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Facebook turned on face recognition silently

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Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#31
post #24

Here is the facebook site explaining how this works/will work. https://www.facebook.com/about/basics/manage-your-privacy/fa...

I have to assume that this UX is intentionally awful:

Go to Settings.

Go to More.

Tap Privacy Shortcuts.

Tap More Settings.

Tap Face Recognition.

Tap Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos?

Select No if you don't want to let Facebook recognize you in photos and videos.

Also, this set of steps doesn't work on the desktop browser. I don't see More or Privacy Shortcuts in My Settings, only in the ? menu at the top (clicked by accident). Once you go to More, I don't see any section for Face Recognition anywhere on the page.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#32
post #21

More than a decade ago Mark Zuckerberg said that anyone who gave him a photo of themselves was a "dumb fuck". His entire plan this whole time has been to do exactly this kind of thing (edit: because he thinks it is profit-maximizing), and he thinks you're a dumb fuck (just like me) for uploading your photo to let him use in the maximum-scary-surveillance way. We should all just get off Facebook. The problem is that y…

This is why I think the 'right to be forgotten' legislation might actually be a GOOD thing. Sure, it's some extra work when designing a new system, and lots of legacy systems require expensive rework, and a few twats will abuse the right to have Google redact journalistic information about their personal misadventures from the public sphere. But it's still my private data, so I should have the right to forbid companies I don't trust from storing and processing it. And they should be legally forced to oblige and have processes in place so that such request can be truly honored.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, there is nothing stopping them from running this in the background to make additional linkages between people and places to sell to third parties without having to share where those linkages come from.

Plus if you opt out you're only opting out of the social aspects of this recognition, not the revenue models behind it.

Thank you for pointing this out. They don't claim that they won't recognize your face if you opt out... they just won't suggest it to your friends.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#34

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.

Yeah when I read the notification I thought it was saying it was on so I clicked through to discover that it had defaulted to off.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#35
On a related note, FB seems to use the microphone, with permissions disabled, when the app isn’t even open, to listen in on our conversations and later advertise things it hears us talking about. I don’t have 100% proof of this but we’ve mentioned things we never googled or even put in our phones or computers and they are pretty specific (purple dress, tactile diaper bags, beer) and they come up the next day or two in a FB ad or recommended post.

EDIT: I get that the "general consensus" is that this has been debunked, and that it's just coincidental. But we have had several situations where there's no other reasonable explanation. Like how our friend, who has never drank beer and never drinks any kind of alcohol, came over to our house, and we discussed beers, and within a few hours she got some beer ads on FB. This kind of highly specific thing has happened too many times for any other explanation to make sense.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#36
post #21

More than a decade ago Mark Zuckerberg said that anyone who gave him a photo of themselves was a "dumb fuck". His entire plan this whole time has been to do exactly this kind of thing (edit: because he thinks it is profit-maximizing), and he thinks you're a dumb fuck (just like me) for uploading your photo to let him use in the maximum-scary-surveillance way. We should all just get off Facebook. The problem is that y…

It's not that we naively trust him, we just believe the creepy data gathering is the price to pay for that warm feeling of being connected with pseudo-friends and kinda-acquaintances.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#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 not they will. All this option does is hide the notifications when they do recognize you.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#38

On a related note, FB seems to use the microphone, with permissions disabled, when the app isn’t even open, to listen in on our conversations and later advertise things it hears us talking about. I don’t have 100% proof of this but we’ve mentioned things we never googled or even put in our phones or computers and they are pretty specific (purple dress, tactile diaper bags, beer) and they come up the next day or two i…

It is more likely that recordings can be used to detect users who have are nearby (who hear the same sound) but have GPS disabled or not available.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#39

On a related note, FB seems to use the microphone, with permissions disabled, when the app isn’t even open, to listen in on our conversations and later advertise things it hears us talking about. I don’t have 100% proof of this but we’ve mentioned things we never googled or even put in our phones or computers and they are pretty specific (purple dress, tactile diaper bags, beer) and they come up the next day or two i…

This is a pretty bold claim to make without something more substantive than this anecdote. There's too much opportunity for coincidental consumer profiling to be the root source of what you suspect is something more malicious.
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