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Facebook turned on face recognition silently

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Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#191

Post by jacquesm »

sib wrote: post #183
jacquesm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you "told me" to delete a picture that included you that I had taken in a public place, I would "tell you" no. If you politely asked, I would generally delete the picture, depending on whether or not there was a reason that I felt I wanted the picture and whether or not there was a way to reproduce the picture without you in it. For example, if Bigfoot had run through the frame while I was taking the picture, I'd…

If you took a picture with me accidentally in the frame that would be one thing, and I could not care less about it.

If you purposefully made a picture of me and refused to delete it things could get interesting.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#193

Post by Ajedi32 »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #179
Ajedi32 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you have a book you certainly own all the information in it, but if you are never allowed to open the book and read its content (your brother wrote it but was then terribly embarrased about it and made you swear nobody would be allowed to read it) then how can you put the information to use?

Facebook's servers are computers, not people.

A human might read that book and be unable to control how they react to that information (maybe you might look at your brother differently if you knew what he wrote).

In contrast, a computer could read the book, do a bunch of processing on it, run it through a few neural nets, check your brother's privacy settings, see that the book is marked as private, then erase all its "memories" of the book from existence; the result being absolutely no different from if it had never "read" the book at all.

So even if it were true that "Facebook will run face recognition on the photo regardless", that would be irrelevant as long as it does nothing with the information obtained via that algorithm. And if you don't trust Facebook to honor your privacy setting and do nothing with the information, you shouldn't trust them to not run the facial recognition algorithm in the first place.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#194

Post by gaius »

John_KZ wrote: post #131
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

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.

by deleting facebook

They still have your photos in their training set

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#195

Post by bitL »

John_KZ wrote: post #186
bitL wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't do it alone, but if most of your friends start doing that, either you mess up their training dataset by introducing a lot of noise, or you all will get flagged as outliers. Both situations are win comparing to learned helplessness one might fall into when realizing the ways how this data can be misused.

Right now the systems in public domain reach 97% accuracy. Facebook doesn't need you, even if you get a million people to try to "trick" the system, you won't do anything. The verification is to fine-tune it. By the way, you forget that Facebook can simply exclude almost all those who know about this. What are you going to do? Do you think nobody will notice the 10M user fan page themed "Fool facebooks AI"? It just k…

We already know Uber is cherry-picking users it suspects as working for competitors, so precedent is set for what you are suggesting. It's doable obviously, and if it's doable, companies have already either implemented it or having somebody working on it.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#196

Post by EGreg »

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…

We've been uploading photos with location data for years.

Any social site knows your whereabouts. Seriously, they even tag you without asking :)

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#197

Post by crpatino »

jacquesm wrote: post #149
bitL wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand this. Why would you want to interview with a company whose core product you do not support?

It is possible to be a non-drinker and yet work for the beer factory. You recognize that other people has the right to choose options that you'd rather not pick up for yourself.

Now, if you're a belligerent teetotaler, taking such a job would be very hypocrital...

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#198

Post by squarefoot »

jacquesm wrote: post #54
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…

Which is why I do not want anybody to make any pictures of me, especially not if they are active on social media. There are exactly two pictures of me online, the one is 30 years old, the other about 10. The quickest way to get me pissed off is to point a camera at me.

Same here. For a while when going out with friends and someone wanted to take a group photo I asked if it was being uploaded to Facebook, and in that case I would get out of the camera sight, but then I realized any photo will end up on FB anyway because most people don't give a damn about their and others privacy, so today I don't allow anyone to take photos of myself in any situation, and ask them not to tag me at any cost should I appear in any photo by mistake. That way I'll probably just delay a bit the day my photo will appear with full name and personal details: I can't smash all phones of the people taking selfies in a pub or on the beach with no consideration for whoever is sitting/walking/bathing 5 meters from them. Yes, that is extreme, just as FB complete lack of respect for privacy.

If I had the right connections I'd push for some countermeasures to be added to the phone OSes, such as for example a barcode that disables the camera or covers the wearer's face through image recognition if taken from a short distance: just wear a shirt/badge with that barcode and your privacy is guaranteed: either they move away or point the camera elsewhere.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#199

Post by khedoros1 »

Jhsto wrote: post #187
khedoros1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

How many pictures do you have of yourself on Facebook? I see the setting, but it states that 'this is not yet available to you'.

No idea. I joined early and didn't really think through some of the privacy ramifications until 2008 or even 2010. Then there are the friends who don't think about them at all, and I assume that Facebook puts some stock in their tags, even if I delete them later.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#200

Post by basch »

cryptoz wrote: post #126
bfred_it wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They warned me that they activated it, so it wasn't silent , it was just opt-out (not that it's particularly better, but let's use non-clickbait terms)

It may be silent for some people and you're intentionally ignoring that. For someone who has an account but does not regularly log in, this change is silent. Yes, you saw the message, but that was by chance. Many others will have this feature silently enabled without their knowledge.

"I didnt get any mail. I also havent checked my mailbox for packages."

"I didnt get your email. I have not logged into my account lately."

It seems like semantics. You expect facebook to send an EXTERNAL notification to an operating system like ios/android or to an email provider like gmail/hotmail. Other people consider it not silent for facebook to make sure it shows up in their newsfeed.

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