Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#221

Post by TuringNYC » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 12:57 AM UTC

drusepth wrote: post #121

TuringNYC wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or half empty -- as evidence they were somewhere unfortunate (doing something totally benign and unrelated.)

Why would this be a concern? At worst, you're somewhere unfortunate (doing something benign and unrelated) and someone brings you in for questioning about it. Wouldn't they do that in many cases even if your GPS was off (for example, from seeing you on cameras or other means)? It seems better to be able to bring in as many people as possible to get whatever information is needed to help with whatever situation was un…

Broadly speaking though, it is because the criminal justice system in the US focuses on conviction as the metric of success, not whether the conviction is of the correct person -- it is simply whether there is sufficient evidence to convince the jury, or sufficient fear to garner an quick plea bargain.

Tens of thousands of people confess to crimes is because they are given the option:

- 6 months for a plea bargain confession

- 10-20yrs if they "fight the charges" but get convicted in court

Many cannot afford expensive lawyers, so often times, the odds are stacked against them in court.

In more select scenarios, people confess to crimes they had nothing to do with because of pressure applied. One of many examples would be that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge In summary: [Innocent person] + [cowprod electrocution] = [guilty confession]

Edit: flow

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#222

Post by icebraining » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 1:04 AM UTC

VvR-Ox wrote: post #191

kraftman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you gaining in exchange for making your life harder?

You gain more conscious decision making and that can help you a lot in life. Sure you could just give in and "go with the flow" because that's what majority does and it's very convenient. Also people as social beings want to belong to groups and doing the same stuff they do is the easiest way to gain access to groups. That's the reason why so many use WA and FB and don't even care about their data. They already gave…

How is using location services "going with the flow", but you using the Internet isn't? Are you ceding to the majority rather than having courage and a strong personality?

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#223

Post by icebraining » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 1:09 AM UTC

gdulli wrote: post #102

miguelrochefort wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you believe that corporations are evil and basically out to get you, but the vast majority of people doesn't. I think it's safe to assume that you're the outlier here. Have you ever tried putting yourself in the shoes of people who leave their GPS on? Can you see how much better the user experience is? Can you understand why someone who never had a negative experience involving their location data might pref…

> I'm sure you believe that corporations are evil and basically out to get you, but the vast majority of people doesn't. I think it's safe to assume that you're the outlier here. I've worked in ad tech before. I used to write code to do some of this tracking and enable analytics on it. Nobody I worked with was out to antagonize users, but in principle I'd rather not feed a master profile about myself that gets matche…

You're being tracked anyway just by having your phone turned on.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#224

Post by ktsmith » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 5:04 AM UTC

rbosinger wrote: post #209

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the exact day when my daughter started first grade this year, Google Photos (which I use pretty often) notified me that it had made a new video montage. It started with a title slide saying "Look how fast they grow", and then showed photos and videos of her (not a single mistake with one of my other kids or any of her friends) growing up from ages 0 to 6, ending with the photo I had just taken of her in front of s…

I've had it make me around 3 if those already for my 2.5 year old. It's the same video but they just keep adding a few more months into it. I always save them. It's amazing, creepy and well done. I had a Premiere project where I was painstakingly trying to compile a similar thing and now I just gave up on that.

I have dozens of these videos now for my two kids and even one or two that are called "Dog days" or something like that with my dog featured instead of the kids. They are usually pretty good but every once in a while there's a blurry pic or they include a video instead of photos and there's some background motion that's distracting. They've gotten much better since they were first introduced.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#225

Post by drusepth » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 7:36 AM UTC

eptcyka wrote: post #172

drusepth wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would this be a concern? At worst, you're somewhere unfortunate (doing something benign and unrelated) and someone brings you in for questioning about it. Wouldn't they do that in many cases even if your GPS was off (for example, from seeing you on cameras or other means)? It seems better to be able to bring in as many people as possible to get whatever information is needed to help with whatever situation was un…

It seems you have not at all dealt with ill intentioned law enforcement entities.

While I would wager that I've dealt with police and the court system _significantly_ more than the average American, I will admit I haven't ever encountered ill intentioned law enforcement entities -- it's hard to believe I'm just lucky, though.

I think it's pretty safe to say bad LEOs make the news because they're extremely rare, and the backlash against each one found signifies that the oversight exists to ensure they don't last long.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#226

Post by api » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

miguelrochefort wrote: post #94

api wrote: post #7

I've come to believe that privacy "by design" is impossible in the hyper-connected age. There are too many vectors for tracking, linking, and de-anonymization and software in general is too insecure. The only solution to the privacy problem is legislation. My favorite idea is HIPAA type regulations for intimate personal data like audio, location, etc. Leak location data? That will be $10,000 per incident where an inc…

I agree with you that privacy is impossible by design. You're free to take the precautions you deem necessary to prevent others from accessing information you want to keep to yourself. I will defend your right to not be coerced into producing information against you will, but I can't help you once the information is out. I don't think it's reasonable to expect to be able to stop the collection, analysis, and distribu…

Your last sentence is total capitulation to a dystopia.

The psychological effect of knowing you're always being watched could mean the end of any cultural or social innovation.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#227

Post by brokenmachine » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

a-dub wrote: post #219

miguelrochefort wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scary? I think that's pretty cool actually. The more ways we have to implicitly correlate/extract data using these techniques, the more accurate model of the world we can build. It reminds me of this pretty cool research about extracting audio from silent videos: http://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibr...

The technology is super cool. As is the stuff where they can reconstruct audio from a video of a potato chip bag that was in the room. Fast computers, DSP, effective pattern matching and reconstruction... some of the most fascinating stuff out there. Where it gets scary, I guess, is where it upends the standard norms and expectations of privacy. As the tools proliferate, forensic reconstruction type analysis becomes…

The scariest part for me is how it keeps getting cheaper, so mass-surveillance is now possible to do economically at an unprecedented scale. It's awesome power to wield, and I'm not sure any government or company can be trusted with such power.

Also drone swarms. They scare the shit out of me for the same reason.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#228

Post by brokenmachine » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 4:05 AM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #214

josefresco wrote: post #197

Imagine being at a bar, and a guy engages you in conversation. You try your best to indicate you're not interested, and your friends help shoo him away. Then, that night when we gets home Facebook tells him your name and suggests you connect. Creepy AF (and not the guy)

If they are using the dust on your camera apparently you'd have to both take photos with the same camera and then upload them to your respective accounts. Then facebook will correlate the dust and learn you are friends. I don't see that happening... ever. Even if it were possible (I'm pretty sure dust and scratches on a camera lens aren't in focus...).

It could also be the sensor, say if certain pixels were slightly less sensitive than the surrounding ones. You could run statistical analysis of the image and spot the similarities.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#229

Post by brokenmachine » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 4:15 AM UTC

the-watchtower wrote: post #164

I am going to go out on a limb and say that this crosses the line from "invasion of privacy" to "just plain evil." Seriously: this is the type of stuff that you expect to find in state-sponsored malware, not software that's forced onto the majority of consumers.

> not software that's forced onto the majority of consumers

I agree with you on your other points, but not "forced".

I've left Facebook and encourage anyone who cares about privacy at all to do the same.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#230

Post by vertexFarm » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #79

vertexFarm wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I get that it adds value to the company. But what do you mean by defense? How is filing patents that you don't intend to produce so you can win legal battles any different from patent trolling?

The "defense" part is that big company X with a large patent portfolio might sue you for infringing on a patent - unless you have a large patent portfolio because then if they sue you, your lawyers can review everything they're doing and compare it to your patent portfolio and find ways to sue them. This is something like mutually assured destruction. It seems preposterous to me, but this is also the basic idea I've…

Ah I see, that makes more sense. So basically the court case looks at the pool of patents each company has, and one that has a lot of patents related to the industry it's involved in looks more legit than a potential patent troll holding a bunch of totally unrelated stuff. Is that more or less correct?

Sorry for contradicting you earlier. That still seems like a crazy way to manage IP, but after all I haven't got a better solution. Thanks for explaining. In my career I haven't been expected to produce patents very often. I'll try to remain a bit more humble.