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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

#131

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

bhhaskin wrote: post #120
aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is. Instead of publicly auto-tagging you on the photo, FB could notify you that someone had uploaded a photo of you, and offer you to either: 1. Tag yourself on the photo 2. Censor yourself from the photo (blur, pixelate, black rectangle, whatever) Voilá, now the same feature is used to give control over your data.

Here is an interesting question. Is it at that point your data? Wouldn't it be the data of who ever took the photo? Why would it belong to you just because you are in the photo? I think giving users power over auto tagging make sense. But giving users power over other people's photos is a terrible idea.

I think it’s basic courtesy to ask someone if they want their picture taken or not. This would only automate the process.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#133

Post by drusepth »

tablespoon wrote: post #8

> The change affects more than a third of Facebook’s daily users who had facial recognition turned on for their accounts, according to the company. I'm surprise the number is that low. Wasn't enabling this a default? > That meant they received alerts when new photos or videos of them were uploaded to the social network. The feature had also been used to flag accounts that might be impersonating someone else... That's…

>I'm surprise the number is that low. Wasn't enabling this a default?

The first implementation appeared in 2017 [1] as tag suggestions, but the facial recognition feature we know today evolved around 2019, when it was made opt-in rather than a default setting. [2]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16794660/facebook-facial...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847650/facebook-facial-r...

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#134

Post by mminer237 »

croes wrote: post #76
mminer237 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they can see themselves in photos? So you don't have to look through all of your friends' photos to find which ones you are in and repost them yourself.

Isn't it possible to tag people even if they don't have a FB account?

You can type whatever you want as a tag, although I've never actually seen someone do this.

I guess it could just be used to annotate images, or to recall who's who for your own use, a la how people used to write everyone's names on the back of photos.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#135

Post by drusepth »

romanhn wrote: post #126
IAmGraydon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is bizarre sometimes. When this feature first appeared, everyone acted like it was the coming of the Antichrist. Now it’s going away and people have “mixed feelings”. I think people just love to hate big tech no matter what they’re doing.

Or, you know, these are different people with different values and different sets of experience.

And also, I'm sure the goalposts have moved a lot in the 3-5 years since this feature was announced.

At the time, facial recognition was almost sci-fi levels of absurd to envision, especially at scale. Nowadays, anyone can do their own facial recognition on laptop-level GPUs from freely-available open source software and every site that can use it, probably does use it in some form.

It's a lot more normalized now than it was.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#136

Post by ysavir »

eptcyka wrote: post #41
5faulker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then, it's probably FB that facilitated that kind of behavior, so more mixed feelings.

Now there's one less tool to help the victim of such abuse though.

It's not that there's one less tool. It's that the tool given to begin with was wrong for that purpose, and instead of leveraging the technology in beneficial ways, they're removing it.

They could have implemented in the account settings somewhere where you can let it alert you for any such usage of your face, but without it doing any auto-tagging or other publicly visible things which we usually complain about.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#137

Post by MrKristopher »

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…

Is facial recognition so good that it can distinguish you from a billion other people? I assumed the photo recognition relied on the social graph i.e. to look for your friends or friends of friends in your pictures.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#138

Post by drusepth »

paxys wrote: post #27
mminer237 wrote: post #15

I get all the privacy concerns, but this was actually super useful for people who opted-in. Manually retyping everybody's name when tagging them in 50 photos from an event is torturous.

Who opted in? I certainly don't remember ever doing it, yet auto tagging has always worked for me (both when I am tagging pictures and when others are tagging me).

The opt-in is at https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec -- I definitely remember intentionally opting in when it was added, and it's off on some of my throwaway accounts so I assume it wasn't auto-checked for everyone at some point.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#139

Post by rootusrootus »

jonas21 wrote: post #123
IAmGraydon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is bizarre sometimes. When this feature first appeared, everyone acted like it was the coming of the Antichrist. Now it’s going away and people have “mixed feelings”. I think people just love to hate big tech no matter what they’re doing.

Or... maybe HN is composed of different people with different viewpoints. People are more motivated to comment when they're upset about something, so it ends up looking like everyone here hates everything big tech does, when it may be that a small number of people hate decision X, a small number of people hate decision Y, and most people either like them or don't care. You often hear complaints that big tech drives p…

> Or... maybe HN is composed of different people with different viewpoints.

A useful concept for people to remember as it applies everywhere. Particularly as we get drawn into tribal politics, it would be better for people to remember that the opposition is not uniform and consists of many different viewpoints. For someone who wants to be divisive, it is trivial to cherry pick examples of bad behavior ("hypocritical") by pretending that those you disagree with must all share exactly the same priorities and opinions.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#140

Post by numpad0 »

eptcyka wrote: post #41
5faulker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then, it's probably FB that facilitated that kind of behavior, so more mixed feelings.

Now there's one less tool to help the victim of such abuse though.

Knowing outlines of how online harassment happens, I'm confident it would do far more harm than help in this context. Weaponized autism is real.
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