Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed. • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#161

Post by falling » Thu, Dec 22, 2011, 6:37 AM UTC

patrickaljord wrote: post #153

falling wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook lets you download your data as well: https://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=download Just wanted to balance the “Facebook evil / Google not evil” diatribe, as when discussing these topics only Google is ever mentioned.

Google allows you to download your data, which includes the emails of your contacts, your icals etc. In Facebook you get your list of contacts consisting in a list of full names in pure text, no emails. The only way to get in contact with them is to connect with them on facebook, making the data completely useless. With Google, you can export everything and use it somewhere else and still be in touch with your contac…

Man, you really want Facebook to be evil, do you?

Google gives you the email addresses because you provided them with that data, it's yours to begin with. Facebook will give you the email addresses, but only for the users that allowed it to share that data with you.

Will Google give you the email addresses of your Google+ contacts, if they decided not to share their address with you? I doubt it, and rightly so.

“Data Liberation” means that you own your data, not that using some social network gives you the right to be able to communicate with people outside of that service. If you want to contact them outside of Facebook, ask them their email. It's your problem, not Facebook's.

Your argument is like saying that Google should give me my Gmail contacts' phone numbers, so I can contact them without using email.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#162

Post by modeless » Thu, Dec 22, 2011, 7:18 AM UTC

iamandrus wrote: post #158

henrybridge wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said on Quora, we use the location field that you put into the album when you uploaded it. The album location isn't displayed in the caption for individual photos and isn't displayed that prominently on the album page, so you're probably just not seeing that you set it when it was uploaded in 2009.

I never entered anything into the location field (I would have remembered doing it), yet it got the exact city and state where I took the photos.

You specifically remember leaving a form field blank on a web page three years ago?

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#163

Post by freshhawk » Thu, Dec 22, 2011, 9:06 AM UTC

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…

They already sell that data to credit agencies who use it to produce more accurate credit scores (and get the answers to those questions they are not legally allowed to ask).

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#164

Post by iamandrus » Thu, Dec 22, 2011, 9:08 AM UTC

modeless wrote: post #162

iamandrus wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never entered anything into the location field (I would have remembered doing it), yet it got the exact city and state where I took the photos.

You specifically remember leaving a form field blank on a web page three years ago?

I would have remembered when the message to tag the location of my photos came up.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#165

Post by sgibat » Thu, Dec 22, 2011, 10:23 AM UTC

iamandrus wrote: post #164

modeless wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You specifically remember leaving a form field blank on a web page three years ago?

I would have remembered when the message to tag the location of my photos came up.

It didn't work like that. It was a plain blank text field among a couple other blank text fields. No search was brought up upon data entry. Very innocuous; Perhaps that why you don't remember it.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#166

Post by cafard » Thu, Dec 22, 2011, 4:07 PM UTC

boredguy8 wrote: post #147

jemfinch wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, I think that if that 1 service makes it possible for you to backup all your information and allows you to remove all the information from their service if you want to, then it shouldn't be a problem... Something like Google's Data Liberation Front? http://www.dataliberation.org/ I put all my eggs in one basket every time I take the family to the grocery store. It's unclear to me why storing all my informat…

When you drive, your goals and the goals of everyone else on the road are roughly aligned insofar as you all want to travel from one place to another place quickly and safely. There are pretty rough consequences for those whose goals aren't similarly aligned. So yes, you could be killed by someone else driving drunk, but it's relatively unlikely. Google's goals and mine aren't aligned at all, except instrumentally. S…

Or "earns them more not to care".

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#167

Post by iamandrus » Fri, Dec 23, 2011, 7:33 AM UTC

sgibat wrote: post #165

iamandrus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have remembered when the message to tag the location of my photos came up.

It didn't work like that. It was a plain blank text field among a couple other blank text fields. No search was brought up upon data entry. Very innocuous; Perhaps that why you don't remember it.

Believe me, I would have remembered doing it. I wouldn't have cared about a location tagging message if I had entered the location manually. Not to mention I couldn't even remember the names of some of the cities where the photos were taken until Facebook suggested them to me.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#168

Post by biturd » Thu, Dec 29, 2011, 4:00 AM UTC

jemfinch wrote: post #142

pilgrim689 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the argument is that having all your information in one service (Google, Facebook,..) is like having all your eggs in one basket. Then, if the company decides to sell your information, lose it, etc., it's too easy, and you're left empty-handed. However, I think that if that 1 service makes it possible for you to backup all your information and allows you to remove all the information from their service if y…

> However, I think that if that 1 service makes it possible for you to backup all your information and allows you to remove all the information from their service if you want to, then it shouldn't be a problem... Something like Google's Data Liberation Front? http://www.dataliberation.org/ I put all my eggs in one basket every time I take the family to the grocery store. It's unclear to me why storing all my informat…

Imagine if google died. You have your email with them. Now you can't login to any other service that you have forgotten your login and password to, because you don't have access to email.

Say you use Google Apps For Domains. Thinking it is safer because you own your own domain. Arguments that you don't really own that domain aside, if google dies, you won't be able to transfer that domain away from google.

Email is the backbone of an approval system for just about everything.

I think you can pretty safely put all your eggs in one basket, as long as you take one egg out, that being your email access. At the very least, forward all inbound emails to some other service so you have access to those in an emergency.

Ideally, we would all have our own mini email servers that we control and manage. However, managing an email server is perhaps one of the harder chunks of tech to manage. From anti-spam to just configuring all the pieces, it is much more than most are willing to do.