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Facebook turned on face recognition silently
- pknerd 9y agoso how can one believe by turning it off will really make it disabled? After all it's all about a CSS/JS animation ;)
- pavel_lishin 9y agoAnyone have a handy link to where I can opt out of this?
- moonka 9y agoDirect link:https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec
- cpcallen 9y agoI am still waiting for this feature in the UK, but European courts keep blocking it. It pisses me off: I should be able to opt-in if I want to.
- Barrin92 9y ago>I should be able to opt-in if I want to. As the top comment suggests, if Facebook runs face recognition on pictures of you and those pictures contain other people, there is no guarantee that they have opted into the program as well. You wouldn't just be making a choice for yourself.
- khedoros1 9y agoWell, either Facebook doesn't have training data for the opt-out users, or they do, and they use it to ensure that those users aren't publicly tagged (my paranoia says that they're still tagged internally, regardless of the option that's selected). Either way, it would only need to identify those users who have actually opted in.
- jugg1es 9y agoThe fact that they notified you means it wasn't exactly silent. I saw this notification and turned it off. I wish it hadn't been opt-out and had been an opt-in thing instead.
- mrtksn 9y agoThere's no notification unless you visit Facebook.com, that I no longer do regularly.
- 8note 9y agoI got it from mbasic.facebook.com
- Gabriel_Martin 9y agoI saw it in the app. So this is not accurate.
- cryptoz 9y agoWas it a push notification? Or did you have to open the app to see it? It's silent unless there was a proactive message to you from Facebook that your face will start to be recognized. This facial recognition happens even when you're not using the app. So Facebook is waiting for you to take action before telling you anything. That is not proactive, it is silent. What if you don't go on Facebook any more but have an account? You'd never know this was happening.
- bfred_it 9y agoThey warned me that they activated it, so it wasn't silent, it was just opt-out (not that it's particularly better, but let's use non-clickbait terms)
- cryptoz 9y agoIt may be silent for some people and you're intentionally ignoring that. For someone who has an account but does not regularly log in, this change is silent. Yes, you saw the message, but that was by chance. Many others will have this feature silently enabled without their knowledge.
- praneshp 9y agoNot really silent, right? Unless you meant there was no press coverage about the feature.
- markstos 9y agoThey silently asked for your consent. As-in, they didn't. The feature is opt-out, with their interests first, and your privacy and consent second.
- khedoros1 9y agoThe feature is "opt-out" in the sense that they based the default on some other privacy setting. It was disabled by default, for me. But I've been fairly diligent over the years, going through and disabling the things that I didn't want.
- trequartista 9y ago"This setting is on, but you can turn it off any time, which applies to features we may add later". Note the features we may add later part. Facebook is getting creepier by the day.
- acd 9y agoSo link surveillance cameras to the Facebook face recognition and cell phone location data of users and law enforcement will be so much easier. A law enforcement json API
- staplers 9y agoAs Facebook's user rate declines, I genuinely believe they'll start generating larger and larger revenue from this exact thing. A majority of the population's data is already there, they can survive for decades by renting out that data.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoAnd people will have the FBI going through their mail because an algorithm written by someone who lived by "move fast and break things" flagged them as a commie (or whatever the equivalent is 30yr from now) over some combination of things they posted in high school. If you spread incompetence around just right the end result is approximately the same as malice.
- antoncohen 9y agoI got nearly the same notification, except mine defaulted to off, it said "This setting is off, but you can turn it on any time". My guess is that they based the setting on another setting. For example there was some photo tagging thing added years ago, and I disabled that. Most of my timeline and tagging settings are set to Custom or require review.
- chaosite 9y agoSame here.
- codemac 9y agoMine was the same, it was already set to off.
- mmjaa 9y agoCan't find it in my Facebook settings - can you give us a pointer where to find these settings in Facebooks cesspool of anti-patterns they like to promote as the "settings" page...
- khedoros1 9y agoThere's a "Face Recognition" tab that's new to the settings page since the last time I went through disabling things. For me, it shows up on the left side right under "Language".
- devilmoon 9y agoThis has always been active ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- coding123 9y agoTrue, there is nothing stopping them from running this in the background to make additional linkages between people and places to sell to third parties without having to share where those linkages come from.
- Buge 9y agoYes, here's an article describing the feature from 2010. https://www.pcworld.com/article/213894/Facebook_Adds_Facial_Recognition_to_Make_Photo_Tagging_Easier.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/213894/Facebook_Adds_Facial_...
- nappy-doo 9y agoGoogle Photos has had it on for years -- not sure what the big deal here is?!?
- ucaetano 9y agoGoogle Photos' was only within your account, and didn't assign any of the faces to you unless you manually assigned it as "me". Later they included the option (via opt-in) to have Google suggest that your friends share with you photos that have you. Facebook's is platform-wide, and you don't have the option of tagging faces but not assigning them to you or to specific people.
- grifball 9y ago"Help protect from strangers using your photo" Ironic
- liberte82 9y agoIronic. They could save others from abusing your privacy, but not themselves.
- soared 9y agoI wish I could activate it once to see all the previous photos of me that aren't tagged, then turn it off so it doesn't do it in the background. Not that its any safer, but it would make me feel better about it.
- khedoros1 9y agoAre you sure it's not going in the background anyhow? I thought they've been using facial recognition to tag pictures for years...
- codedokode 9y agoRussian photographer took photos of random people in the subway in Saint-Petersburg and later could easily find their social network profiles [1] [2] The creators of the app (FindFace) that indexes face data do not have any respect for privacy and boast how good their app is. I think browsers should issue a warning before uploading photo to internet. Maybe then less people will want to publish their photo online. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/14/russian-photographer-yegor-tsvetkov-identifies-strangers-facial-recognition-app https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/14/russian-photog... [2] https://birdinflight.com/ru/vdohnovenie/fotoproect/06042016-face-big-data.html https://birdinflight.com/ru/vdohnovenie/fotoproect/06042016-...
- cryptoz 9y agoMore than a decade ago Mark Zuckerberg said that anyone who gave him a photo of themselves was a "dumb fuck". His entire plan this whole time has been to do exactly this kind of thing (edit: because he thinks it is profit-maximizing), and he thinks you're a dumb fuck (just like me) for uploading your photo to let him use in the maximum-scary-surveillance way. We should all just get off Facebook. The problem is that you can't leave even after you "delete" your account, and they have your photos tagged and matched to your email even if you never signed up anyway since all your "dumb fuck" friends gave Mark Zuckerberg their email passwords too - so even if you never sign up, your friends already ratted you out and gave up your email and photos anyway.
- vesinisa 9y agoThis is why I think the 'right to be forgotten' legislation might actually be a GOOD thing. Sure, it's some extra work when designing a new system, and lots of legacy systems require expensive rework, and a few twats will abuse the right to have Google redact journalistic information about their personal misadventures from the public sphere. But it's still my private data, so I should have the right to forbid companies I don't trust from storing and processing it. And they should be legally forced to oblige and have processes in place so that such request can be truly honored.
- tcd 9y agoYeah, if you think Facebook would EVER honour a system like that then I have many, many bridges in stock for you :) To most people, flicking a bit from 0 to 1 is enough to convince them your data is "deleted", however, in the database, what people never see, is that it the column name is actually "hidden". :)
- ikeyany 9y agoIt's not that we naively trust him, we just believe the creepy data gathering is the price to pay for that warm feeling of being connected with pseudo-friends and kinda-acquaintances.
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- naskwo 9y agowww.famipix.com Free for schools. Hosted in Europe.
- tucif 9y agoHere is the facebook site explaining how this works/will work. https://www.facebook.com/about/basics/manage-your-privacy/face-recognition https://www.facebook.com/about/basics/manage-your-privacy/fa...
- web007 9y agoI have to assume that this UX is intentionally awful: Go to Settings. Go to More. Tap Privacy Shortcuts. Tap More Settings. Tap Face Recognition. Tap Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos? Select No if you don't want to let Facebook recognize you in photos and videos. Also, this set of steps doesn't work on the desktop browser. I don't see More or Privacy Shortcuts in My Settings, only in the ? menu at the top (clicked by accident). Once you go to More, I don't see any section for Face Recognition anywhere on the page.
- angrydev 9y agoI got this notification in my news feed last night and now I can't find the option to shut it off on desktop or mobile. No idea what is going on.
- khedoros1 9y agoI can click the little arrow, go to settings, and there's a "Face Recognition" entry in the sidebar, between "Language" and "Notifications". This is on the desktop website. Sounds like it's hidden deeper if you visit from a phone?
- eschulz 9y agoYes, but for me instead of "Face Recognition" it's under "Timeline and Tagging Settings", and then it's the third suggestion under "Tagging".
- khedoros1 9y agoFrom other comments in the thread, it sounds like there are at least 2 different locations that they put the option. It's either region/country-specific, or an example of A/B testing, I suppose.
- _sdegutis 9y agoOn a related note, FB seems to use the microphone, with permissions disabled, when the app isn’t even open, to listen in on our conversations and later advertise things it hears us talking about. I don’t have 100% proof of this but we’ve mentioned things we never googled or even put in our phones or computers and they are pretty specific (purple dress, tactile diaper bags, beer) and they come up the next day or two in a FB ad or recommended post. EDIT: I get that the "general consensus" is that this has been debunked, and that it's just coincidental. But we have had several situations where there's no other reasonable explanation. Like how our friend, who has never drank beer and never drinks any kind of alcohol, came over to our house, and we discussed beers, and within a few hours she got some beer ads on FB. This kind of highly specific thing has happened too many times for any other explanation to make sense.
- codedokode 9y agoIt is more likely that recordings can be used to detect users who have are nearby (who hear the same sound) but have GPS disabled or not available.
- nkozyra 9y agoThis is a pretty bold claim to make without something more substantive than this anecdote. There's too much opportunity for coincidental consumer profiling to be the root source of what you suspect is something more malicious.
- I-M-S 9y agoReply All made an episode on this: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/109-facebook-spying https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/109-facebook-spying
- natecavanaugh 9y agoThe episode was really good and stated that Facebook has at least 55,000 data points on any given individual, and when you have that kind of metadata on someone, it seems like parsing voice data would be inefficient and expensive in comparison to inferring information from those data points.
- bjt2n3904 9y agoSo, here's the weird catch-22. Or perhaps, the illusion of choice. There are two people who are in a photo. One wishes Facebook to use face recognition, the other does not. Facebook will run face recognition on the photo regardless, but how will they know who wants to be recognized, and who doesn't? Simply, they have a model of your face already trained. And they recognize you in photos--you have no say whether or not they will. All this option does is hide the notifications when they do recognize you.
- bamboozled 9y agoI don't think they care about that unfortunately; This has been a long running concern of mine. You're involved with it even if you choose not to be. Doesn't feel right.
- denzil_correa 9y agoPrivacy Leakage via Social (Co-Location etc.) Information - an important and active research area.
- acomjean 9y agoThat’s an interesting point. Not on Facebook but they know who I am and who I know already (they sent me an invite to join years ago with a list of about 10 people I might know. I knew 9 of them...
- electrograv 9y agoUsually these systems are implemented via a generic face detector that first runs on the whole image, to locate all the faces that are present. After the faces are located, they’re matched against a set of candidates (which I would guess is an enumeration if all your Nth order friends [who don’t opt out of this], to reduce computational complexity). This isn’t the only possible way to do it, but I believe it’s the most common and effective approach. So it’s not at all unlikely that when running the identifier, they simply don’t match against people who say no to this. They’d never be recognized at all, and the system would just identify their face as an “unknown” identity. I cannot say for sure whether or not this is how they implemented it, but it seems likely.
- igotsideas 9y agoIf facial recognition bothers you enough to be paranoid, I would highly suggest deleting all Facebook products.
- mwnz 9y agoNot sure that you can consider the activation silent, given that they prompted people in their news feeds.
- supahfly_remix 9y agoIs there an easy way to mistrain this?
- bfred_it 9y agoDefinitely: tag yourself in photos that aren't you. Eventually Facebook will think that's you.
- debt 9y agoI'm fine with this, but how do I find those photos where I'm being automatically tagged in?
- maleta 9y agoAlgorithm is good, but not best. Facebook is offering me to tag my dad on my own pictures. :v https://imgur.com/a/fqDGS https://imgur.com/a/fqDGS
- adamrezich 9y agoit's like a weird dystopian complement to your father
- gnicholas 9y agoDid anyone else notice that FB mentioned accessibility as one of the reasons that people should opt-in to face recognition? I wonder whether this was something that the FB Accessibility team actually asked for, or whether this is just a do-good sounding excuse for a program that FB wants to (clandestinely, apparently) launch.
- guhcampos 9y agoYou can hardly call it "silent" while screenshotting their disclaimer about it.
- horsecaptin 9y agoJust wanted to point out. IF YOU ARE NOT THE CUSTOMER, THEN YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!
- jwilk 9y agoFrom the HN guidelines: Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
- horsecaptin 9y agoI'd forgotten that one. Thank you.
- pokoleo 9y agoI got this notification in my Facebook mobile app with slightly different wording. I went into the settings, and it was turned off. I wonder if they realized they need to show this to all users in order to get some sort of consent.
- krrrh 9y agoHere’s the press release announcing the new control from December. > People gave us feedback that they would find it easier to manage face recognition through a simple setting, so we’re pairing these tools with a single “on/off” control. If your tag suggestions setting is currently set to “none,” then your default face recognition setting will be set to “off” and will remain that way until you decide to change it. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/managing-your-identity-on-facebook-with-face-recognition-technology/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/managing-your-identity-...
- mncolinlee 9y agoI'm imaging a Probability Zero or Black Mirror short where Facebook insists some scammer is using your face and attempts to shut them down. They are unable to log into services because they used Facebook login for convenience. In the end, it turns out the imposter randomly had an identical face and was perhaps a long list twin.
- antoncohen 9y agoI think this is notification is sort of the opposite of what people think it is. Facebook has had facial recognition and tag suggestions based on facial recognition for a long time. For example this [1] article from June 2017 explains how to turn it off. This new notification is about a global on/off switch that disable all facial recognition, because Facebook is going to start doing more than tag suggestions with facial recognition [2][3]. For example they are trying to detect when people are impersonating you online. The global face recognition setting defaulted to off for me, probably because I had tag suggestions disabled already. [1] https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-disable-facebooks-facial-recognition-feature-2487265 https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-disable-facebooks-facial-rec... [2] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/managing-your-identity-on-facebook-with-face-recognition-technology/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/managing-your-identity-... [3] http://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/facebook-face-recognition-optional-tool-is-widely-rolling-out-to-users-but-raises-a-lot-of-concerns-4369533.html http://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/facebook-face-re...
- polskibus 9y agoWhat possibilities for the user will GDPR bring into such situations, if any?
- pkhamre 9y agoI hope they make a new function: * Join the group of people that looks like me
- endlessvoid94 9y agoHow is this silent? They told you about it...
- bartl 9y agoI'm OK with this, under the condition that Facebook only uses it to alert you of photos you likely appear in, i.e. those two first examples of what it can do. I would not allow them to show those results to other people.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]