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

Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 196 posts

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#141

Post by jjj123 »

drusepth wrote: post #130
unsungNovelty wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it really breaching someone's privacy to assist your own memory of the things they've chosen to (repeatedly) tell you?

I think the breach of privacy is giving an almost trillion dollar corporation free training data via my face and name combination.

I don’t mind an individual knowing this information, but I’d rather that individual not hand that data over to a megacorp that has a million other unknown uses for it.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#142

Post by bryan_w »

x0x0 wrote: post #97
sharkweek wrote: post #58

Here's where Facebook's brand reputation sits in my mind today: I do not believe them at all. I do not believe they've had some change of heart regarding "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." I do not believe they intend to not use this technology in some other privacy-invading way. Trying to figure out their real angle here. Avoid regulation? "Good" PR at a time when they despe…

fb just had to pay $650m to people in Illinois for blatantly violating their biometrics law. I suspect that between Illinois and the EU, there's flatly no way to reliably legally do this.

Yeah, I could see Illinois saying that scanning a picture for only opt-in templates is still "scanning" people who haven't opted in because it does face detection and FB not wanting to take it to the Supreme Court.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#143

Post by darthvoldemort »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #116
zbowling wrote: post #21

The facial recognition feature is how I figured out someone was doxxing and harassing me on their page. Getting the notification that it thinks I appeared in a photo they had ripped from my FB profile was the tip off. I have mixed feelings.

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.

Actually your comment is pretty bizarre.

You're distilling your impressions from thousands of people into a single sentence, and then you're taking a single person's response and using that to push your agenda that "people just love to hate big tech". It's fascinating that you think this is a valid observation on your part.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#144

Post by baryphonic »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #116
zbowling wrote: post #21

The facial recognition feature is how I figured out someone was doxxing and harassing me on their page. Getting the notification that it thinks I appeared in a photo they had ripped from my FB profile was the tip off. I have mixed feelings.

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.

Is there any one single representative of "HN" as a body of opinions?

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#145

Post by jjj123 »

jdavis703 wrote: post #104
unsungNovelty wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am definitely anti facial recognition in general, precisely because of your second point. If I felt there were reasonable incentives for recognition to stay offline/individual scale that would be fine with me. But obviously we’re heading in the opposite direction, where corporations use facial recognition to gather even more data on users for ad dollars, and governments use it to surveil citizens for “national security.”

I don’t want to help either of those initiatives, so for now I’m strictly anti facial recognition, even for benign use cases at the micro level.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#146

Post by m0zg »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #116
zbowling wrote: post #21

The facial recognition feature is how I figured out someone was doxxing and harassing me on their page. Getting the notification that it thinks I appeared in a photo they had ripped from my FB profile was the tip off. I have mixed feelings.

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.

I think assuming malice on the part of Zuck is a good default. It's as in that blockbuster movie "no matter who wins, you lose". The only winning move is not to play.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#147

Post by marwis »

skybrian wrote: post #84
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…

That's kind of a radical position. People shouldn't take photos of crowds in public places? You want veto power over that?

Not radical enough. It should be an opt-in rather opt-out. A public website should verify that every person on the photo consented to being publicly displayed. Otherwise their faces should be pixelated.

I can certainly see things going that way in EU within a decade.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#148

Post by reaperducer »

Vrondi wrote: post #89
skybrian wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of a radical position. People shouldn't take photos of crowds in public places? You want veto power over that?

In the USA at least, there is no legal expectation of privacy on a public street. So, for news reporting purposes, you can publish photos of a crowd in public. However, as soon as you step onto private property, this changes. Even at places like shopping malls and stores, the owner of that place can take your photo for security, but cannot publish it, and it is not kosher for photographers to take photos of customers…

However, as soon as you step onto private property, this changes. Even at places like shopping malls and stores, the owner of that place can take your photo for security, but cannot publish it, and it is not kosher for photographers to take photos of customers in these settings and publish them without getting a signed model release form the subject of the photo.

You're on the right track, but it's somewhat more complicated than that. There are plenty of times when you can be on private property and it's perfectly legal for someone to publish your photo.

Two companies I've worked for have brought in lawyers for staff training on this. It's nuanced.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#149

Post by ike0790 »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #116
zbowling wrote: post #21

The facial recognition feature is how I figured out someone was doxxing and harassing me on their page. Getting the notification that it thinks I appeared in a photo they had ripped from my FB profile was the tip off. I have mixed feelings.

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.

lmao

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#150

Post by Karunamon »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #128
jonas21 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is also why it's much more valuable to look at user metrics than actual feedback when making design decisions. Individual pieces of feedback can be valuable, but if you let it do the driving then you can end up making changes that worsen your product. You become subject to the will of the most vocal critics at any given moment.

Be careful with this advice, though. Writing off feedback, as Mozilla does, can blow up in your face as you dismiss any and all criticism as being from a vocal minority of whiners.
Post reply on HN