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Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#101

Post by slownews45 »

pempem wrote: post #73
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?

No - we are not going after both - the AG's take high profile low hanging easy target cases.

I've personally tried to get police / DA / AG type response on a fair number of white collar type cases. Crickets.

Stolen checks / AP fraud, even stuff that would be pretty damn easy to track down (ie, whose name was on account that cashed this check) - there is almost no follow-up. It really can be eye opening.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#102

Post by AuthorizedCust »

ryandrake wrote: post #46
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?

The privacy cat is already out of the bag once someone uploads a photo of you without your consent. That's the root behavior that should be corrected, and it's hard because the onus is on the privacy-conscious user, to get everyone else's cooperation. The facial recognition just adds even more privacy-questionable metadata. My dream facial recognition feature for Facebook would be to allow me, as a non-user of Facebo…

Not exactly. From the perspective of building data of concern, simply uploading photos won't do that. Uploading photos just potentially creates databases of rando faces.

It is the tying of these faces to a name (identity) that's the challenge. Further, the crucial data comes from a human's act of tagging a person in a photo.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#103

Post by jdavis703 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #94
the_other wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

> 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. I've decided that I must be atypical around name recall for some reason or another. I often do ask, because as you said it is human to forget, but I find myself forgetting like 3 times in the course of a conversation sometimes, I could really use a machine of this sort.

Face blindness probably operates on a spectrum. I too aren’t face blind, but often struggle to remember the names of infrequent contacts until I get some other prompt, like vocal recognition.

I assume this is less of a genetic problem, but related to having undiagnosed myopia as a child when perhaps facial recognition pathways are in a critical development stage.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#104

Post by jdavis703 »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #99
whimsicalism wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I've decided that I must be atypical around name recall for some reason or another. I often do ask, because as you said it is human to forget, but I find myself forgetting like 3 times in the course of a conversation sometimes, I could really use a machine of this sort.

Great! But if it is not without the consent of the person involved though, it is your "convenience" breaching someone else's privacy. I think it is important to think about this.

I don’t see how organic facial recognition is any worse than electronic recognition. Evidently some people can take a simple wanted or missing persons person and solve a case. But for me that ability feels like magic. How is having an aid, like facial recognition glasses, any worse?

This of course assumes a non-scalable offline system. Obviously something online like China’s social credit system is more of a breach.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#105

Post by dang »

bryan_w wrote: post #47
dang wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

I don't know about this one @dang. Respectfully I took a look at his comment history, and while they have some "spicy" comments, it doesn't seem to be for trolling purposes. I won't disagree that perhaps he broke the rules with the comment and it could be rephrased better, but it does seem like he is a real poster with a legitimate (although unpopular) viewpoint and could use a bit of grace, eh?

Not just with that one comment.

It's easy enough to get unbanned.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#106

Post by whimsicalism »

jdavis703 wrote: post #103
whimsicalism wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I've decided that I must be atypical around name recall for some reason or another. I often do ask, because as you said it is human to forget, but I find myself forgetting like 3 times in the course of a conversation sometimes, I could really use a machine of this sort.

Face blindness probably operates on a spectrum. I too aren’t face blind, but often struggle to remember the names of infrequent contacts until I get some other prompt, like vocal recognition. I assume this is less of a genetic problem, but related to having undiagnosed myopia as a child when perhaps facial recognition pathways are in a critical development stage.

I think for me it is genetic, my dad is also very bad at this - although he is more confidently wrong than I am.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#107

Post by jdavis703 »

ryandrake wrote: post #46
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?

The privacy cat is already out of the bag once someone uploads a photo of you without your consent. That's the root behavior that should be corrected, and it's hard because the onus is on the privacy-conscious user, to get everyone else's cooperation. The facial recognition just adds even more privacy-questionable metadata. My dream facial recognition feature for Facebook would be to allow me, as a non-user of Facebo…

In theory one could build a perceptual hash that had a universal opt-in. But I’m skeptical such a scheme could avoid collisions (e.g. identical twins) or perhaps even doppelgänger-like strangers.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#108

Post by mechanical_bear »

8note wrote: post #87
ryandrake wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The privacy cat is already out of the bag once someone uploads a photo of you without your consent. That's the root behavior that should be corrected, and it's hard because the onus is on the privacy-conscious user, to get everyone else's cooperation. The facial recognition just adds even more privacy-questionable metadata. My dream facial recognition feature for Facebook would be to allow me, as a non-user of Facebo…

the privacy has been broken once you've been photographed without your consent. The same features for name association can be done offline once the picture exists. Just show people the picture, and see if anyone knows who it is

Consent is not required in a public setting.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#109

Post by jdavis703 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #106
jdavis703 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Face blindness probably operates on a spectrum. I too aren’t face blind, but often struggle to remember the names of infrequent contacts until I get some other prompt, like vocal recognition. I assume this is less of a genetic problem, but related to having undiagnosed myopia as a child when perhaps facial recognition pathways are in a critical development stage.

I think for me it is genetic, my dad is also very bad at this - although he is more confidently wrong than I am.

For sure it could be genetic for a subset of people — I unintentionally ruled that out.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#110

Post by mechanical_bear »

badRNG wrote: post #86
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> and hell lot to loose by lying this straight face among employees. And if, in a year an employee speaks out and leaks that FB never deleted the data? What would happen then? I don't think anything would happen, they wouldn't lose much, and no one would be too surprised.

“We didn’t realize that our old archive data was retained. Whoopsie.”
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