousands off from people (tech support scams etc). Crickets. An opt in feature on the facebook platform that is useful (at least to some). Multiple Attorney General press conferences :)

But their facial recognition is not opt-in. You cannot prevent other people from uploading photos of you then tagging your face in them, training Facebook's facial recognition to your face even if you consciously never upload your image a single time.

If you don't like that, you're going to hate this.

https://youtu.be/KT18KJouHWg

Basically they can find you from your DNA, even if only a couple very distant relatives ever gave theirs.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#76

Post by croes » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

mminer237 wrote: post #37

mathgladiator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but why tag people?

So they can see themselves in photos? So you don't have to look through all of your friends' photos to find which ones you are in and repost them yourself.

Isn't it possible to tag people even if they don't have a FB account?

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#77

Post by kapp_in_life » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

SNosTrAnDbLe wrote: post #63

captainmuon wrote: post #50

So sad that we can't have nice things. I like the feature that automatically tags people in pictures. Sometimes I have trouble remembering people's names (not face blindness or similar, just regular trouble I guess). I would love to have smart glasses that show the name of someone I've met before but don't quite remember. But alas, our society being what it is people will abuse facial recognition, so I can't have tha…

The question is are you ok with some stranger adding a picture of you on facebook and then facebook promptly tags you on their profile.

Knowing that someone I don't know uploaded a photo of me seems like a good feature, yes.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#78

Post by the_other » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

captainmuon wrote: post #50

So sad that we can't have nice things. I like the feature that automatically tags people in pictures. Sometimes I have trouble remembering people's names (not face blindness or similar, just regular trouble I guess). I would love to have smart glasses that show the name of someone I've met before but don't quite remember. But alas, our society being what it is people will abuse facial recognition, so I can't have tha…

> I would love to have smart glasses that show the name of someone I've met before but don't quite remember.

Or you could just tell them you don't remember. It's rarely rude. It's better to be human. We all forget stuff all the time. If we stopped imagining that everyone else is holding everyone else to impossible levels of "quality" we'd all be much better off. Just admit you don't remember their name. If you feel really bad about it, work in a little story about what you do remember about them. If you don't remember anything, then the meeting wasn't important to you so just let it go. If it was somehow important to them, there'll be a way to resolve this. Or there won't and you'll have a lost a friend but all of that is better than hiding your humanity behind a robot.

Perhaps we need to issue a new "Turning Test". Can a human tell the difference between a human and a human with machine assistance? And does it matter?

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#79

Post by tehjoker » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

I am for this decision, but I don't understand their justification for it. What was the actual reason they pulled back on this? The US government is assuredly for maximum surveillance, so long as the publicly visible part is done by private companies that can be subpoenaed for their data. FB needs to stay in the good graces of the military-industrial-political complex to avoid anti-trust action.

FB doesn't do anything out of the good of their heart, so what are they getting out of this? I really doubt that winning the hearts of civil libertarians is at all important to them.

(I also noticed how the NYT managed to get a dig into the discredited China story when discussing a company that was surveilling billions of people worldwide using facial recognition technology.)

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#80

Post by Vrondi » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #2

Serious question: I kind of liked how Facebook found people in my photos. Is there room for such a feature in a privacy conscious world?

Well, honestly, you shouldn't be giving other peoples' likenesses to big corporations under worldwide non-exclusive license agreements without a signed model release consent form. However, enforcing this is almost impossible.

But really, morally, you should never give anyone else's face to a corporation without their explicitly requesting you to upload the photo to a site.