4 ms·
Though very uncanny, this is rather easy to extrapolate even using the basic facets FB has available. But the most overlooked is photos. They are offline beacon
by aleem 9y ago
Though very uncanny, this is rather easy to extrapolate even using the basic facets FB has available. But the most overlooked is photos. They are offline beacons and are to offline tracking what websites are to online tracking.
For example you and a group of 10 other people took photos at the same location which FB sees as a small gathering of intimate friends. It will need to qualify the location is not a public restaurant to be sure its an intimate gathering. The chances of you connecting with that person are then really high. And if you are and the other person are in each others photos, then it's almost a certainty you will end up connecting on FB should FB recommend the connection. The more connected FB's network is, the more it can extrapolate based on commonalities from the first degree graph of your network.
It's also the reason why Google is betting so heavy on photos and offering free unlimited storage -- remember, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Google wants to build a social network graph based on location and facial recognition to draw on proximity.
With AI this will get even more uncanny. For example a wedding will have a certain photography profile (number of pics taken, the time of day, the location and venue based on Google Maps or past photographing histroy, the lighting in the photos, etc). Once you throw AI into the mix you realize Google doesn't need to draw out any conclusions. It can throw all these parameters into the AI engine and draw up proximity.
In this case, Google or FB will not be able to tell you how they drew the connection, because even they won't know. All you can assume is the AI engine will take dozens of parameters today and hundreds tomorrow. Google's deep investment in AI infrastructure is a bigger testament to this.
- mathattack 9y agoProfound. I don't think this explains the connection in the original post, but everything else you say makes a lot of sense.
- aleem 9y agoI thought that was fairly obvious. As per the author's aritcle it is definitely not a direct connection. FB relies heavily on first-degree connection analysis. If you and I end up in the same phonebook (which the author mentions) or the same photograph and FB connects us, we'll never know why. The not knowing why part makes it uncanny. Facebook is to people what Google is to websites. It is in the business of enriching its social graph in every way possible and then running profiling algorithms on that graph. Google by contrast crawls and pageranks the crawled graph. FB has literally hundreds of data sources to enrich their social graph and profile data. A good start is their list of acquisitions [1] in the space of offline applications, social networking aggregators, contact importers, photo management, private conversations, travel recommendations, check-ins/status updates, etc. Then consider the FB partnerships with ride hailing services, retail apps, music apps, etc. Then consider it's own apps and features around events, calendering, photos and instant messaging. Also consider the state of technology in NLP, AI and image recognition. Also consider the FB integrations with tens of thousands of apps for social auth, share buttons and advertising. Writing this post, I have surprised even myself as to how much data they have access to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...