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This is surely sending shock waves down the data mining community. Not really. From a technical point of view there is nothing impressive about this, except t

by ma2rten 11y ago

This is surely sending shock waves down the data mining community. Not really. From a technical point of view there is nothing impressive about this, except that they spend the time and money to collect all the training data. Also that it says "this image may contain:" tells you something about how accurate this actually is.

hacker_9 11y ago
Not my point. What isn't available to everyone is the sheer amount of real life images that Facebook has access to, which people are uploading of their lives as we speak. You could get an unprecedented view of almost anyone's life from that, seeing as users have past the 1 billion mark, and it's all in the hands of a company who sells your data for profit.
- manigandham 11y ago
  Your basic demographics and "likes" are already enough to do all the targeting necessary. If this is about the general privacy issue then it's back to the same old thing: don't share things that you want to keep private. Of course people's actions prove that they get more value out of sharing this content then is worth the privacy of not doing so.
  - hacker_9 11y ago
    Again, not my point. Social network sites are built off image sharing, that before computers did not understand. Now that they do, we are entered an unprecedented age of surveillance. Private is only private to humans, the Facebook machine can look at any photos it wants, and build up a profile for anyone, their friends, make predictions of behavior and so on. It's not the tech that is bad, it is the fact it is in the hands of for-profit companies, who are willing to sell your data just to make their bottom line.
    - mynameisvlad 11y ago
      Then what is your point? manigandham literally adressed your concern; basic demographics, likes, and other sources for content are far better for targeting than what a picture could potentially contain, and that can be done with closer to 100% accuracy since a computer doesn't have to "guess" what the content of an image is, it already knows this content from the text in a status, or the location metadata associated with a post, or the people you're tagged with. This is incredibly inaccurate when compared with all those sources.
      - hacker_9 11y ago
        Posted images contain far more information that what is posted in text. Scroll through your feed, people upload images then write a header that adds to the scene. It doesn't describe it. There is so so much more information to gain from parsing images, I can't believe you can't see that, and can only assume you aren't thinking this through properly.
        mynameisvlad 11y ago
        No, I am thinking through this properly, you're just being overly paranoid. A computer ML system right now will not be able to, with a high degree of accuracy, know enough about the image to provide targeted advertisements. They even showed samples of descriptions; they're vague and general, not specific. The description might be "two people, outdoors, at beach" while the content could be "Awesome beach day today with my best buddy!" with X tagged in the image, geolocated to "Y beach" (either through your phone/camera's geolocation feature, or the poster specifically tagging a location which is something Facebook encourages), posted at Z time. Which do you honestly believe is going to provide more information for targeting? Hell, even if the content is "It's a beautiful day out!", you'd still have far more information from the metadata (tags, location, time) than the vague description the auto-generator could possibly provide.
    - manigandham 11y ago
      > This is surely sending shock waves down the data mining community. Tech keeps getting better and Facebook keeps getting more data and putting it together results in better insights. There are several other major companies and government agencies who can derive just as much, if not more, insights about people through data. This is just natural evolution, not a major revolution. > but this is surely just a cover for being able to take targeted ads to the next level. As someone who has built 3 adtech companies, this image info is nowhere near as good as the current posts, relationships and likes that users have already entered. Maybe someday it will be able to accurately know what's actually in the image and also derive some intention and relations out of it, but today it's nothing special at all. > You could get an unprecedented view of almost anyone's life from that, seeing as users have past the 1 billion mark, and it's all in the hands of a company who sells your data for profit. > It's not the tech that is bad, it is the fact it is in the hands of for-profit companies, who are willing to sell your data just to make their bottom line. So are they not allowed to use the data? They are a business and will use everything they can to make their system as good as possible. Whether users care or not is up to them but it's clear that people find plenty of value in Facebook to continue using it. If you're just stating that the possible surveillance capabilities are increasing then I think this is pretty well known...?
dr_zoidberg 11y ago
Indeed, in this presentation given by Geoff Hinton[0] (video uploaded 13 oct. 2015), a similar system to this is explained very simply. And by the time this was recorded, and how it was presented, I get the feeling it was not ground-breaking or cutting-edge -- but still a very good example to show. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcOMKXAw5VA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcOMKXAw5VA
lucaspiller 11y ago
Tensorflow + Inception is about this accurate. For high level categories and popular items it's pretty good, but if you want to dig deeper (e.g. identify the type of animal in a picture) it'll need more training. Google Photos is a lot smarter in that it can identify what a set of photos contains. As an example I noticed all pictures of my graduation (which had no metadata saying it was that) have been grouped into a 'Graduation' album. It's also kind of scary...
- r00fus 11y ago
  Did you have EXIF data on your pictures? Similar location + even a single picture with an academic cap could easily provide enough information for categorization...

by ma2rten 11y ago

hacker_9 11y ago

Not my point. What isn't available to everyone is the sheer amount of real life images that Facebook has access to, which people are uploading of their lives as we speak. You could get an unprecedented view of almost anyone's life from that, seeing as users have past the 1 billion mark, and it's all in the hands of a company who sells your data for profit.

manigandham 11y ago
Your basic demographics and "likes" are already enough to do all the targeting necessary. If this is about the general privacy issue then it's back to the same old thing: don't share things that you want to keep private. Of course people's actions prove that they get more value out of sharing this content then is worth the privacy of not doing so.
- hacker_9 11y ago
  Again, not my point. Social network sites are built off image sharing, that before computers did not understand. Now that they do, we are entered an unprecedented age of surveillance. Private is only private to humans, the Facebook machine can look at any photos it wants, and build up a profile for anyone, their friends, make predictions of behavior and so on. It's not the tech that is bad, it is the fact it is in the hands of for-profit companies, who are willing to sell your data just to make their bottom line.
  - mynameisvlad 11y ago
    Then what is your point? manigandham literally adressed your concern; basic demographics, likes, and other sources for content are far better for targeting than what a picture could potentially contain, and that can be done with closer to 100% accuracy since a computer doesn't have to "guess" what the content of an image is, it already knows this content from the text in a status, or the location metadata associated with a post, or the people you're tagged with. This is incredibly inaccurate when compared with all those sources.
    - hacker_9 11y ago
      Posted images contain far more information that what is posted in text. Scroll through your feed, people upload images then write a header that adds to the scene. It doesn't describe it. There is so so much more information to gain from parsing images, I can't believe you can't see that, and can only assume you aren't thinking this through properly.
      - mynameisvlad 11y ago
        No, I am thinking through this properly, you're just being overly paranoid. A computer ML system right now will not be able to, with a high degree of accuracy, know enough about the image to provide targeted advertisements. They even showed samples of descriptions; they're vague and general, not specific. The description might be "two people, outdoors, at beach" while the content could be "Awesome beach day today with my best buddy!" with X tagged in the image, geolocated to "Y beach" (either through your phone/camera's geolocation feature, or the poster specifically tagging a location which is something Facebook encourages), posted at Z time. Which do you honestly believe is going to provide more information for targeting? Hell, even if the content is "It's a beautiful day out!", you'd still have far more information from the metadata (tags, location, time) than the vague description the auto-generator could possibly provide.
  - manigandham 11y ago
    > This is surely sending shock waves down the data mining community. Tech keeps getting better and Facebook keeps getting more data and putting it together results in better insights. There are several other major companies and government agencies who can derive just as much, if not more, insights about people through data. This is just natural evolution, not a major revolution. > but this is surely just a cover for being able to take targeted ads to the next level. As someone who has built 3 adtech companies, this image info is nowhere near as good as the current posts, relationships and likes that users have already entered. Maybe someday it will be able to accurately know what's actually in the image and also derive some intention and relations out of it, but today it's nothing special at all. > You could get an unprecedented view of almost anyone's life from that, seeing as users have past the 1 billion mark, and it's all in the hands of a company who sells your data for profit. > It's not the tech that is bad, it is the fact it is in the hands of for-profit companies, who are willing to sell your data just to make their bottom line. So are they not allowed to use the data? They are a business and will use everything they can to make their system as good as possible. Whether users care or not is up to them but it's clear that people find plenty of value in Facebook to continue using it. If you're just stating that the possible surveillance capabilities are increasing then I think this is pretty well known...?

dr_zoidberg 11y ago

Indeed, in this presentation given by Geoff Hinton[0] (video uploaded 13 oct. 2015), a similar system to this is explained very simply. And by the time this was recorded, and how it was presented, I get the feeling it was not ground-breaking or cutting-edge -- but still a very good example to show. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcOMKXAw5VA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcOMKXAw5VA

lucaspiller 11y ago

Tensorflow + Inception is about this accurate. For high level categories and popular items it's pretty good, but if you want to dig deeper (e.g. identify the type of animal in a picture) it'll need more training. Google Photos is a lot smarter in that it can identify what a set of photos contains. As an example I noticed all pictures of my graduation (which had no metadata saying it was that) have been grouped into a 'Graduation' album. It's also kind of scary...

r00fus 11y ago
Did you have EXIF data on your pictures? Similar location + even a single picture with an academic cap could easily provide enough information for categorization...