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Facebook turned on face recognition silently

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Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#101

Post by Raphmedia »

_sdegutis wrote: post #35

On a related note, FB seems to use the microphone, with permissions disabled, when the app isn’t even open, to listen in on our conversations and later advertise things it hears us talking about. I don’t have 100% proof of this but we’ve mentioned things we never googled or even put in our phones or computers and they are pretty specific (purple dress, tactile diaper bags, beer) and they come up the next day or two i…

What if, instead, you were talking about those items because Facebook's algorithm manipulated you into thinking about them?

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#102

Post by bjt2n3904 »

bitL wrote: post #87
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal, but years ago I uploaded a picture of a friend. He's a bit of a hermit, and doesn't have social media accounts. The picture scrolled by several times that week, and Facebook asked me to tag who this was. (This was perhaps... 2010?) I uploaded perhaps twenty or so photos, but that was the only one they asked about. I haven't seen this for a while, but I used to get my friends pictures scrolling by. (Not eve…

If you want to fight it, tag them as wrong persons to mess up their training dataset. I am sure they would love that! :) Maybe even start a Facebook group "False positives" where people would do this for fun and to "stick it to the man" lol

I'm sure they're on the lookout for that, as well. If they have enough confidence in their model, I'm sure they'd raise an eyebrow at something that only has 30% confidence, say "thanks", and then simply flag my account to not be trusted to train their models.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#103

Post by dsfyu404ed »

staplers wrote: post #8
acd wrote: post #5

So link surveillance cameras to the Facebook face recognition and cell phone location data of users and law enforcement will be so much easier. A law enforcement json API

As Facebook's user rate declines, I genuinely believe they'll start generating larger and larger revenue from this exact thing. A majority of the population's data is already there, they can survive for decades by renting out that data.

And people will have the FBI going through their mail because an algorithm written by someone who lived by "move fast and break things" flagged them as a commie (or whatever the equivalent is 30yr from now) over some combination of things they posted in high school.

If you spread incompetence around just right the end result is approximately the same as malice.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#104

Post by jacquesm »

mod wrote: post #97
jacquesm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should I have to be afraid of anything? Is this a riff on the 'if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear' theme? I just don't think it is ok that large companies are working their way into datasets about every living body on the planet and that is my right. See also, article 12: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upo…

I can't speak for the guy you're replying to, but I'm also curious what harm you're afraid of, mostly so that I can also be afraid of it. Definitely not the "nothing to hide" stuff as I'm very pro-privacy. I have a vague fear of some kind of dystopian situation that arises or is influenced by these huge, accurate data sets. I'm curious if you have more specific qualms with it. My vague fear hasn't kept photos of me o…

I'm not afraid of anything, I just want a modicum of control over who has access to my data and Facebook is one of the companies that I would not trust with anything.

Why does there have to be a scenario attached to this? They've shown time and again that they don't give a rats ass about the people whose data they collect.

The default is not 'on' when it comes to sharing your data, the default is 'off', and even then it should be grounded in need. As long as I don't see the need there is no other reason that I would need to justify my behavior.

On the other hand, there is a very large need for FB to explain its behavior but hardly anybody seems to care. So I'm happy to be the exception.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#105

Post by bjt2n3904 »

znpy wrote: post #62
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #37

So, here's the weird catch-22. Or perhaps, the illusion of choice. There are two people who are in a photo. One wishes Facebook to use face recognition, the other does not. Facebook will run face recognition on the photo regardless, but how will they know who wants to be recognized, and who doesn't? Simply, they have a model of your face already trained. And they recognize you in photos--you have no say whether or no…

> how will they know who wants to be recognized, and who doesn't? If they have enough data to recognize you, they will. They just won't tag you.

That was meant to be a rhetorical question. ;) But I'm glad you see this too!

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#106

Post by jdcarter »

jacquesm wrote: post #74
Joeri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, aside from emotional distress, what harm are you afraid of?

Why should I have to be afraid of anything? Is this a riff on the 'if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear' theme? I just don't think it is ok that large companies are working their way into datasets about every living body on the planet and that is my right. See also, article 12: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upo…

As I understand US law, when you're in public you have no expectation of privacy, and you can't do anything about having your photo taken. This is tangental to your point, but does that also mean that Facebook is legally free to ID you in photos which are taken in public? I really don't know.

(FWIW, I'm with you, it makes me crazy when family members post all their holiday photos on Facebook and tag me in them.)

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#107

Post by jacquesm »

growse wrote: post #99
jacquesm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is simply insisting on something that is listed in the universal declaration of human rights something that should warrant a tinfoil hat? In my experience stuff like this is abused sooner or later, most likely sooner. I see absolutely no reason why I should willingly consent to such abuse. Privacy is important, guard it because if you don't there is no way back.

> Why is simply insisting on something that is listed in the universal declaration of human rights something that should warrant a tinfoil hat? But you're not insisting on that. You're insisting that no-one takes a picture of you, even (presumably) if you're standing in a public place. You might want to read what the rest of the UDHR says before you try and infringe on the rights of others.

Your assumptions are not borne out in practice. Others that purposefully take my picture in order to share that on social media does not include total strangers making pictures on the streets.

But if a stranger on the street wants to make a close up picture of me then it could get interesting, so far nobody has been that impolite.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#108

Post by kelnos »

jacquesm wrote: post #74
Joeri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, aside from emotional distress, what harm are you afraid of?

Why should I have to be afraid of anything? Is this a riff on the 'if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear' theme? I just don't think it is ok that large companies are working their way into datasets about every living body on the planet and that is my right. See also, article 12: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upo…

I don't read that as "no one can take my photo", though. Certainly that language should protect me from people invading my private space to take photos of me, but if I'm out and about in public, I should have no expectation that no photos will be taken of me, and I would feel very wrong asking someone to delete a photo of me in a public place. I would consider that to be infringing on their rights.

I get that photos of people can be a lot more harmful than a casual photographer might assume, but I would never accede to a request from a random stranger to delete a photograph that they just happened to be in. If someone requested that I not take a photo of them, I personally would comply out of a sense of politeness, but I don't believe anyone has a legal or moral obligation to comply when in public.

(But yes, I know, this is just my opinion and preference, just like yours is yours.)

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#109

Post by cryptoz »

Gabriel_Martin wrote: post #79
mrtksn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no notification unless you visit Facebook.com, that I no longer do regularly.

I saw it in the app. So this is not accurate.

Was it a push notification? Or did you have to open the app to see it?

It's silent unless there was a proactive message to you from Facebook that your face will start to be recognized. This facial recognition happens even when you're not using the app.

So Facebook is waiting for you to take action before telling you anything. That is not proactive, it is silent.

What if you don't go on Facebook any more but have an account? You'd never know this was happening.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#110

Post by kilotaras »

electrograv wrote: post #52
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #37

So, here's the weird catch-22. Or perhaps, the illusion of choice. There are two people who are in a photo. One wishes Facebook to use face recognition, the other does not. Facebook will run face recognition on the photo regardless, but how will they know who wants to be recognized, and who doesn't? Simply, they have a model of your face already trained. And they recognize you in photos--you have no say whether or no…

Usually these systems are implemented via a generic face detector that first runs on the whole image, to locate all the faces that are present. After the faces are located, they’re matched against a set of candidates (which I would guess is an enumeration if all your Nth order friends [who don’t opt out of this], to reduce computational complexity). This isn’t the only possible way to do it, but I believe it’s the mo…

> After the faces are located, they’re matched against a set of candidates (which I would guess is an enumeration if all your Nth order friends [who don’t opt out of this], to reduce computational complexity.

Face recognition is usually done by first transforming the face into vector space and than looking for the closest vector from known, e.g. openface[1] (which is based on google 2015 paper "FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering"). Facebook itself opensourced[2] a library for efficient search of nearest neighbors in such spaces.

It doesn't seem likely that generating set of Nth order friends (which grow very quickly with N) would be better than just having a global set or a split of global set by some characteristics (e.g. gender, race).

[1] https://cmusatyalab.github.io/openface/ [2] https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss

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