11 ms·

Facebook is now scanning your photos to make sure you send them to your friends

148 points by Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago

alex_c 11y ago
Is the face recognition done on the device, or on Facebook's servers? It's one thing to give the app permission to access your photos, it's another entirely to have it upload every single photo you take to Facebook's servers.
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  I don't work for Facebook or anything, but based on my own judgement I believe they upload the pictures on to their servers to then analyze with their super computing power, which our phones are not capable of yet, without of course analyzing all their existing data within our phones, which I doubt they would give an end user (probably too large of a data set). I've uninstalled the Facebook Apps since a while back, they request for permission to do really strange and intrusive things such as reading all of my SMS text messages, no thanks.
  - plaguuuuuu 11y ago
    So basically, as soon as you take a photo, even if you don't intend on ever uploading it, it gets sent to Facebook?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Well that's disturbing (but not surprising) if true (if you haven't opted in).
    - dreamdu5t 11y ago
      Most important question in this thread.
    - gcr 11y ago
      The parent was speculating! Please be careful. This is how rumors get started!
  - gcr 11y ago
    In the verification setting, here's how recognition (could perhaps!) work: - Find the face in the image. This can easily run on a telephone no sweat. Viola and Jones practically solved this problem in 2001. - Find the parts of the face (eyes, nose, mouth), and then warp the face so it looks like it's facing right at the camera. A recent paper at CVPR last year was called "Face alignment at 3000 FPS," so this is also no sweat at all anymore. - Extract the face's features. This turns the pixels into a smaller vector representation (maybe a list of 1024 numbers perhaps). This is a bit tricky --- many current systems use convolutional neural networks to do this step, which typically take a lot of compute time. Maybe Facebook could shrink them down to a telephone. - Compare that feature vector to your friends' vectors. In the verification setting, you know the "feature vectors" of your 500 friends, so you find the Euclidean distance between the image's vector and the 500 others. No sweat. - To get a recognition result, just pick the closest vector. Or, if the closest friend is too far away, return "No Match". There are many ways to build a good face recognizer. This is one of them. This might or might not be what Facebook's doing. Last year, they published a paper called "DeepFace" which works essentially this way but with some extra tricks. (The paper is here, but the focus was on comparing to academic state-of-the-art on a strictly academic dataset. It's totally marketing / PhD recruiting bait. :P I'm sure their internal system they have now must be far better. https://research.facebook.com/publications/480567225376225/deepface-closing-the-gap-to-human-level-performance-in-face-verification/ https://research.facebook.com/publications/480567225376225/d... ) The AI and ML people at Facebook are darn smart. I would be impressed (but probably not surprised) if the wizards found some clever way to shrink the pipeline to fit on a phone without too much accuracy loss. So it's possible. I have no clue though.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    Many Facebook users are in the third world / financial situations where data is very expensive and presumably engineers are designing for this. I cannot imagine they're stupid enough to run up these people's bandwidth bills with every single photo they take. Privacy concerns may be ignored, but "the latest Facebook update cost me $500 in data and I make $400/year" will not.
mortenjorck 11y ago
There's nothing wrong with this feature by itself. Nothing! The elephant in the room here is consent. If the app simply popped up a little box on first launch of the new version to the effect of "Would you like to be automatically notified when your new pictures contain your friends?" with a little "About privacy" link at the bottom, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
- dayon 11y ago
  The potential wrongness is that with each new, seemingly benign feature, people consent to more and more potential privacy breaches until they reach a point where their privacy is no longer valuable. Or, they get tired of reading through the concerns and just give consent to every one of them, analogous to not reading Terms of Services. Sure, you can put the blame on the user, but that doesn't make it not wrong. But, yes, if Facebook was more transparent and upfront about what it's doing, we might not be as critical.
- freshhawk 11y ago
  To get informed consent you would have to communicate that this involves every picture taken being uploaded to Facebook servers (but not posted to your Facebook account) to be scanned for friends. Even that 'uploaded but not posted' distinction would be difficult to convey to a lay person. I'm not sure hiding that in an "About privacy" section would get a reasonable level of informed consent either, very few would read it. This is an issue that keeps coming up: useful features involve slurping a lot of personal data in order to do the processing remotely, that distinction is not understood by a large number of the users and explaining it fully is determined to be bad UX ("overly technical explanation") and bad marketing (makes the privacy implications obvious).
  - stavrianos 11y ago
    There's an interesting class of actions in there, which are fine in principle, but in practice cannot be reasonably expected to be understood, rendering consent impossible. The moral imperative to not be confusing.
  - 11y ago
zimpenfish 11y ago
And this is why "Photos" joined all the other permissions in off-land for the Facebook app. If the mobile web version wasn't horribly janky, I'd delete the app entirely.
- lukasm 11y ago
  I use only mobile web version of facebook and it good enough. No notifications and it's simple.
  - ubersync 11y ago
    That correct. I use the web app as well. It works pretty well.
- ksenzee 11y ago
  Try the mobile web version again. I think it's improved in the last 18 months or so. I use it on Chrome for Android and it's not bad.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Never tried the app, but I haven't noticed anything janky about http://m.facebook.com http://m.facebook.com on my android phone. Perhaps they fixed it since you last looked?
  - zimpenfish 11y ago
    It's what I use about half the time - the app doesn't have access to cellular data (because they seem to be playing silly buggers with pretending to be a music player / vpn / something) which means I use the mobile web version (on Mobile Safari) any time I'm not in the office / at home / in Starbucks.
bruceb 11y ago
turnoff suggested tags on FB: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline&section=suggestions&view&hc_location=ufi https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline&section=sugge...
miander 11y ago
How does this work? If they aren't uploading the picture how are they doing facial recognition? Surely they aren't running their highly proprietary recognition software on users' phones. Maybe they're doing preliminary zealous face-finding and uploading those potential matches for further processing? If so that means that no photo you ever take on your device is private.
- gcr 11y ago
  You could probably run recognition on a phone. Getting it running smoothly in the background without draining the battery? That might be a different matter. :)
monochromatic 11y ago
This, and other things like this, is why I uninstalled the Facebook app. The website is slower, but functional.
- ubersync 11y ago
  Ditto. I never installed the messenger app. I would use the facebook app for browsing, and logged into the web app for messages. But then I realized I can do all the stuff in one place, the web app. So I uninstalled the main app as well.
- ionised 11y ago
  I use Tinfoil for Facebook personally. It's an that is a wrapper for the website and allows better control over things like location and access to phone data.
jasperf 11y ago
Engineer on the feature here. This article is incorrect in describing how this feature becomes enabled. It does not turn on if "you've ever sent your friends a photo via Messenger." The feature only turns on if you see the promotion and click "Try It".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- davb 11y ago
  Could you please clarify if the face recognition is done on-device or if the photo (or some subset of data) is uploaded to Facebook's servers in order to analyse the photos? Thanks.
  - malandrew 11y ago
    Yes, this is hugely important. If any photos are being uploaded without my explicit action, I consider it a huge violation of trust. I've disabled every permission messenger has until there is clarification here.
    - gcr 11y ago
      The feature isn't live yet, is it?
  - gcr 11y ago
    Here's one possible way they could have implemented it: All the recognition happens on the device. Faces are detected, poses are estimated and frontalized, and features are extracted on the iphone. Then, the feature vector is compared to a small gallery of your friends' features living on the telephone. No upload. That's what I hope happens. I don't really see much a problem with the above potential strategy, but then again, I wouldn't want my recognition model living on my friends' phones. (One could imagine an attack that tries to extract the images used to train the recognition model given just the model blob...are there any private images there? sounds like a juicy paper!) Or maybe the features are extracted but sent to Facebook, which returns a recognition result. I consider this less trustworthy because Facebook would learn the identity of everyone in any picture I take, even if I choose not to send the full picture to facebook. Or: perhaps faces are detected, but then cropped and the image fragment containing the face is sent to Facebook. Or more Orweillian still, perhaps the entire image is simply sent to Facebook and the recognition happens there.
simplexion 11y ago
I am glad I have Android Marshmallow. Facebook no longer has any permissions.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  My solution is simpler. I just don't have Facebook.
  - scott_karana 11y ago
    "Simple" is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, it's simpler to keep in touch with friends and family by having a "least-privileges" Facebook account. For those people, convincing every single person to also ditch Facebook would be very complex indeed.
    - chatmasta 11y ago
      why not just use the website?
      - scott_karana 11y ago
        I meant least-privileges in a general sense. Disallow tagging of you without approval, upload as little as you like, show as few details as you like, and for the app, deny any permissions you're not interested in giving up the keys to the castle for.
r00fus 11y ago
Wasn't clear - is this feature for Android only? Surprised, as usually FB releases stuff on iOS first...
- scott_karana 11y ago
  From the article: > For Android, [it's realtime]. For iPhone users, it will scan through your camera roll "periodically".
lemming 11y ago
If it still sounds a little creepy to have Facebook looking through all your photos, especially as you take them, you are basically left with two options: You can turn off the send-to-your-friend notifications, and you can turn off Facebook's facial recognition feature. Or, you know, ditch Facebook, since this is far from the total extent of their creepiness.
- meddlepal 11y ago
  It's not really practical to do that. You're basically asking people to give up email or their phone at this point. That's how wired into Facebook most people are.
  - existencebox 11y ago
    I normally don't post in the social network threads; but I've seen this argument enough times that I have a bunch of questions I'm legitimately curious about, since I'm clearly not the target audience: (For context, I tried facebook in college, found myself hating a lot of aspects about it despite heavy use, cut myself off by the end of college and have been "clean" for a good few years now.) 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them over email/gchat/texting/in person. 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method? This hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very limited population strata. As a followup, do these people find any difficulties when connecting with non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those? 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just the accepted dogma at this point. I don't mean to demean the group by suggesting that, I've certainly watched myself do the same in hindsight to other things (video games), but I do wonder if it's at least being considered.
    - Silfen 11y ago
      In my personal experience, the biggest wedge is in planning events. With the caveat that this probably only applies strongly to people currently in their mid-twenties: For a lot of social circles, facebook is the only service that almost everyone will regularly check and that lets you coordinate events. My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them, it's because they opted out of the platform. The other big point of stickiness that I can think of is that facebook is many people's cloud. Years of photos are backed up there and only there. It's unfortunate that they've relinquished control of their files to a closed-platform third party, but that's the way it is.
callmeed 11y ago
"Magic" is a nice euphemism
RexRollman 11y ago
Am I the only one who is concerned that Facebook is going to eventually turn into a passive surveillance system for the government? I don't think it would be too difficult for Facebook to silently alert authorities when particular matches occur.
- us0r 11y ago
  Microsoft does this
  - gcr 11y ago
    Really !! Sounds interesting. Source please?
    - uptown 11y ago
      Haven't you noticed all of Microsoft's latest "cute" apps are all face-based? * We can guess your age from your face: https://how-old.net/ https://how-old.net/ * We can guess your emotion: https://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2015/11/11/happy-sad-angry-this-microsoft-tool-recognizes-emotions-in-pictures/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2015/11/11/happy-sad-angry-...
      - gcr 11y ago
        us0r's assertion was that Microsoft reports certain recognition results to the government. You're replying with a list of some of Microsoft's technologies that use face attribute estimation. That's not what I was asking for. These are two very different things.
        FungalRaincloud 11y ago
        I don't agree that "microsoft already does this" - so don't take what I'm about to say to mean that. I mean only to show a piece of technology that more directly relates to the comments others have made. That being said, Microsoft has developed a piece of technology called PhotoDNA[0], which is designed with the specific purpose of identifying child pornography. This is actively used on OneDrive and Bing, among other services - including Facebook. It's safe to say that OneDrive does not just delete the content if child pornography is detected - it reports to the authorities. Now, it's hard to argue that they don't have a right to do that, as long as the person is voluntarily using their services. That's where I draw a distinction here: Facebook could elect to turn on PhotoDNA on photos uploaded to their new service, and not properly educate their customers that stuff is being uploaded automatically. This does, essentially, constitute a passive surveillance system. Mind you, if it is used to establish that child pornography is found, you will have a hard time convincing most people that it is overstepping what Facebook should do. That's my concern - that this will be pushed as a "for the children" thing, and then extended to "to cut down on crime" later, once everyone stops caring about its existence. That said, that's my concern. It's not necessarily what I think will happen. I have no reason as of yet to believe that it's the next step. I do not, however, want Facebook automatically uploading (or even scanning) my photos. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA
workitout 11y ago
Doesn't Facebook own your pictures you upload? I haven't been on there in a long time but I thought I recalled that.
- azinman2 11y ago
  I believe not but if you read snapchats terms they can do anything they want with your photos
aswanson 11y ago
I fucking hate this company, but I'm drawn into it's gravitational pull like so many of us wanting to connect with long-distance family. There has to be technological way to stop these sons of bitches. What is it?
- jerf 11y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlKao_Pox5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlKao_Pox5A Seriously. As others on the thread have pointed out, it's not as hard to live without as you think. Don't believe me? Well... why don't you just try it for one week? If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Isn't it worth a try, though? Try a step out of the social Skinner box.
  - x1798DE 11y ago
    Yeah, all this, "I need Facebook" stuff feels foreign to me. Maybe I'm just a sociopath who doesn't care about his extended network, but I haven't used Facebook in years and I haven't missed it for one second of that time.
mixmastamyk 11y ago
Creepy. I'm glad I've removed the facebook app everywhere I've had it installed, in favor of using the mobile site under safari. The mobile site can chat too, so that limitation is also gone.
oselhn 11y ago
Another reason to root your phone or to get phone with android 6.
junto 11y ago
So, let's assume that processing your photos on the device is far too processor extensive. That means that Facebook uploads every single photo you take to Facebook's servers. That means that every single dick photo, or vagina/boobs photo that you have ever taken, is now with Facebook and readily available to the NSA under the FISA or Prism programs. Basically the NSA has the biggest amateur porn collection in the world.

148 points by Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago

Is the face recognition done on the device, or on Facebook's servers? It's one thing to give the app permission to access your photos, it's another entirely to have it upload every single photo you take to Facebook's servers.

giancarlostoro 11y ago
I don't work for Facebook or anything, but based on my own judgement I believe they upload the pictures on to their servers to then analyze with their super computing power, which our phones are not capable of yet, without of course analyzing all their existing data within our phones, which I doubt they would give an end user (probably too large of a data set). I've uninstalled the Facebook Apps since a while back, they request for permission to do really strange and intrusive things such as reading all of my SMS text messages, no thanks.
- plaguuuuuu 11y ago
  So basically, as soon as you take a photo, even if you don't intend on ever uploading it, it gets sent to Facebook?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Well that's disturbing (but not surprising) if true (if you haven't opted in).
  - dreamdu5t 11y ago
    Most important question in this thread.
  - gcr 11y ago
    The parent was speculating! Please be careful. This is how rumors get started!
- gcr 11y ago
  In the verification setting, here's how recognition (could perhaps!) work: - Find the face in the image. This can easily run on a telephone no sweat. Viola and Jones practically solved this problem in 2001. - Find the parts of the face (eyes, nose, mouth), and then warp the face so it looks like it's facing right at the camera. A recent paper at CVPR last year was called "Face alignment at 3000 FPS," so this is also no sweat at all anymore. - Extract the face's features. This turns the pixels into a smaller vector representation (maybe a list of 1024 numbers perhaps). This is a bit tricky --- many current systems use convolutional neural networks to do this step, which typically take a lot of compute time. Maybe Facebook could shrink them down to a telephone. - Compare that feature vector to your friends' vectors. In the verification setting, you know the "feature vectors" of your 500 friends, so you find the Euclidean distance between the image's vector and the 500 others. No sweat. - To get a recognition result, just pick the closest vector. Or, if the closest friend is too far away, return "No Match". There are many ways to build a good face recognizer. This is one of them. This might or might not be what Facebook's doing. Last year, they published a paper called "DeepFace" which works essentially this way but with some extra tricks. (The paper is here, but the focus was on comparing to academic state-of-the-art on a strictly academic dataset. It's totally marketing / PhD recruiting bait. :P I'm sure their internal system they have now must be far better. https://research.facebook.com/publications/480567225376225/deepface-closing-the-gap-to-human-level-performance-in-face-verification/ https://research.facebook.com/publications/480567225376225/d... ) The AI and ML people at Facebook are darn smart. I would be impressed (but probably not surprised) if the wizards found some clever way to shrink the pipeline to fit on a phone without too much accuracy loss. So it's possible. I have no clue though.
- superuser2 11y ago
  Many Facebook users are in the third world / financial situations where data is very expensive and presumably engineers are designing for this. I cannot imagine they're stupid enough to run up these people's bandwidth bills with every single photo they take. Privacy concerns may be ignored, but "the latest Facebook update cost me $500 in data and I make $400/year" will not.

mortenjorck 11y ago

There's nothing wrong with this feature by itself. Nothing! The elephant in the room here is consent. If the app simply popped up a little box on first launch of the new version to the effect of "Would you like to be automatically notified when your new pictures contain your friends?" with a little "About privacy" link at the bottom, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

dayon 11y ago
The potential wrongness is that with each new, seemingly benign feature, people consent to more and more potential privacy breaches until they reach a point where their privacy is no longer valuable. Or, they get tired of reading through the concerns and just give consent to every one of them, analogous to not reading Terms of Services. Sure, you can put the blame on the user, but that doesn't make it not wrong. But, yes, if Facebook was more transparent and upfront about what it's doing, we might not be as critical.
freshhawk 11y ago
To get informed consent you would have to communicate that this involves every picture taken being uploaded to Facebook servers (but not posted to your Facebook account) to be scanned for friends. Even that 'uploaded but not posted' distinction would be difficult to convey to a lay person. I'm not sure hiding that in an "About privacy" section would get a reasonable level of informed consent either, very few would read it. This is an issue that keeps coming up: useful features involve slurping a lot of personal data in order to do the processing remotely, that distinction is not understood by a large number of the users and explaining it fully is determined to be bad UX ("overly technical explanation") and bad marketing (makes the privacy implications obvious).
- stavrianos 11y ago
  There's an interesting class of actions in there, which are fine in principle, but in practice cannot be reasonably expected to be understood, rendering consent impossible. The moral imperative to not be confusing.
- 11y ago

zimpenfish 11y ago

And this is why "Photos" joined all the other permissions in off-land for the Facebook app. If the mobile web version wasn't horribly janky, I'd delete the app entirely.

lukasm 11y ago
I use only mobile web version of facebook and it good enough. No notifications and it's simple.
- ubersync 11y ago
  That correct. I use the web app as well. It works pretty well.
ksenzee 11y ago
Try the mobile web version again. I think it's improved in the last 18 months or so. I use it on Chrome for Android and it's not bad.
marssaxman 11y ago
Never tried the app, but I haven't noticed anything janky about http://m.facebook.com http://m.facebook.com on my android phone. Perhaps they fixed it since you last looked?
- zimpenfish 11y ago
  It's what I use about half the time - the app doesn't have access to cellular data (because they seem to be playing silly buggers with pretending to be a music player / vpn / something) which means I use the mobile web version (on Mobile Safari) any time I'm not in the office / at home / in Starbucks.

bruceb 11y ago

turnoff suggested tags on FB: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline&section=suggestions&view&hc_location=ufi https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline&section=sugge...

miander 11y ago

How does this work? If they aren't uploading the picture how are they doing facial recognition? Surely they aren't running their highly proprietary recognition software on users' phones. Maybe they're doing preliminary zealous face-finding and uploading those potential matches for further processing? If so that means that no photo you ever take on your device is private.

gcr 11y ago
You could probably run recognition on a phone. Getting it running smoothly in the background without draining the battery? That might be a different matter. :)

monochromatic 11y ago

This, and other things like this, is why I uninstalled the Facebook app. The website is slower, but functional.

ubersync 11y ago
Ditto. I never installed the messenger app. I would use the facebook app for browsing, and logged into the web app for messages. But then I realized I can do all the stuff in one place, the web app. So I uninstalled the main app as well.
ionised 11y ago
I use Tinfoil for Facebook personally. It's an that is a wrapper for the website and allows better control over things like location and access to phone data.

jasperf 11y ago

Engineer on the feature here. This article is incorrect in describing how this feature becomes enabled. It does not turn on if "you've ever sent your friends a photo via Messenger." The feature only turns on if you see the promotion and click "Try It".

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
davb 11y ago
Could you please clarify if the face recognition is done on-device or if the photo (or some subset of data) is uploaded to Facebook's servers in order to analyse the photos? Thanks.
- malandrew 11y ago
  Yes, this is hugely important. If any photos are being uploaded without my explicit action, I consider it a huge violation of trust. I've disabled every permission messenger has until there is clarification here.
  - gcr 11y ago
    The feature isn't live yet, is it?
- gcr 11y ago
  Here's one possible way they could have implemented it: All the recognition happens on the device. Faces are detected, poses are estimated and frontalized, and features are extracted on the iphone. Then, the feature vector is compared to a small gallery of your friends' features living on the telephone. No upload. That's what I hope happens. I don't really see much a problem with the above potential strategy, but then again, I wouldn't want my recognition model living on my friends' phones. (One could imagine an attack that tries to extract the images used to train the recognition model given just the model blob...are there any private images there? sounds like a juicy paper!) Or maybe the features are extracted but sent to Facebook, which returns a recognition result. I consider this less trustworthy because Facebook would learn the identity of everyone in any picture I take, even if I choose not to send the full picture to facebook. Or: perhaps faces are detected, but then cropped and the image fragment containing the face is sent to Facebook. Or more Orweillian still, perhaps the entire image is simply sent to Facebook and the recognition happens there.

simplexion 11y ago

I am glad I have Android Marshmallow. Facebook no longer has any permissions.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
My solution is simpler. I just don't have Facebook.
- scott_karana 11y ago
  "Simple" is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, it's simpler to keep in touch with friends and family by having a "least-privileges" Facebook account. For those people, convincing every single person to also ditch Facebook would be very complex indeed.
  - chatmasta 11y ago
    why not just use the website?
    - scott_karana 11y ago
      I meant least-privileges in a general sense. Disallow tagging of you without approval, upload as little as you like, show as few details as you like, and for the app, deny any permissions you're not interested in giving up the keys to the castle for.

r00fus 11y ago

Wasn't clear - is this feature for Android only? Surprised, as usually FB releases stuff on iOS first...

scott_karana 11y ago
From the article: > For Android, [it's realtime]. For iPhone users, it will scan through your camera roll "periodically".

lemming 11y ago

If it still sounds a little creepy to have Facebook looking through all your photos, especially as you take them, you are basically left with two options: You can turn off the send-to-your-friend notifications, and you can turn off Facebook's facial recognition feature. Or, you know, ditch Facebook, since this is far from the total extent of their creepiness.

meddlepal 11y ago
It's not really practical to do that. You're basically asking people to give up email or their phone at this point. That's how wired into Facebook most people are.
- existencebox 11y ago
  I normally don't post in the social network threads; but I've seen this argument enough times that I have a bunch of questions I'm legitimately curious about, since I'm clearly not the target audience: (For context, I tried facebook in college, found myself hating a lot of aspects about it despite heavy use, cut myself off by the end of college and have been "clean" for a good few years now.) 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them over email/gchat/texting/in person. 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method? This hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very limited population strata. As a followup, do these people find any difficulties when connecting with non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those? 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just the accepted dogma at this point. I don't mean to demean the group by suggesting that, I've certainly watched myself do the same in hindsight to other things (video games), but I do wonder if it's at least being considered.
  - Silfen 11y ago
    In my personal experience, the biggest wedge is in planning events. With the caveat that this probably only applies strongly to people currently in their mid-twenties: For a lot of social circles, facebook is the only service that almost everyone will regularly check and that lets you coordinate events. My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them, it's because they opted out of the platform. The other big point of stickiness that I can think of is that facebook is many people's cloud. Years of photos are backed up there and only there. It's unfortunate that they've relinquished control of their files to a closed-platform third party, but that's the way it is.

callmeed 11y ago

"Magic" is a nice euphemism

RexRollman 11y ago

Am I the only one who is concerned that Facebook is going to eventually turn into a passive surveillance system for the government? I don't think it would be too difficult for Facebook to silently alert authorities when particular matches occur.

us0r 11y ago
Microsoft does this
- gcr 11y ago
  Really !! Sounds interesting. Source please?
  - uptown 11y ago
    Haven't you noticed all of Microsoft's latest "cute" apps are all face-based? * We can guess your age from your face: https://how-old.net/ https://how-old.net/ * We can guess your emotion: https://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2015/11/11/happy-sad-angry-this-microsoft-tool-recognizes-emotions-in-pictures/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2015/11/11/happy-sad-angry-...
    - gcr 11y ago
      us0r's assertion was that Microsoft reports certain recognition results to the government. You're replying with a list of some of Microsoft's technologies that use face attribute estimation. That's not what I was asking for. These are two very different things.
      - FungalRaincloud 11y ago
        I don't agree that "microsoft already does this" - so don't take what I'm about to say to mean that. I mean only to show a piece of technology that more directly relates to the comments others have made. That being said, Microsoft has developed a piece of technology called PhotoDNA[0], which is designed with the specific purpose of identifying child pornography. This is actively used on OneDrive and Bing, among other services - including Facebook. It's safe to say that OneDrive does not just delete the content if child pornography is detected - it reports to the authorities. Now, it's hard to argue that they don't have a right to do that, as long as the person is voluntarily using their services. That's where I draw a distinction here: Facebook could elect to turn on PhotoDNA on photos uploaded to their new service, and not properly educate their customers that stuff is being uploaded automatically. This does, essentially, constitute a passive surveillance system. Mind you, if it is used to establish that child pornography is found, you will have a hard time convincing most people that it is overstepping what Facebook should do. That's my concern - that this will be pushed as a "for the children" thing, and then extended to "to cut down on crime" later, once everyone stops caring about its existence. That said, that's my concern. It's not necessarily what I think will happen. I have no reason as of yet to believe that it's the next step. I do not, however, want Facebook automatically uploading (or even scanning) my photos. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA

workitout 11y ago

Doesn't Facebook own your pictures you upload? I haven't been on there in a long time but I thought I recalled that.

azinman2 11y ago
I believe not but if you read snapchats terms they can do anything they want with your photos

aswanson 11y ago

I fucking hate this company, but I'm drawn into it's gravitational pull like so many of us wanting to connect with long-distance family. There has to be technological way to stop these sons of bitches. What is it?

jerf 11y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlKao_Pox5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlKao_Pox5A Seriously. As others on the thread have pointed out, it's not as hard to live without as you think. Don't believe me? Well... why don't you just try it for one week? If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Isn't it worth a try, though? Try a step out of the social Skinner box.
- x1798DE 11y ago
  Yeah, all this, "I need Facebook" stuff feels foreign to me. Maybe I'm just a sociopath who doesn't care about his extended network, but I haven't used Facebook in years and I haven't missed it for one second of that time.

mixmastamyk 11y ago

Creepy. I'm glad I've removed the facebook app everywhere I've had it installed, in favor of using the mobile site under safari. The mobile site can chat too, so that limitation is also gone.

oselhn 11y ago

Another reason to root your phone or to get phone with android 6.

junto 11y ago

So, let's assume that processing your photos on the device is far too processor extensive. That means that Facebook uploads every single photo you take to Facebook's servers. That means that every single dick photo, or vagina/boobs photo that you have ever taken, is now with Facebook and readily available to the NSA under the FISA or Prism programs. Basically the NSA has the biggest amateur porn collection in the world.