Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 168 posts

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#111

Post by joelthelion »

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…

"It seems you've been watching a lot of porn lately. Do you want to post an update about it?"

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#112

Post by tomjen3 »

pnathan wrote: post #110
tomjen3 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found googles page where they tell you which catagories of things they believe about you (basically age and interests). Some of them where right, but more than half of them was wrong (I am not, for the record, interested in Paleontology).

Can you provide a link? I'm curious now!

Can't remember.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#113

Post by davux »

pnathan wrote: post #110
tomjen3 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found googles page where they tell you which catagories of things they believe about you (basically age and interests). Some of them where right, but more than half of them was wrong (I am not, for the record, interested in Paleontology).

Can you provide a link? I'm curious now!

http://www.google.com/ads/preferences

See "Your categories"

Edit - Sorry, I copied the link from the Google results page, it acutally shows up as adspreferences in the ad, but ads/preferences below. Kind of strange.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#114

Post by emw »

sondh wrote: post #50

I don't think this is machine learning. I have Facebook suggested a few albums today (2 hours ago). Some of them are from 2+ years ago, others are recent ones. The suggestion is quite accurate (89%, 8 out of 9 albums). With the incorrect album, Facebook suggested another city with the same name but from another country! So Facebook probably just combine as much data as possible and when the matching rate is larger th…

I second the idea that this doesn't sound like machine learning. I wouldn't be surprised if there were no machine learning or data mining algorithms involved in Facebook mapping EXIF-embedded geographic coordinates in digital photographs and suggesting locations for an album based on points-of-interest near those coordinates.

Maybe some neat work with GIS enabled this, but I don't see anything that strongly indicates machine learning.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#115

Post by hyperbovine »

iradik wrote: post #70
freedompeace wrote: post #2

How could Facebook do this (technologically)? According to a redditor, " - It's not IP address . Facebook successfully identified a number of specific locations (bars, theaters, etc) even though I had uploaded the photos from my home - It's not geo-tagging . All of my photos were taken with a camera that does not geo-tag (Nikon d700). - It's not contextual tagging . There were no people tagged in the photos, no comme…

This is how it can be done without any EXIF/GPS data with a fairly dumb algorithm. It's a picture of a baby at a hospital. There are probably hundreds of baby photos being taken per day at that hospital being posted to FB. Some have GPS and some don't. The images that do have GPS, get recognized and lumped together as the same "entity" since they all look the same. FB then looks up where she lives, then looks for any…

A slightly more sophisticated approach would be to use the all /other/ data they have on her to predict what hospital she is likely to choose. Why stop with just her hometown?

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#116

Post by waterlesscloud »

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…

Or that species of insect only lives in Costa Rica.

Kidding! If it was that good, I really would be shocked.

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#117

Post by kang »

davux wrote: post #113
pnathan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide a link? I'm curious now!

http://www.google.com/ads/preferences See "Your categories" Edit - Sorry, I copied the link from the Google results page, it acutally shows up as adspreferences in the ad, but ads/preferences below. Kind of strange.

gives me a 404

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#118

Post by waffle_ss »

kang wrote: post #117
davux wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.google.com/ads/preferences See "Your categories" Edit - Sorry, I copied the link from the Google results page, it acutally shows up as adspreferences in the ad, but ads/preferences below. Kind of strange.

gives me a 404

I think he meant http://www.google.com/ads/preferences

Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

#120

Post by msbarnett »

pud wrote: post #32
phpnode wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right, but assuming the timestamp is on the photos, facebook still knows where you were at the time they were taken. The time you upload them is immaterial

In your opinion, how would Facebook know your location if you never logged in from a GPS-enabled smart phone? (and never approved an HTML5 geo permission request on your laptop). That's the interesting question here.

> In your opinion, how would Facebook know your location if you never logged in from a GPS-enabled smart phone? (and never approved an HTML5 geo permission request on your laptop).

No real trick to that; if the user signs in from an IP leased to a Christchurch, NZ ISP on March 5th, 2007, then it's a safe bet that any photos taken that day were taken near Christchurch (and you get date taken from the EXIF data of virtually every camera on the planet).

Post reply on HN