[HN Gopher] Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition s...
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Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system
Author : nycdatasci
Score : 218 points
Date : 2021-11-02 17:05 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| pmlnr wrote:
| "I don't believe you"
| https://c.tenor.com/9PqKT8E9RNkAAAAd/gif.gif
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The change affects more than a third of Facebook's daily users
| who had facial recognition turned on for their accounts,
| according to the company.
|
| I'm surprise the number is that low. Wasn't enabling this a
| default?
|
| > That meant they received alerts when new photos or videos of
| them were uploaded to the social network. The feature had also
| been used to flag accounts that might be impersonating someone
| else...
|
| That's actually a pretty valuable and legitimate use case for
| such a system, even from a very pro-privacy perspective.
|
| > Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial
| recognition templates, which are digital scans of facial
| features, by December, it will not eliminate the software that
| powers the system, which is an advanced algorithm called
| DeepFace. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial
| recognition technology into future products, Mr. Grosse said.
|
| It's also almost certainly not going to delete the face-specific
| image tagging either, which means they could re-derive everything
| they're "deleting" relatively easily.
| sulam wrote:
| I turned it off because the "default" use case seemed rather to
| be to boost their engagement because someone you know socially
| would upload a picture of something they did that happened to
| have you in it. That would lead to you being tagged and getting
| notified, presumably to talk about how much fun you all had or
| whatever it was. Unfortunately it's pretty useless to ask
| people to not upload pictures that you're present in, and FB
| used notifications essentially just to get you to open the app
| and re-engage. I turned off everything that generated useless
| notifications for a while, then I finally turned off
| notifications completely.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Everything in FB is centered around the use case of boosting
| their engagement. That's pretty much the only metric they
| steer by.
| drusepth wrote:
| >I'm surprise the number is that low. Wasn't enabling this a
| default?
|
| The first implementation appeared in 2017 [1] as tag
| suggestions, but the facial recognition feature we know today
| evolved around 2019, when it was made opt-in rather than a
| default setting. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16794660/facebook-
| facial...
|
| [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847650/facebook-
| facial-r...
| joelbondurant wrote:
| Penis recognition software is more private and is definitely the
| future of Internet identity.
| rkagerer wrote:
| If it had been opt-in from the getgo, I think it would have been
| less controversial.
|
| I still remember a time when it was common courtesy to _ask_
| someone before you took a picture of them.
| advisedwang wrote:
| It seems this is likely a result of the 2019 FTC Consent Order on
| Facebook [1]. Facebook has had to implement privacy processes
| which are monitored by a 3rd party who reports to a judge and
| facial recognition was one of the issues sparking the order.
|
| The consent agreement [2] has whole sections and rules
| specifically for facial recognition data.
|
| Likely a review program and criteria (approved by the monitor)
| were set up based on these rules, and when the tagging feature
| was pushed through this review it failed. Rather than risk the
| judge sanctioning them for failing to meet the order, they
| decided shut down the feature.
|
| [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-
| releases/2019/07/ftc-i...
|
| [2]
| https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/c4365facebo...
| cbtacy wrote:
| Thank you. Yes... this is almost certainly happening because of
| the intersection of the Illinois settlement, the current
| microscope FB (no, I will not refer to them as M*a) finds
| themselves under, and the Consent Order that they have almost
| certainly violated dozens if not hundreds of times in the last
| few years. They've done the risk assessment, and they're
| reducing the risk profile in order to decrease potential
| liabilities and penalties.
| herunan wrote:
| This is all just PR. Doesn't really affect revenue.
| sam345 wrote:
| Good riddance. Good choice by FB.
| slownews45 wrote:
| It's always confusing to see what the internet police go after.
|
| Total scams ripping thousands to hundreds of thousands off from
| people (tech support scams etc). Crickets.
|
| An opt in feature on the facebook platform that is useful (at
| least to some). Multiple Attorney General press conferences :)
| Vrondi wrote:
| But their facial recognition is not opt-in. You cannot prevent
| other people from uploading photos of you then tagging your
| face in them, training Facebook's facial recognition to your
| face even if you consciously never upload your image a single
| time.
| donatj wrote:
| If you don't like that, you're going to hate this.
|
| https://youtu.be/KT18KJouHWg
|
| Basically they can find you from your DNA, even if only a
| couple very distant relatives ever gave theirs.
| bduerst wrote:
| I get what you're saying but that's unguided learning though.
|
| Facebook doesn't have any way of linking that face
| fingerprint to you to even check your consent - but a part of
| me doubts that when they _do_ make the link they remove the
| fingerprint bc you didn 't opt in.
| slownews45 wrote:
| You can only be suggested as a name for someone else's photo
| if you've turned face recognition on.
|
| "If you'd like other people to see tag suggestions for you,
| you'll need to turn on your face recognition setting."
|
| So you need to opt in to it to let others tag you.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| But how does it know that "This is slownews45's face, so
| don't show any auto-tag recommendation for it."..?
| croes wrote:
| The negative impact of facial recognition technology is much
| bigger than the impact of scams.
| fvdessen wrote:
| Could you be more specific ?
| jcun4128 wrote:
| There's Jim Browning for that
| pempem wrote:
| Are we not going after both?
|
| Let's marshall the energy. I'm sure we can find it. Wanna lead
| the charge?
| slownews45 wrote:
| No - we are not going after both - the AG's take high profile
| low hanging easy target cases.
|
| I've personally tried to get police / DA / AG type response
| on a fair number of white collar type cases. Crickets.
|
| Stolen checks / AP fraud, even stuff that would be pretty
| damn easy to track down (ie, whose name was on account that
| cashed this check) - there is almost no follow-up. It really
| can be eye opening.
| comrh wrote:
| It makes more sense when you stop and think that there are no
| single group of "internet police" and that in reality it's
| millions of people with their ethics, personal views and
| natural inability to rank risk.
| vvG94KbDUtRa wrote:
| 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)
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| vvG94KbDUtRa wrote:
| wait am I banned?
| bryan_w wrote:
| 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?
| dang wrote:
| Not just with that one comment.
|
| It's easy enough to get unbanned.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| This is a corporate decision based on cold profit projections,
| and it affects FB users worldwide. Your local politics have
| little to do with that. This is about washing FB's image.
| mkl95 wrote:
| > We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition
| against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have
| yet to provide clear rules.
|
| Disclaimer: I have never owned an Apple product, and I haven't
| used Facebook for roughly a decade.
|
| Apple have been doing face recognition for a while now, arguably
| at a similar scale, but their use case is pretty straightforward.
| With FB face recognition is not the real concern, it's the fact
| they have been caught misusing personal data multiple times.
| htormey wrote:
| Sadly apple are not angels either when it comes to scanning
| photos:
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-to-delay-implementing-anti-...
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Where does apple do it? They do it in iPhoto but it is based on
| what you tell it, and is opt out. Where else?
| mkl95 wrote:
| I only know about FaceID.
| Vrondi wrote:
| Unlike Facebook's facial recognition, other people can't
| enroll you into Apple's Face ID without your consent or
| knowledge.
| kome wrote:
| a step in the right direction. that said, i closed my facebook in
| 2008 and i never missed it.
| EastOfTruth wrote:
| Its public facial recognition system? For some reason I doubt
| that they will stop using it for themselves.
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| 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?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, if you do it client side. I could see this working as a
| browser plug in.
| Vrondi wrote:
| Well, honestly, you shouldn't be giving other peoples'
| likenesses to big corporations under worldwide non-exclusive
| license agreements without a signed model release consent form.
| However, enforcing this is almost impossible.
|
| But really, morally, you should never give anyone else's face
| to a corporation without their explicitly requesting you to
| upload the photo to a site.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| That's kind of a radical position. People shouldn't take
| photos of crowds in public places? You want veto power over
| that?
| marwis wrote:
| Not radical enough. It should be an opt-in rather opt-out.
| A public website should verify that every person on the
| photo consented to being publicly displayed. Otherwise
| their faces should be pixelated.
|
| I can certainly see things going that way in EU within a
| decade.
| Vrondi wrote:
| In the USA at least, there is no legal expectation of
| privacy on a public street. So, for news reporting
| purposes, you can publish photos of a crowd in public.
| However, as soon as you step onto private property, this
| changes. Even at places like shopping malls and stores, the
| owner of that place can take your photo for security, but
| cannot publish it, and it is not kosher for photographers
| to take photos of customers in these settings and publish
| them without getting a signed model release form the
| subject of the photo. Likewise, a photographer should get
| explicit permission for any other private spaces such as
| homes.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _However, as soon as you step onto private property, this
| changes. Even at places like shopping malls and stores,
| the owner of that place can take your photo for security,
| but cannot publish it, and it is not kosher for
| photographers to take photos of customers in these
| settings and publish them without getting a signed model
| release form the subject of the photo._
|
| You're on the right track, but it's somewhat more
| complicated than that. There are plenty of times when you
| can be on private property and it's perfectly legal for
| someone to publish your photo.
|
| Two companies I've worked for have brought in lawyers for
| staff training on this. It's nuanced.
| 8note wrote:
| the privacy has been broken once you've been photographed
| without your consent.
|
| The same features for name association can be done offline
| once the picture exists. Just show people the picture, and
| see if anyone knows who it is
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| Consent is not required in a public setting.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| In theory one could build a perceptual hash that had a
| universal opt-in. But I'm skeptical such a scheme could avoid
| collisions (e.g. identical twins) or perhaps even
| doppelganger-like strangers.
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| Not exactly. From the perspective of building data of
| concern, simply uploading photos won't do that. Uploading
| photos just potentially creates databases of rando faces.
|
| It is the tying of these faces to a name (identity) that's
| the challenge. Further, the crucial data comes from a human's
| act of tagging a person in a photo.
| MrKristopher wrote:
| Is facial recognition so good that it can distinguish you
| from a billion other people? I assumed the photo recognition
| relied on the social graph i.e. to look for your friends or
| friends of friends in your pictures.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Yes, there is. Instead of publicly auto-tagging you on the
| photo, FB could notify you that someone had uploaded a photo of
| you, and offer you to either:
|
| 1. Tag yourself on the photo
|
| 2. Censor yourself from the photo (blur, pixelate, black
| rectangle, whatever)
|
| Voila, now the same feature is used to give control over your
| data.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| Here is an interesting question. Is it at that point your
| data? Wouldn't it be the data of who ever took the photo? Why
| would it belong to you just because you are in the photo?
|
| I think giving users power over auto tagging make sense. But
| giving users power over other people's photos is a terrible
| idea.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| I think it's basic courtesy to ask someone if they want
| their picture taken or not. This would only automate the
| process.
| tmountain wrote:
| Subjective answer: Any data that has the potential for abuse
| regarding privacy will eventually find its way to being abused.
| Providing said feature requires curating the dataset necessary
| to power it. How can we trust companies beholden to quarterly
| earnings to do the right thing when financial motivations
| inform 100% of their actions? We can't.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > Any data that has the potential for abuse regarding privacy
| will eventually find its way to being abused.
|
| Right, and it is our duty to not just roll over and let it be
| abused. We live in the world we create. Just shrugging will
| guarantee it will be abused.
| bdamm wrote:
| Unless regulation is brought, they're going to do it anyway.
| The companies are absolutely going to be doing facial
| recognition and use that data, they just will be doing it
| without exposing the use of it to us.
| uuddlrlr wrote:
| iOS does this on-device, you can access the SQLite database
| containing the metadata using libimobiledevice's ifuse(1).
|
| https://libimobiledevice.org/
| snarf21 wrote:
| You need to ask the other question: Do _they_ like it when HB
| tags them in yours and everyone else 's photos?
| bryan_w wrote:
| I mean, they opted in (it's off by default) so I would think
| so.
| [deleted]
| antegamisou wrote:
| 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?
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Nowadays there's enough dissent inside FB itself (according to
| news articles), that if they lied about this, someone from the
| inside will probably leak/whistleblow about it...
| LadyCailin wrote:
| The same way that you verify that the local chicken plant is
| properly following contamination prevention procedures. You
| don't, at least not personally. We as a society rely on
| government based regulations and knowledgeable inspectors to
| verify these things. I'd say software should be no different in
| these regards. (Though that isn't currently the case.)
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Reminds me of the drone photographers that were flying over
| pig farms in the south that were egregiously breaking laws.
| Instead of fixing the pig farms, they went after the
| photographers.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Authoritarian dysfunction. Killing the messenger.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I am for this decision, but I don't understand their
| justification for it. What was the actual reason they pulled back
| on this? The US government is assuredly for maximum surveillance,
| so long as the publicly visible part is done by private companies
| that can be subpoenaed for their data. FB needs to stay in the
| good graces of the military-industrial-political complex to avoid
| anti-trust action.
|
| FB doesn't do anything out of the good of their heart, so what
| are they getting out of this? I really doubt that winning the
| hearts of civil libertarians is at all important to them.
|
| (I also noticed how the NYT managed to get a dig into the
| discredited China story when discussing a company that was
| surveilling billions of people worldwide using facial recognition
| technology.)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The govt uses facial recognition for unemployment benefits
| because of the fraud experienced.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Insert meme of History Channel Aliens guy (is such a thing
| possible)
| literallyaduck wrote:
| "We are never ever ever getting back together." Facebook user
| base quoting 21 century poet laureate.
|
| Hey you remember all those times we analyzed you photos, and
| those times we did things we said we wouldn't? We totally aren't
| going to do those now. We are "Meta" not the evil Facebook, trust
| us. "Meta" has never lied to you, right?
| 5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN wrote:
| Highly unlikely that they will delete it. The info collected is
| too valuable for them to delete it. They may retain the hash or
| other unique identifiers even if they delete originals. They have
| shown again and again that they can't be trusted.
|
| trust, once lost, can never be regained.
| trident5000 wrote:
| How about Match Group?
| jMyles wrote:
| They're not going to shut it down. They're just doing to deny
| access to you and me, and sell it to cops and despots.
| ddoolin wrote:
| Slightly off-topic but I deleted my Instagram yesterday. I was
| really holding out for one person who almost refuses to talk to
| me on any non-FB property but...oh well. I'm glad to be rid of
| it, but I can't shake that it's somewhat meaningless and I'll
| miss the many content creators I followed who have earned my
| business. I wonder if there's some way to follow them in a way
| not tied to my identity.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| There are several Facebook and Twitter proxies; perhaps there's
| an Instagram proxy with an RSS feed?
| mirkules wrote:
| What do you mean by FB/Twitter proxies? Is it what it sounds
| like, service to access FB/Twitter in some kind of anonymous
| mode? And could you name a few?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Yes. There's https://nitter.net/ for Twitter. Can't
| remember the Facebook one, or the other Twitter one.
| There's also https://teddit.net/ (and another one) for
| Reddit.
| captainmuon wrote:
| 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...
| drusepth wrote:
| I've also been eagerly awaiting a feature that'd notify me if I
| ever showed up in a stranger's photos (at concerts, travelling,
| etc). I know FB has the technology but the feature apparently
| never materialized.
|
| There's a lot of useful stuff you can do when people stop
| abusing that stuff.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| pimeyes can do this
| jacquesm wrote:
| It would be fine if that information stayed with you.
|
| The fact that it is pumped around from service to service is
| what causes the problems.
| SNosTrAnDbLe wrote:
| The question is are you ok with some stranger adding a picture
| of you on facebook and then facebook promptly tags you on their
| profile.
| strulovich wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it was only applied on Facebook friends
| posts, ideally those are not strangers.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| Knowing that someone I don't know uploaded a photo of me
| seems like a good feature, yes.
| nitrogen wrote:
| But now everyone else knows, too. That's not such a great
| feature.
| bigzyg33k wrote:
| But that isn't how the feature worked
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Not if you set Facebook to require your approval for all
| tags. Then you know before everyone else.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Which in turn requires you to have a facebook account.
| the_other wrote:
| > I would love to have smart glasses that show the name of
| someone I've met before but don't quite remember.
|
| Or you could just tell them you don't remember. It's rarely
| rude. It's better to be human. We all forget stuff all the
| time. If we stopped imagining that everyone else is holding
| everyone else to impossible levels of "quality" we'd all be
| much better off. Just admit you don't remember their name. If
| you feel really bad about it, work in a little story about what
| you do remember about them. If you don't remember anything,
| then the meeting wasn't important to you so just let it go. If
| it was somehow important to them, there'll be a way to resolve
| this. Or there won't and you'll have a lost a friend but all of
| that is better than hiding your humanity behind a robot.
|
| Perhaps we need to issue a new "Turning Test". Can a human tell
| the difference between a human and a human with machine
| assistance? And does it matter?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Or you could just tell them you don't remember. It's rarely
| rude. It's better to be human. We all forget stuff all the
| time.
|
| I've decided that I must be atypical around name recall for
| some reason or another. I often do ask, because as you said
| it is human to forget, but I find myself forgetting like 3
| times in the course of a conversation sometimes, I could
| really use a machine of this sort.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Face blindness probably operates on a spectrum. I too
| aren't face blind, but often struggle to remember the names
| of infrequent contacts until I get some other prompt, like
| vocal recognition.
|
| I assume this is less of a genetic problem, but related to
| having undiagnosed myopia as a child when perhaps facial
| recognition pathways are in a critical development stage.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think for me it is genetic, my dad is also very bad at
| this - although he is more confidently wrong than I am.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| For sure it could be genetic for a subset of people -- I
| unintentionally ruled that out.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| Great! But if it is not without the consent of the person
| involved though, it is your "convenience" breaching someone
| else's privacy. I think it is important to think about
| this.
| drusepth wrote:
| Is it really breaching someone's privacy to assist your
| own memory of the things they've chosen to (repeatedly)
| tell you?
| jjj123 wrote:
| I think the breach of privacy is giving an almost
| trillion dollar corporation free training data via my
| face and name combination.
|
| I don't mind an individual knowing this information, but
| I'd rather that individual not hand that data over to a
| megacorp that has a million other unknown uses for it.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I don't see how organic facial recognition is any worse
| than electronic recognition. Evidently some people can
| take a simple wanted or missing persons person and solve
| a case. But for me that ability feels like magic. How is
| having an aid, like facial recognition glasses, any
| worse?
|
| This of course assumes a non-scalable offline system.
| Obviously something online like China's social credit
| system is more of a breach.
| jjj123 wrote:
| I am definitely anti facial recognition in general,
| precisely because of your second point. If I felt there
| were reasonable incentives for recognition to stay
| offline/individual scale that would be fine with me. But
| obviously we're heading in the opposite direction, where
| corporations use facial recognition to gather even more
| data on users for ad dollars, and governments use it to
| surveil citizens for "national security."
|
| I don't want to help either of those initiatives, so for
| now I'm strictly anti facial recognition, even for benign
| use cases at the micro level.
| amelius wrote:
| > So sad that we can't have nice things.
|
| Privacy is also a nice thing.
| zamalek wrote:
| > I like the feature that automatically tags people in
| pictures.
|
| Yeah, when it first launched I thought "this is what facial
| recognition is for," completely oblivious to the privacy
| concerns.
|
| In a world where privacy wasn't exploited:
|
| A photo album that automatically finds you in other people's
| photos is really awesome. Imagine you went to a concert and
| your phone died, there would likely be dozens of photos with
| you in the frame. You could likely amass a treasure trove of
| unexpected perspectives of your memories, from complete
| strangers.
|
| Fun ideas that are completely incompatible with reality...
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I didn't like that feature, and neither did my circle, back
| when I was on Facebook. We found it unnerving. But we are older
| and perhaps prefer the illusion of privacy, and not anyone
| being able to out us by uploading a picture and being
| archived/cataloged non-consensually.
| xupybd wrote:
| They are finally realizing that they're scaring people away.
| laurent92 wrote:
| 2021 is the "let's bring back normal stuff" year, after Apple
| restored USB, HDMI, Magsafe ports and the F1 keys ;)
|
| What next, moving back from the Cloud, data ownership, Youtube
| having chronological ordering instead of "We chose what you
| should watch because we want to influence your political
| opinions" ???
| Yhippa wrote:
| Make Blogs Great Again
| simion314 wrote:
| >Youtube having chronological ordering
|
| I am confused, for me the subscription section is always
| chronological and has everything I subscribed , I see the
| youtube home page a few times a year because I bookmarked the
| subscription url and not the home page.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| ..after the Horse has bolted!
| gip wrote:
| Also:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/02/faceboo...
|
| https://archive.md/JMwS2
| mminer237 wrote:
| 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.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| Yes, but why tag people?
| mminer237 wrote:
| So they can see themselves in photos? So you don't have to
| look through all of your friends' photos to find which ones
| you are in and repost them yourself.
| croes wrote:
| Isn't it possible to tag people even if they don't have a
| FB account?
| mminer237 wrote:
| You can type whatever you want as a tag, although I've
| never actually seen someone do this.
|
| I guess it could just be used to annotate images, or to
| recall who's who for your own use, a la how people used
| to write everyone's names on the back of photos.
| paxys wrote:
| Who opted in? I certainly don't remember ever doing it, yet
| auto tagging has always worked for me (both when I am tagging
| pictures and when others are tagging me).
| Jenk wrote:
| > Who opted in?
|
| It was one of those "by continuing to use our service(s), you
| are opting-in" t&C's updates.
|
| So in short: nobody did but legally there is a box ticked.
| drusepth wrote:
| The opt-in is at
| https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec -- I definitely
| remember intentionally opting in when it was added, and it's
| off on some of my throwaway accounts so I assume it wasn't
| auto-checked for everyone at some point.
| Jenk wrote:
| 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?
| mminer237 wrote:
| 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.
| thegreatdukd wrote:
| I doubt Facebook won't offer some unsupervised face
| clustering for albums, they will just remove tagging from
| images. Google Photos offers me pictures of distinctive
| people found in my gallery without giving me their names.
| Jenk wrote:
| the ideas aren't mutually exclusive.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| And then each guest has to go through every picture in the
| album to find the ones with them to share?
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20211102170829/https://www.nytime...
|
| https://archive.md/PLSTN
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Sorry for me not believing this. They've been caught lying so
| many times trying to save face that I fully expect them to double
| down on facial recognition after this announcement.
| ajay-b wrote:
| I'm happy but I don't believe it.
| dang wrote:
| Their announcement is at
| https://about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-reco....
|
| (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29084199, but we merged
| that thread hither)
| zbowling wrote:
| 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.
| 5faulker wrote:
| But then, it's probably FB that facilitated that kind of
| behavior, so more mixed feelings.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Now there's one less tool to help the victim of such abuse
| though.
| azinman2 wrote:
| This comment to me shows that it's impossible to keep the
| public happy. HN likes to rail on all these big tech
| companies amassing and abusing data, and here as they go
| deleting one of the most Orwellian parts it gets
| complaints.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Knowing outlines of how online harassment happens, I'm
| confident it would do far more harm than help in this
| context. Weaponized autism is real.
| ysavir wrote:
| It's not that there's one less tool. It's that the tool
| given to begin with was wrong for that purpose, and instead
| of leveraging the technology in beneficial ways, they're
| removing it.
|
| They could have implemented in the account settings
| somewhere where you can let it alert you for any such usage
| of your face, but without it doing any auto-tagging or
| other publicly visible things which we usually complain
| about.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| HN is bizarre sometimes. When this feature first appeared,
| everyone acted like it was the coming of the Antichrist. Now
| it's going away and people have "mixed feelings". I think
| people just love to hate big tech no matter what they're doing.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Utilitarian arguments are a bad base for a discussion that is
| primarily about ethics.
| ike0790 wrote:
| lmao
| telchar wrote:
| I don't think there's a need to be confused here. Parent
| liked it when the tool empowered them, but most people don't
| like when tools give others power - potentially power over
| them. The difference in like/hate is in how the tool is
| deployed.
|
| If the only use of facial recognition on Facebook were to
| track how one's own image is used I don't think many people
| would be upset. But allowing someone else to find every image
| one appears in is a different and scarier thing.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| >I think people just love to hate big tech no matter what
| they're doing.
|
| Or, maybe companies have proven again and again and again and
| again and again that not only can they not be trusted with
| your data, but they don't secure it, because profits.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Or... maybe HN is composed of different people with different
| viewpoints.
|
| People are more motivated to comment when they're upset about
| something, so it ends up looking like everyone here hates
| everything big tech does, when it may be that a small number
| of people hate decision X, a small number of people hate
| decision Y, and most people either like them or don't care.
|
| You often hear complaints that big tech drives people to
| extreme viewpoints through algorithms. But the natural human
| algorithm of putting more effort into the negative than the
| positive seems to lead to the same outcome.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Or... maybe HN is composed of different people with
| different viewpoints.
|
| A useful concept for people to remember as it applies
| everywhere. Particularly as we get drawn into tribal
| politics, it would be better for people to remember that
| the opposition is not uniform and consists of many
| different viewpoints. For someone who wants to be divisive,
| it is trivial to cherry pick examples of bad behavior
| ("hypocritical") by pretending that those you disagree with
| must all share exactly the same priorities and opinions.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Why pretend? If you genuinely believe it, the
| confirmation bias is likely to keep you from thinking
| about it enough to assess whether it's true. (Do you
| regularly re-assess whether the sky is blue, or whether
| you're wearing clothes? It's just there, background
| knowledge.)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| You are probably right, many people aren't pretending.
| They really do think their opponents are a monoculture.
| Convenient, I suppose, critical thinking takes effort.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| This is also why it's much more valuable to look at user
| metrics than actual feedback when making design decisions.
|
| Individual pieces of feedback can be valuable, but if you
| let it do the driving then you can end up making changes
| that worsen your product. You become subject to the will of
| the most vocal critics at any given moment.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Be careful with this advice, though. Writing off
| feedback, as Mozilla does, can blow up in your face as
| you dismiss any and all criticism as being from a vocal
| minority of whiners.
| romanhn wrote:
| Or, you know, these are different people with different
| values and different sets of experience.
| drusepth wrote:
| And also, I'm sure the goalposts have moved a lot in the
| 3-5 years since this feature was announced.
|
| At the time, facial recognition was almost sci-fi levels of
| absurd to envision, especially at scale. Nowadays, anyone
| can do their own facial recognition on laptop-level GPUs
| from freely-available open source software and every site
| that can use it, probably does use it in some form.
|
| It's a lot more normalized now than it was.
| m0zg wrote:
| I think assuming malice on the part of Zuck is a good
| default. It's as in that blockbuster movie "no matter who
| wins, you lose". The only winning move is not to play.
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| Actually your comment is pretty bizarre.
|
| You're distilling your impressions from thousands of people
| into a single sentence, and then you're taking a single
| person's response and using that to push your agenda that
| "people just love to hate big tech". It's fascinating that
| you think this is a valid observation on your part.
| baryphonic wrote:
| Is there any one single representative of "HN" as a body of
| opinions?
| throwaway29303 wrote:
| Getting rid of its facial recognition system is a good step, but
| lest people either forget or miss... Although
| Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition
| templates, which are digital scans of facial features, by
| December,
|
| _it will not eliminate the software that powers the system,_
| which is an advanced algorithm called DeepFace.
|
| _The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial
| recognition technology into future products,_ Mr.
| Grosse said.
| quotemstr wrote:
| 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 moral systems instead of
| using the government and the laws to codify restrictions and
| rules in a transparent way that everyone can understand and in
| which everyone has a say.
|
| If facial recognition is so bad, it should be illegal. If it's
| not illegal, FB has a responsibility to its shareholders to
| maximize profit within the law. If, as an activist, can't get
| support for making facial recognition illegal, then maybe it's
| not quite as bad as you claim.
| TillE wrote:
| "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.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Also, cowards. I don 't like this system where activists_
|
| Are you sure it isn't just that not enough people opted in for
| it to be worth the cost of maintaining that part of the
| service?
|
| _> FB has a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize
| profit within the law_
|
| Which it may be doing here, by removing infrastructure and
| people from running and maintaining a feature, resources that
| can then be used on features that have a better effect on the
| bottom line.
|
| Or are you believing that it is entirely about "finding
| balance" morally (or at least in the court of public opinion),
| rather than balancing the bottom line financially (even if just
| in part)?
| asdff wrote:
| Why would they? I bet most users actually like that facebook
| finds their face in friends photos.
| paxys wrote:
| I bet Facebook has a much better idea of what most of their
| users like or dislike.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Its probably because Facebook finally realized when government
| etc ask for data they need to give them otherwise you know
| ....... Also this is also good opportunity to green wash. It
| doesn't make a single dent on their ad revenue so why even
| gather more hate by doing some futile task?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Pity. I liked the feature. Fortunately, we've mostly all moved
| over to use Google's shared albums with automatic facial
| recognition and sharing. My friends all have photos I take of
| them and likewise they share theirs with me.
|
| I think Google has figured out a lot of fun sharing tools for
| people in trusted environments: location sharing, photo tagging,
| etc.
|
| I'm rather impressed with it all. Good stuff.
| bduerst wrote:
| Same, though Google doesn't enable it for users in different
| countries. It's weird to be able to automatically share photos
| with a partner with face recognition, but then they can't
| reciprocate for some reason.
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| Who needs facial recognition when we're going to be uploading our
| minds into the metaverse?
| bryan_w wrote:
| The hoops they have to jump through just to enable some really
| cool features down the line is sad.
|
| I don't know why adding another opt in wasn't enough, it's not
| like the haters are going to believe they deleted the templates
| anyways.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| "Haters" ok. I feel like that is just a cheap deflection from
| legitimate criticism.
| sharkweek wrote:
| Here's where Facebook's brand reputation sits in my mind today:
|
| I do not believe them at all. I do not believe they've had some
| change of heart regarding "many concerns about the place of
| facial recognition technology in society." I do not believe they
| intend to not use this technology in some other privacy-invading
| way.
|
| Trying to figure out their real angle here. Avoid regulation?
| "Good" PR at a time when they desperately need it? A broader
| existential threat that I can't even fathom at the level of power
| their company currently wields in society?
|
| Probably not much at this point they could do to change my
| absolute negative opinion of the company though, so there's that.
| Yhippa wrote:
| I do wonder if they are merely substituting outright facial
| recognition with some other technology where they are able to
| identify a person in a particular piece of content. It could be
| text associated with content or the geographical proximity of
| people at the time content was captured or published.
| ben_jones wrote:
| The system no longer provides FB the same value it previously
| did. So they're taking it down, now that they've collected
| billions of images. Will they be deleting the trained models
| too? All artifacts and inferences? Hell no.
| Yhippa wrote:
| They have then politicized it by referring to "regulators"
| and "regulations" several times.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| "the social network will delete the face scan data of more
| than one billion users."
|
| I believe it because facebook has nothing much to gain by
| lying about this small thing(after all they still have all
| the tracking data) and hell lot to loose by lying this
| straight face among employees.
| badRNG wrote:
| > and hell lot to loose by lying this straight face among
| employees.
|
| And if, in a year an employee speaks out and leaks that FB
| never deleted the data? What would happen then? I don't
| think anything would happen, they wouldn't lose much, and
| no one would be too surprised.
| ben_jones wrote:
| Normally the cost of cognitive dissonance in tech is
| $200k/yr. Pay that and you will have a line out your door
| and around the block of engineers who want to work for
| you, no matter what you do.
|
| Fortunately Facebook pays for the Cognitive Dissonance
| Deluxe package which is about $250k-$400k year. They've
| got plenty of padding to mislead their employees right to
| their face.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| "We didn't realize that our old archive data was
| retained. Whoopsie."
| sixothree wrote:
| Not. It does _not_ say "all users". Additionally, there's a
| lot of weasel words.
|
| It does not say they've stopped doing facial recognition.
| It just says they've shut down one program.
|
| They also specifically reference the "usage" of facial
| recognition, not the act of facial recognition.
|
| My guess is they are still being paid by governments to
| collect this data but are just not exposing it.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > Trying to figure out their real angle here.
|
| Maybe that most phone cameras are now good enough to enable
| iris scanning, which is orders of magnitude more accurate.
| classified wrote:
| To me FB is the embodiment of that old joke about politicians:
| You know they're lying because their mouth is moving.
| x0x0 wrote:
| fb just had to pay $650m to people in Illinois for blatantly
| violating their biometrics law.
|
| I suspect that between Illinois and the EU, there's flatly no
| way to reliably legally do this.
| bryan_w wrote:
| Yeah, I could see Illinois saying that scanning a picture for
| only opt-in templates is still "scanning" people who haven't
| opted in because it does face detection and FB not wanting to
| take it to the Supreme Court.
| datavirtue wrote:
| They want the feature regulated/pariahed so no other social
| network can leverage it.
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