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

Facebook turned on face recognition silently

imgur.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 224 posts

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#131

Post by John_KZ »

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

It doesn't work that way. They can see that you tag wrong too many people, and you're obviously an outlier, so your data is rejected. The only way you can "win" is by deleting facebook and pushing for better data protection laws.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#132

Post by antoncohen »

khedoros1 wrote: post #42
mmjaa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't find it in my Facebook settings - can you give us a pointer where to find these settings in Facebooks cesspool of anti-patterns they like to promote as the "settings" page...

There's a "Face Recognition" tab that's new to the settings page since the last time I went through disabling things. For me, it shows up on the left side right under "Language".

For me I had a related setting under the "Timeline and Tagging" tab (set to "No One"), there was no "Face Recognition" tab... until I click "Go to Settings" in the notification, then the "Face Recognition" tab appeared, and the similar setting was removed from "Timeline and Tagging".

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#133

Post by mmjaa »

khedoros1 wrote: post #111
mmjaa wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I don't see it. Maybe its a USA-only thing? (Europe here.)

Maybe it's something they're A/B testing?

It would appear to be the case - I don't see it, but others in Europe do... its maybe also related to local laws (Austria) disallowing such things, and if that is the case I sure am thankful.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#135

Post by StavrosK »

web007 wrote: post #31
tucif wrote: post #24

Here is the facebook site explaining how this works/will work. https://www.facebook.com/about/basics/manage-your-privacy/fa...

I have to assume that this UX is intentionally awful: Go to Settings. Go to More. Tap Privacy Shortcuts. Tap More Settings. Tap Face Recognition. Tap Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos? Select No if you don't want to let Facebook recognize you in photos and videos. Also, this set of steps doesn't work on the desktop browser. I don't see More or Privacy Shortcuts in My Settings, only…

Can you post the URL to it?

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#136

Post by Demiurge »

jacquesm wrote: post #77
klenwell wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you. But I'd also be worried about coming off as the angriest (or most paranoid) guy on earth. I probably already hold the title in my family. What would be neat is a polite discreet social signal that politely discreetly signaled this to people with a camera. If you did it right, you might also get rich in a Pet Rock sort of way.

I've had exactly one run-in over 10 years or so about this with someone who did not believe me when I told him to delete a picture of me he just took. Other than that everybody seems to understand just fine.

I know only one coworker who understands this concern. No one else seems to care, and the girl I am dating, who is quite technical, has been very suspicious and saddened by me not wanting to put up any pictures of us together. It was basically I relent or something is really wrong, so I gave up. This is the world we live in.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#137

Post by krrrh »

Here’s the press release announcing the new control from December.

> People gave us feedback that they would find it easier to manage face recognition through a simple setting, so we’re pairing these tools with a single “on/off” control. If your tag suggestions setting is currently set to “none,” then your default face recognition setting will be set to “off” and will remain that way until you decide to change it.

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/managing-your-identity-...

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#138

Post by cycrutchfield »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #91
cycrutchfield wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they have a model of your face already trained, or are they just using a generic facial recognition neural network to compute an embedding vector and then finding identities that are close to that vector in L2 distance or whatever?

How do they discern the difference between someone without an account (ie: a new face), a poor result from the network, and someone who's opted out? Unless the default for everyone is "opt-out", which I highly doubt.

Maybe they use some sort of locality-sensitive hash to efficiently gather a set of (approximate) candidates that are close by in that embedding space, and then use some heuristics to further narrow down who the most probable match is.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#139

Post by TremendousJudge »

craigsmansion wrote: post #127
bitL wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you want to fight it: don't use Facebook ! No matter how much an individual thinks they're resisting or messing with the system, they're not. The only way to win is to not participate.

if other people still upload pictures of you to Facebook it's the same thing

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#140

Post by bitL »

craigsmansion wrote: post #127
bitL wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you want to fight it: don't use Facebook ! No matter how much an individual thinks they're resisting or messing with the system, they're not. The only way to win is to not participate.

I don't use Facebook myself for a few years already, which is paradoxical as they were headhunting me recently to lead one of their ML teams and didn't mind that I quit them long time ago :D But maybe they were just harvesting my own "outlier" training dataset - who knows if I was filmed while onsite and now my gait is analyzed to smallest details including reconstructed skeleton and muscle attachments, my appearance is predicted for the next 30 years under various aging assumptions, maybe later used to fabricate realistically faked video etc. These things are now possible and not that difficult anymore.
Post reply on HN