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Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

nytimes.com

41–50 of 196 posts

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#41

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.

But then, it's probably FB that facilitated that kind of behavior, so more mixed feelings.

Now there's one less tool to help the victim of such abuse though.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#42
A legitimate question I’ve always had when we read such announcements is how can we be certain they’re actually doing whatever they’re claiming / planning to do. Unlike software /OS modifications, it’s not feasible to somehow reverse engineer FB’s backend and find out if anything unusual is happening. At least without any attempt of compromising it.

Considering how powerful these orgs are, with low probability of facing any legal repercussions about potentially false claims, do we have any other option than to take their word for it?

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#43
post #29

I get all the privacy concerns, but this was actually super useful for people who opted-in. Manually retyping everybody's name when tagging them in 50 photos from an event is torturous.

Surely one should be able to just tag _the album_ instead of each photo? I always figured this constraint was kept as a happy convenience so that Facebook have a steady supply of training data for their face recognition service. If they are shutting that service down, maybe they'll let us tag albums?

My wedding album has like 200 photos in it. I definitely had relatives who didn't want to look through them all and just asked me to send them the photos with them in it.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#44
post #29

I get all the privacy concerns, but this was actually super useful for people who opted-in. Manually retyping everybody's name when tagging them in 50 photos from an event is torturous.

Surely one should be able to just tag _the album_ instead of each photo? I always figured this constraint was kept as a happy convenience so that Facebook have a steady supply of training data for their face recognition service. If they are shutting that service down, maybe they'll let us tag albums?

And then each guest has to go through every picture in the album to find the ones with them to share?

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#45
post #14

Yet another useful technology going away because the activist media threw a five year temper tantrum over Trump being elected (which was mostly their fault in the first place)

We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

wait am I banned?

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#46

Serious question: I kind of liked how Facebook found people in my photos. Is there room for such a feature in a privacy conscious world?

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 Facebook, to upload some hash of my face and direct Facebook to disallow any user from uploading a picture with my face in it.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#47
post #14

Yet another useful technology going away because the activist media threw a five year temper tantrum over Trump being elected (which was mostly their fault in the first place)

We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

I don't know about this one @dang. Respectfully I took a look at his comment history, and while they have some "spicy" comments, it doesn't seem to be for trolling purposes.

I won't disagree that perhaps he broke the rules with the comment and it could be rephrased better, but it does seem like he is a real poster with a legitimate (although unpopular) viewpoint and could use a bit of grace, eh?

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#49

Luddites. You can't un-invent technology. Like all technology, facial recognition has tremendous potential for good. We should learn to live with the technology, not attempt to forbid its use. Also, Meta is a bunch of cowards nowadays. They should not have kowtowed to angry Twitter activists. It sets a bad precedent. I don't like this system where activists bully big companies into compliance with their idiosyncratic…

"activists bully big companies"

What's up with this plainly ridiculous usage of the term "bully"? It's almost self-parody. It's something I've noticed in British newspapers sometimes where MPs will whine about being "bullied" by citizens who post rude comments online.

It's really obviously not the right term for whatever point you want to express! Taking points off your English paper for incorrect word usage.

Re: Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

#50
So sad that we can't have nice things. I like the feature that automatically tags people in pictures.

Sometimes I have trouble remembering people's names (not face blindness or similar, just regular trouble I guess). I would love to have smart glasses that show the name of someone I've met before but don't quite remember. But alas, our society being what it is people will abuse facial recognition, so I can't have that it seems...

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