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Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

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Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#51

Post by obtu »

drats wrote: post #24

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo... Facebook almost certainly has more photo information than TinEye or Flickr, and of indoor environments probably more than Google (which has reverse image search too). Across any given bar or hospital Facebook would have maybe 5-10 other people with albums tagged with the name/gps/check-in. They'd only need one other album though. SIFT more or less turns…

They might be combining some low-accuracy image similarity to match on images from his friends list, and infer the location from those other images.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#52

Post by kokey »

jagira wrote: post #29

Just checked this. I took some pics on a regular digital camera (no GPS) in Indore. I uploaded them from New Delhi a few weeks later. And now FB is asking me "Were these pics taken in Indore?". Crazy shit. Update - I dug through my FB updates. Just before leaving for airport, I updated my status to "Off to Indore" and after coming back to New Delhi, I had some status updates about my office and a local park. Facebook…

I think you are actually getting to the bottom of it. A combination of timestamps, and status updates, and probably that of friends tagged in the same album. Could be quite effective, as we can see.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#53

Post by kokey »

JonnieCache wrote: post #19

The important thing to take away from this: If they can make guesses this accurate about your photos, imagine they guesses they're making behind the scenes about your life, your personality and your innermost thoughts. If there was a page on fb where it showed all the inferences they had made about you, sexuality, income, religion, philosophical viewpoints, mental health, etc. then people would run screaming. Of cour…

Yeah it's scary that a site, where you and your friends share the details of your lives online, uses those details to... oh wait that's the point.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#54

Post by zombielifestyle »

I've tried it. i don't use fb for pics. i don't use wifi on my smartphone and i had the fb app only briefly installed. i also weren't on any trips outside my city.

I've uploaded 4 screenshot-ed landscape (including one building) pics from flicker with absolutely no metadata. at least 2 of them should be very recognizable. the only thing that fb suggested was the single check-in that i had, minimum of 500km off.

i'm pretty sure that there is only minimal (if any) intelligence on image recognition and that they guess locations by information that "leak" from you and your hardware.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#55

Post by uptown »

Since Facebook knows your social connections, isn't it also possible they check the location of the people to whom you're connected, and use their location as a guide as to where your photos may have been taken? If a cousin checked Facebook on a phone near a hospital while you posted a hospital photo, they know there's a chance the cousin was visiting you and that's where your photo was taken. They use your social grid for everything ... why wouldn't they use it for this too?

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#56

Post by DJN »

swalsh wrote: post #27
phpnode wrote: post #4

Here's my guess at how it's done: Redditor has facebook app installed on their smartphone (or just uses the website), sets status to "OMG wife is going into labour, at the hospital now". Facebook now knows roughly where redditor was at the specified time based on the ip, they can narrow this down further by looking at keywords in the status message and check it against a list of addresses in the local area and select…

It's probably a combination of techniques to be honest. They do have some unprecedented access to contextually heavy data, as well as an unusually large base of free labor to supervise the learning... My creepy moment came when It correctly pointed out the exact location of this photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40127665@N03/4788700749/in/set-... I was in the middle of Costa Rica. For fear of roaming charges my pho…

Both photos are in a public folder on Flickr called "Costa Rica".

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#57

Post by dhx »

LinkedIn appears to build "social graphs" based on profile views. If person A visits the profile of person B and C it is quite likely that some form of relationship exists (perhaps an inverse relationship too). It doesn't just have to be profile views -- LinkedIn most likely keeps track of search terms too. If a random unknown visitor comes along and searches for both "Person A" and "Person C" then it is likely that a connection exists between these two persons.

It would be easy to train this system by displaying a "guess" (a friendship recommendation for person A) to persons B and C. If person B or C show interest in the recommendation then perhaps a relationship exists. Guesses could also be formed by comparing keywords/metadata found on profiles in two different social circles.

The reason I mentioned LinkedIn is that I think they do a better job of recommending/guessing who your acquaintances are than Facebook.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#58

Post by reinhardt »

JonnieCache wrote: post #19

The important thing to take away from this: If they can make guesses this accurate about your photos, imagine they guesses they're making behind the scenes about your life, your personality and your innermost thoughts. If there was a page on fb where it showed all the inferences they had made about you, sexuality, income, religion, philosophical viewpoints, mental health, etc. then people would run screaming. Of cour…

As someone with just a fake-info FB account that interacts with it maybe once or twice a week, I am more concerned by the fact that not having an (active|real) account is also a signal that says (or may say at some point in the near future) a lot about me.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#59

Post by swalsh »

DJN wrote: post #56
swalsh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably a combination of techniques to be honest. They do have some unprecedented access to contextually heavy data, as well as an unusually large base of free labor to supervise the learning... My creepy moment came when It correctly pointed out the exact location of this photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40127665@N03/4788700749/in/set-... I was in the middle of Costa Rica. For fear of roaming charges my pho…

Both photos are in a public folder on Flickr called "Costa Rica".

the facebook album was named "D40 Pics", but it would be curious if it is cross referencing photos with flikr.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#60

Post by terhechte »

Peroni wrote: post #16
terhechte wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to be taken on a smartphone. It's sufficient to open facebook on a smartphone only once (app or web) in roughly the same timeframe that the picture was taken. It can then look where one has been in the timeframe when the picture was taken by comparing the picture timestamp with the list of checkin ip addresses, and do a geolookup of the ip address against a location database.

Again, that doesn't align with my experience. The first smartphone I owned was when I arrived in the UK. In NZ, I was restricted to an old Nokia work phone.

Maybe you accessed facebook in a browser while in NZ? On a regular computer?
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