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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

by 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.
  - downer70 11y ago
    You are deluded. Modern internet developers don't do this sort of thing. Not what you've described. Not as you've described it. It's never about deploying features that can't be explicitly controlled by the mothership. Furthermore, the graphics processing you're envisioning will consume battery power and might be kiboshed by the end-user's OS arbitrarily. That alone (lack of OS control) gives developers a plausible way to rationalize the orwellian. You want things to work in a way that will never ever happen.
    - gcr 11y ago
      (edit: see my reply to your other comment. I think that one's a bit better-structured to address the points you mention) I don't think it's out of the question. Here are some good reasons why Facebook might want to structure their pipeline like this. - Cellular Bandwidth is still expensive. They don't want the reputation of raising your data bill by uploading all your photos. Maybe the GPU cycles really are cheaper. After all, Facebook already uses a lot of battery anyway; what does a few million more cycles per image matter? - Messenger on iOS gets a new release every week. It's not very difficult to make code changes. Not quite as easy as a webapp, but updating recognition models is a pain anyways, so it won't happen too often. - Uploading photos without the user's consent is going to make Facebook look very bad, especially in certain countries like Germany or other parts of the EU. They already don't have a lot of social "privacy trust capital" as it is; they might not want to waste even more "trust capital" on such a silly application. Compare this to Apple, for example, who loudly claims that even they can't read your encrypted iMessages. They do this to win privacy karma points. Sure, this claim may not be true, but Facebook can't even consider this kind of marketing if photos are indeed being uploaded. On the other hand, if all the recognition happens on the device, Facebook could win some much-needed privacy karma points back by loudly saying so! Why wouldn't Facebook want to be able to say this? It's within their grasp, too! I agree; I don't think they're doing this. But my argument is much weaker: I only claim that it's possible, or perhaps even reasonable and desirable, to build their service like this.
theodoredziuba 11y ago
Facebook constantly reminds me of Johnny Knoxville on the golf course. [1] "You said we could come on the golf course, you didn't say anything about air horns, though!" That is to say, you get permission/consent for one ostensible purpose, and then abuse that consent for something that is technically okay by the letter of the law, but goes way beyond what the user would agree to if they knew why you were asking for permission. I don't trust that you'll keep this opt-in, as I have no reason to believe it. -- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C1Pr4AU2wc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C1Pr4AU2wc
jimrandomh 11y ago
Others here have asked whether enabling this feature would mean that non-shared photos are uploaded to Facebook's server, when they haven't been shared and wouldn't otherwise be uploaded. Does it do that?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
eveningcoffee 11y ago
I have a social question here. I assume that I will not get an answer to this but I think it is still worth asking. If you were developing this feature, that is in my opinion a very interesting problem from technical point of view, then what were your thoughts about the possible social and moral implications of such feature? For example, to give you an idea, did you think that this may outrage people? Or they may at least find it intrusive? If you had any such thoughts, then how did you mitigate them? Also is there some kind of program in Facebook that addresses these kind of problems? I could not throw a rock at you. I am just interested about your personal experience.
- chmullig 11y ago
  I interned at Facebook a few years ago, so I'll speculate with an ounce of information. There's a lot of openness, including around issues like this, at the company. There's weekly all hands meetings, where a developer could directly ask Mark about his opinion on a feature like this. The user experience, including creepiness, was almost certainly discussed. They may have misjudged in this case, but that's fallibility, not because it was ignored.
gcr 11y ago
Thank you for the clarification! There's some really cool tech behind this feature. Though I'm personally worried about the privacy of the implementation, I'm really impressed by the engineering that went into it.

by jasperf 11y ago

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.
- downer70 11y ago
  You are deluded. Modern internet developers don't do this sort of thing. Not what you've described. Not as you've described it. It's never about deploying features that can't be explicitly controlled by the mothership. Furthermore, the graphics processing you're envisioning will consume battery power and might be kiboshed by the end-user's OS arbitrarily. That alone (lack of OS control) gives developers a plausible way to rationalize the orwellian. You want things to work in a way that will never ever happen.
  - gcr 11y ago
    (edit: see my reply to your other comment. I think that one's a bit better-structured to address the points you mention) I don't think it's out of the question. Here are some good reasons why Facebook might want to structure their pipeline like this. - Cellular Bandwidth is still expensive. They don't want the reputation of raising your data bill by uploading all your photos. Maybe the GPU cycles really are cheaper. After all, Facebook already uses a lot of battery anyway; what does a few million more cycles per image matter? - Messenger on iOS gets a new release every week. It's not very difficult to make code changes. Not quite as easy as a webapp, but updating recognition models is a pain anyways, so it won't happen too often. - Uploading photos without the user's consent is going to make Facebook look very bad, especially in certain countries like Germany or other parts of the EU. They already don't have a lot of social "privacy trust capital" as it is; they might not want to waste even more "trust capital" on such a silly application. Compare this to Apple, for example, who loudly claims that even they can't read your encrypted iMessages. They do this to win privacy karma points. Sure, this claim may not be true, but Facebook can't even consider this kind of marketing if photos are indeed being uploaded. On the other hand, if all the recognition happens on the device, Facebook could win some much-needed privacy karma points back by loudly saying so! Why wouldn't Facebook want to be able to say this? It's within their grasp, too! I agree; I don't think they're doing this. But my argument is much weaker: I only claim that it's possible, or perhaps even reasonable and desirable, to build their service like this.

theodoredziuba 11y ago

Facebook constantly reminds me of Johnny Knoxville on the golf course. [1] "You said we could come on the golf course, you didn't say anything about air horns, though!" That is to say, you get permission/consent for one ostensible purpose, and then abuse that consent for something that is technically okay by the letter of the law, but goes way beyond what the user would agree to if they knew why you were asking for permission. I don't trust that you'll keep this opt-in, as I have no reason to believe it. -- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C1Pr4AU2wc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C1Pr4AU2wc

jimrandomh 11y ago

Others here have asked whether enabling this feature would mean that non-shared photos are uploaded to Facebook's server, when they haven't been shared and wouldn't otherwise be uploaded. Does it do that?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

eveningcoffee 11y ago

I have a social question here. I assume that I will not get an answer to this but I think it is still worth asking. If you were developing this feature, that is in my opinion a very interesting problem from technical point of view, then what were your thoughts about the possible social and moral implications of such feature? For example, to give you an idea, did you think that this may outrage people? Or they may at least find it intrusive? If you had any such thoughts, then how did you mitigate them? Also is there some kind of program in Facebook that addresses these kind of problems? I could not throw a rock at you. I am just interested about your personal experience.

chmullig 11y ago
I interned at Facebook a few years ago, so I'll speculate with an ounce of information. There's a lot of openness, including around issues like this, at the company. There's weekly all hands meetings, where a developer could directly ask Mark about his opinion on a feature like this. The user experience, including creepiness, was almost certainly discussed. They may have misjudged in this case, but that's fallibility, not because it was ignored.

gcr 11y ago

Thank you for the clarification! There's some really cool tech behind this feature. Though I'm personally worried about the privacy of the implementation, I'm really impressed by the engineering that went into it.