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

161–170 of 224 posts

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#161

Post by bsenftner »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #150
Joeri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, aside from emotional distress, what harm are you afraid of?

I'm a woman, so different situation, but I took most photos of me offline at some point. Later, I began putting up new ones, but it was handled differently. There are more than two photos of me, but there aren't tons. I actually like being photographed, or did in my youth. But I don't like having photos of me all over the internet. Years ago, I joined an all female Yahoo group that was a spin off from a parenting and…

This is too real. Every beautiful woman I know actively fights to keep their images offline, because of these clueless assholes.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#162

Post by jacquesm »

Joeri wrote: post #155
jacquesm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a clear upside: the ability to quickly find all pictures of a person, either by that person themselves or by other people. That's not a benefit to me. > But given the value provided by the feature, again I ask: what is the harm you're afraid of? You're stuck. It's kind of annoying when you ask someone a question, they give you an answer and then you repeat the question again. Either you're going to have to…

I believe I understand your point of view (and please correct me if I don't): you don't want these companies to track any data about you because you think of digital privacy as an absolute right. Now try to understand my point of view: I think treating digital privacy as an absolute right is probably a mistake. First of all it's a denial of how the real world works (where you never have absolute privacy since other p…

You set up a strawman and then eloquently argue against it.

No, I don't think digital privacy is an absolute right. Obviously some level of online interaction is ok with me otherwise we would not be having this conversation. But I do believe that individuals should have some control over what data of their ends up online and that simply exercising that control should be possible without getting accused of being afraid of specific use cases of that data.

Value creation to society doesn't interest me one bit without an actual example of such value created. The only value FB cares about is the value of their stock and since I'm not a stockholder it doesn't create value for me.

The fact that there is potential for harm would be enough reason for me to be considerate but if even if it weren't I'd still be within my rights to limit which bits of me are online and which are not, it is you that rejects stuff without consideration and it is you that puts the onus on the people exercising their consideration to prove to you beyond some nebulous standard of doubt that those people are not afraid of something when in fact this was never the case to begin with.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#163

Post by bo1024 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #59
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #37

So, here's the weird catch-22. Or perhaps, the illusion of choice. There are two people who are in a photo. One wishes Facebook to use face recognition, the other does not. Facebook will run face recognition on the photo regardless, but how will they know who wants to be recognized, and who doesn't? Simply, they have a model of your face already trained. And they recognize you in photos--you have no say whether or no…

Think about it this way: the photo itself already contains all the information necessary to identify you, and algorithms already exist which allow that information to be easily extracted. No privacy setting in the world will change that, short of the "delete" button on the photo itself (or maybe a way to blur your face). Therefore, this setting logically _cannot_ change what information Facebook has about you; it can…

Good point, but the setting might change how that information is used, by Facebook or its users or advertisers (or subpoenas, etc).

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#164

Post by khedoros1 »

eschulz wrote: post #128
khedoros1 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can click the little arrow, go to settings, and there's a "Face Recognition" entry in the sidebar, between "Language" and "Notifications". This is on the desktop website. Sounds like it's hidden deeper if you visit from a phone?

Yes, but for me instead of "Face Recognition" it's under "Timeline and Tagging Settings", and then it's the third suggestion under "Tagging".

From other comments in the thread, it sounds like there are at least 2 different locations that they put the option. It's either region/country-specific, or an example of A/B testing, I suppose.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#165

Post by mrtksn »

Gabriel_Martin wrote: post #79
mrtksn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no notification unless you visit Facebook.com, that I no longer do regularly.

I saw it in the app. So this is not accurate.

Good for you but I don't open the app too, I wouldn't know what Facebooks does with the app but I guess Mark Zuckerberg enjoys The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#166

Post by DoreenMichele »

bsenftner wrote: post #161
DoreenMichele wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a woman, so different situation, but I took most photos of me offline at some point. Later, I began putting up new ones, but it was handled differently. There are more than two photos of me, but there aren't tons. I actually like being photographed, or did in my youth. But I don't like having photos of me all over the internet. Years ago, I joined an all female Yahoo group that was a spin off from a parenting and…

This is too real. Every beautiful woman I know actively fights to keep their images offline, because of these clueless assholes.

I'm not particularly beautiful these days. I did see myself that way in my youth. My personal opinion of my youthful experiences has changed some.

My mother placed a high value on clothes and I have a good eye for some things and I was surrounded by people who liked me and were good with a camera. An awful lot of so called beauty is manufactured.

I am not comfortable with you characterizing me as a beautiful woman. I have yet to say much about it anywhere on the internet, but will probably blog about it at some point. I have carefully positioned myself to be something other than the stereotypical woman measured primarily by my looks and whether or not men find me hot. Most wealthy, powerful women are happy to use their looks and sexuality as a part of how they make money. I think this is really corrosive to the lives of the average woman.

Beauty is, in some sense, not real. We invent it. And I am not comfortable being accused of that since I make no effort to participate in the societal conspiracy to paint women as good for one thing -- sex -- and to qualify for that primarily based on one metric -- looks. In fact, I go out of my way to sidestep all that nonsense.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#167

Post by sangnoir »

wpietri wrote: post #130
kilotaras wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After the faces are located, they’re matched against a set of candidates (which I would guess is an enumeration if all your Nth order friends [who don’t opt out of this], to reduce computational complexity. Face recognition is usually done by first transforming the face into vector space and than looking for the closest vector from known, e.g. openface[1] (which is based on google 2015 paper "FaceNet: A Unified Emb…

Wouldn't the betterness of using friend networks being reduced false positives? Facebook has 2 billion MAU, which means they have a lot of faces. Filtering down to the 50k or so that are close to you means it's much easier to find the right person, rather than a similar stranger.

> Wouldn't the betterness of using friend networks being reduced false positives?

They are not limiting to friend networks, otherwise they would not catch (out of network) strangers using your pics. One of the use cases touted is "Help protect you from strangers using your photo"

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#168

Post by russelluresti »

antoncohen wrote: post #7

I got nearly the same notification, except mine defaulted to off, it said "This setting is off, but you can turn it on any time". My guess is that they based the setting on another setting. For example there was some photo tagging thing added years ago, and I disabled that. Most of my timeline and tagging settings are set to Custom or require review.

Same here. Defaulted to off. They could be running an experiment. Roll it out to X percent of people, default half on and see who turns it off, default half off and see who turns it on.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#169

Post by web007 »

eschulz wrote: post #128
khedoros1 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can click the little arrow, go to settings, and there's a "Face Recognition" entry in the sidebar, between "Language" and "Notifications". This is on the desktop website. Sounds like it's hidden deeper if you visit from a phone?

Yes, but for me instead of "Face Recognition" it's under "Timeline and Tagging Settings", and then it's the third suggestion under "Tagging".

I don't see anything but a divider between "Language" and "Notifications", and for me the only "face" anywhere on the "Timeline and Tagging" page is "Facebook".

Even on mobile the set of steps they published doesn't work. "More Settings" leads to a generic settings page with no "face" as well.

Post reply on HN