Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook turned on face recognition silently

imgur.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 224 posts

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#81

Post by kobayashi »

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…

All of your comment is accurate.

In addition, this is not news in the sense that this is not _new_. Anecdotally, this feature has been active for many for months, if not years.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#82

Post by jacquesm »

cdelsolar wrote: post #76
jacquesm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where can I order/make your tinfoil hat?

Why is simply insisting on something that is listed in the universal declaration of human rights something that should warrant a tinfoil hat?

In my experience stuff like this is abused sooner or later, most likely sooner. I see absolutely no reason why I should willingly consent to such abuse. Privacy is important, guard it because if you don't there is no way back.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#83

Post by khedoros1 »

markstos wrote: post #6
praneshp wrote: post #3

Not really silent, right? Unless you meant there was no press coverage about the feature.

They silently asked for your consent. As-in, they didn't. The feature is opt-out, with their interests first, and your privacy and consent second.

The feature is "opt-out" in the sense that they based the default on some other privacy setting. It was disabled by default, for me. But I've been fairly diligent over the years, going through and disabling the things that I didn't want.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#84

Post by myth_buster »

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.

A/B testing?

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#85

Post by mfrye0 »

_sdegutis wrote: post #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 i…

I've seen very odd events as well that have convinced me this is happening.

Went to a friends house and ending up discussing the most random, very specific topics. 2 of the 3 topics popped up in ads on the way home an hour later. Never searched anything related on my phone prior to then.

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#87

Post by bitL »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #73
electrograv wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

Anecdotal, but years ago I uploaded a picture of a friend. He's a bit of a hermit, and doesn't have social media accounts. The picture scrolled by several times that week, and Facebook asked me to tag who this was. (This was perhaps... 2010?) I uploaded perhaps twenty or so photos, but that was the only one they asked about. I haven't seen this for a while, but I used to get my friends pictures scrolling by. (Not eve…

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

Re: Facebook turned on face recognition silently

#88

Post by fg287o2348f »

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.

Everyone living in a city is in thousands of other people's photos
Post reply on HN