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Facebook turned on face recognition silently

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Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#51

Post by batina »

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.

Mine defaulted to on... hmmmm

"You control face recognition. This setting is on, but you can turn it off any time, which applies to features we may add later."

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#52

Post by electrograv »

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…

Usually these systems are implemented via a generic face detector that first runs on the whole image, to locate all the faces that are present. 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).

This isn’t the only possible way to do it, but I believe it’s the most common and effective approach.

So it’s not at all unlikely that when running the identifier, they simply don’t match against people who say no to this. They’d never be recognized at all, and the system would just identify their face as an “unknown” identity.

I cannot say for sure whether or not this is how they implemented it, but it seems likely.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#53

Post by dalore »

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…

Well your friend took the photo presumably and uploaded it to Facebook. Let's assume that the friend does know about face recognition and does want it enabled for their photos. Surely they have the right?

What about all the face recognition going on in all my Google photos that are automatically uploaded to the cloud? Everyone of the people in my photos has no say in what I do with a photo I took.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#54

Post by jacquesm »

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.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#55

Post by mmjaa »

khedoros1 wrote: post #42
mmjaa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't find it in my Facebook settings - can you give us a pointer where to find these settings in Facebooks cesspool of anti-patterns they like to promote as the "settings" page...

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".

Okay, I don't see it. Maybe its a USA-only thing? (Europe here.)

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#56

Post by dalore »

batina wrote: post #51
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.

Mine defaulted to on... hmmmm "You control face recognition. This setting is on, but you can turn it off any time, which applies to features we may add later."

Facebook is notorious for doing A/B testing and feature flipping. It's very possible they are testing defaulting to on vs defaulting to off and measuring how many people turn it off and how many turn it on after the notification.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#57

Post by deadmetheny »

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.

Echoing this, mine was defaulted to off. I imagine it's correlated to another privacy setting, so for those of us who keep it fairly locked down it will likely default off, although it's entirely possible that it's an A/B test and everyone should be sure to check the setting (Hamburger -> Account Settings -> Face Recognition Settings)

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#58

Post by cycrutchfield »

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…

Do they have a model of your face already trained, or are they just using a generic facial recognition neural network to compute an embedding vector and then finding identities that are close to that vector in L2 distance or whatever?

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#59

Post by Ajedi32 »

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 only change how that information is displayed.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#60

Post by Larrikin »

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.

Do you spray paint all of the CCTVs on your daily route?
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