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> Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them I've been saying this for years. It's pretty clear that if Facebook told regular users just

> Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them I've been saying this for years. It's pretty clear that if Facebook told regular users just how much they knew, those users would be seriously creeped out (though, these days, probably not creeped out enough to do anything about it). I expect that another example of this would be the ability of their facial recognition system and the breadth of the database behind it. Users are Facebook's product, and they should expect to be treated as such. The Facebook site and associated services are just infrastructure designed to a) collect information on users and b) give advertisers optimal access to those users. edit: also, obviously, Facebook is not the only company engaged in this sort of thing. It's all around us.

wmccullough 10y ago
I'm starting to wonder if we the people need to begin creating a sousveilance system to track public officials and corporate heads.
- caconym_ 10y ago
  I really think what we need is to be willing to pay for the things we use so that we aren't aggressively productized for the benefit of the entities who cover that cost "for us". I stopped using Facebook not because I was worried about privacy (although that did help) but because it was just a waste of time. It wasn't doing anything positive for me. All the features that I had once enjoyed had been removed or drowned under a torrent of advertising and aggressively "curated" (calculatedly manipulative) content. Like, how about this: I pay $1 per month and I get a product that's actually built with me in mind, for my benefit, that I enjoy using. I recently switched to Fastmail (while I don't hate Gmail, it's not been great recently) and guess what: Fastmail is better, clearly more interested in catering to me, and it's dirt cheap. A product built for me... imagine that! Crazy talk, really, in today's ad-subsidized world.
  - xg15 10y ago
    Except that the ISPs, automakers, IoT venders, etc are tracking you too if they can get away with it. It's perfectly possible today to pay for a service and be the product.
    - wmccullough 10y ago
      Farmers buy new pigs all the time to raise up and slaughter.
wallacoloo 10y ago
When you download the archive of personal data Facebook shares with you, it includes some facial recognition data. Specifically, it gives 3 "Threshold" decimal values. Does anyone know what these numbers mean? I read up on "eigenfaces", and it sounds like Facebook is most likely subtracting my face from the mean and then projecting it onto N different face-like and orthogonal images to obtain numbers like this, and so these numbers would represent the weights used to reconstruct an approximation of my face from a linear combination of basis images. But N=3 is way too small for this method to be useful. It seems silly to share these values with a user but not tell them what it means.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  Facebook has far more sophisticated facial recognition systems than Eigenfaces, based on deep neutral networks.
nilved 10y ago
Everyone has been saying this for years. I honestly can't believe anyone would think that Facebook shares all their data with you.
pmlnr 10y ago
> if Facebook told regular users just how much they knew, those users would be seriously creeped out The sad truth: they wouldn't. They'd simply ignore it, because it would shatter their current beliefs.

wmccullough 10y ago

I'm starting to wonder if we the people need to begin creating a sousveilance system to track public officials and corporate heads.

caconym_ 10y ago
I really think what we need is to be willing to pay for the things we use so that we aren't aggressively productized for the benefit of the entities who cover that cost "for us". I stopped using Facebook not because I was worried about privacy (although that did help) but because it was just a waste of time. It wasn't doing anything positive for me. All the features that I had once enjoyed had been removed or drowned under a torrent of advertising and aggressively "curated" (calculatedly manipulative) content. Like, how about this: I pay $1 per month and I get a product that's actually built with me in mind, for my benefit, that I enjoy using. I recently switched to Fastmail (while I don't hate Gmail, it's not been great recently) and guess what: Fastmail is better, clearly more interested in catering to me, and it's dirt cheap. A product built for me... imagine that! Crazy talk, really, in today's ad-subsidized world.
- xg15 10y ago
  Except that the ISPs, automakers, IoT venders, etc are tracking you too if they can get away with it. It's perfectly possible today to pay for a service and be the product.
  - wmccullough 10y ago
    Farmers buy new pigs all the time to raise up and slaughter.

wallacoloo 10y ago

When you download the archive of personal data Facebook shares with you, it includes some facial recognition data. Specifically, it gives 3 "Threshold" decimal values. Does anyone know what these numbers mean? I read up on "eigenfaces", and it sounds like Facebook is most likely subtracting my face from the mean and then projecting it onto N different face-like and orthogonal images to obtain numbers like this, and so these numbers would represent the weights used to reconstruct an approximation of my face from a linear combination of basis images. But N=3 is way too small for this method to be useful. It seems silly to share these values with a user but not tell them what it means.

IshKebab 10y ago
Facebook has far more sophisticated facial recognition systems than Eigenfaces, based on deep neutral networks.

nilved 10y ago

Everyone has been saying this for years. I honestly can't believe anyone would think that Facebook shares all their data with you.

pmlnr 10y ago

> if Facebook told regular users just how much they knew, those users would be seriously creeped out The sad truth: they wouldn't. They'd simply ignore it, because it would shatter their current beliefs.