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Facial recognition's 'dirty little secret': Millions of online photos scraped
- telesilla 8y agoThe irony of all this being, when I use Facebook marketplace with a specially-created public profile that has no discernible photos I get accused of being a spammer. Maybe Facebook could implement some kind of trustworthy algorithm that says "we believe this account is not a scammer". And I don't have to deal with not being able to fully use online systems that assume a photograph==trust.
- tapland 8y agoAdd some nice pictures of what could be a hobby?
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoEven if you upload a photo, FB will block the account if the photo doesn’t show your entire face. I set up a Facebook account where, after a holiday in Morocco, my profile photo was me in a turban where my mouth was obscured by part of the turban. I got a message from FB saying that this was not sufficient and I would have to upload another photo where no part of my face was covered.
- doovd 8y agoThis sounds like bs to me. There is a significant number of users with profile photos that don't contain a face and this is the first time I'm hearing this...
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoThose users probably have performed various other actions that reassured FB they had not signed up to spam (joining groups, adding many friends, etc.). It was the combination of being a new signup with an emptyish profile and having no clearly identifiable face that led to my account being blocked, with a message that specifically said I would not be able to regain access to my account until I uploaded a photo where my face was fully visible.
- doovd 8y agoFair enough
- underwater 8y agoWho is accusing you? Facebook or other users? Facebook don't want you to create separate accounts for different purposes (i.e. one just for marketplace). So they aren't going to optimise the product around your use case.
- telesilla 8y agoOther users: if I post something in the marketplace for sale, invariably I get a comment from someone in the community "watch out, might be a spammer because they don't have any photos"
- JohnFen 8y agoThis sort of thing is the main reason why I do not put photos (or any other identifying information) of myself or others on the open web.
- fredley 8y agoNeither do I, any more, but I wasn't precient enough not to do it 10-15 years ago, and there's no way of redacting that information.
- nostrademons 8y agoThere's also nothing you can do about appearing in friends' photos, or in the background of random strangers' photos in public places, or that article for the school newspaper that celebrated your basketball team victory in 11th grade, or (in many cases) headshots on your employer's team page. And that's only the legal and innocent ones. Somebody hacks into your phone or your company's org chart and suddenly a whole bunch of your photos are out there on the dark web.
- 908087 8y agoImagine being a kid born after Facebook became a thing, and finding out later in life that your parents robbed you of the chance to decide for yourself whether or not you wanted corporations to have that data.
- nightfly 8y agoRealistically it's all but impossible.
- canada_dry 8y agoNot that this really helps. The moment someone else puts up a picture that you happen to be in (esp. family, friends) and then tags it with your name -- your image and name be scooped and cataloged.
- renholder 8y ago
- philipodonnell 8y ago> The dataset does not link the photos of people’s faces to their names, which means any system trained to use the photos would not be able to identify named individuals. But isn't that like the point of a facial recognition algorithm? Recognizing individuals by their faces? Presumably from a reference image that has a name? Also it seems pretty trivial to reverse lookup the images if they were from a public source and some of those will have names, unless they are significantly downsampled.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fixermark 8y agoNot necessarily. One thing that a wide-net dataset can be extremely useful for is improving the neural net models to better recognize people outside the traditional academic dataset a lot of older-generation neural nets were trained on, which is to say: the sorts of people who have the time and need-awareness to put their faces in some university's dataset for training neural nets (which is to say: white guys ;) ). You can use faces without names attached to improve the engine's modeling for recognizing human faces in general (and more importantly: improve the system's ability to distinguish human and animal faces). (Your first comment is pretty interesting by itself, incidentally: both NBC News and your comment make an assumption that is not universially true about the technology. Face recognition is a much wider space than "recognize an individual by their face." Clustering of similar faces, emotion analysis, camera targeting, human presence / absence can all be done without name labels).
- glitchc 8y agoAt a recent event, all of my friends and relatives took lots of photos, then cautioned each other not to use Facebook to post or share any of the photos because of privacy and facial recognition concerns. All of them did, however, use WhatsApp to share the photos with each other. <facepalm>
- liquid9 8y agoHow much do you believe Whatsapp and Facebook is connected in the backend? Any info on this specifically, especially since theres rumors stirring up that Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram are going to come together very soon. I mean your friends and family did choose an encrypted service over an uncrypted one. Better something than nothing no?
- glitchc 8y agoI firmly believe they're fully connected, and all information that is possible and reasonable to share is being shared. They paid $22 billion for WhatsApp. What did they pay for, exactly?
- kajecounterhack 8y agoDAUs. Whatsapp is end-to-end encrypted, so they're not connected data-wise.
- codedokode 8y agoIs end-to-end encryption applied to files?
- noname120 8y agoYes. [1] [1] https://www.whatsapp.com/security/ https://www.whatsapp.com/security/
- caprese 8y ago
- nmstoker 8y agoThe article takes a very long time to raise that the photographs in the collection had Creative Commons licenses. Perhaps the specific use they're being put to isn't covered by the particular CC licence of each one, but until that is someone's claim I don't see this is quite the issue it's portrayed as.
- nmstoker 8y agoI see there were a couple of complaints I'd missed further down, but it's still sounding like it's being talked up into more than it is.
- stefan_ 8y agoIf it's a full on frontal photo, in a number of countries, it is not for the photographer to decide what the license of that image is and any such attribution as CC might very well be invalid.
- lotu 8y agoYes, and when uploading you are required to confirm you have the rights to do so with that photo. If we aren't going to be able to trust these type of self declarations we pretty much can't have websites where users upload photos anymore.
- yorwba 8y agoThey make a big deal about IBM using images published under a Creative Commons license without asking for permission, when the whole point of CC is to give permission to anyone, without having to ask. The people who are now surprised that their images are being used for purposes they disagree with should probably have used a different license, but I guess the messaging around CC (which tends to emphasize reuse by artists) makes it difficult. Using images with a restriction to non-commercial purposes is a bit more of a gray area, depending on how you separate commercial from non-commercial activity. Since they share the data set with researchers at other organizations (presumably including competitors), I'd consider it non-commercial enough, because they don't gain a competitive advantage, but the details might have to be fought out in court.
- jasonhansel 8y agoBut the CC license requires attribution (and, in some variants, prohibits commerical use). It's not clear to me that IBM followed these requirements--presumably a trained neural network counts as a derived work, so far as the CC license is concerned.
- EpicEng 8y ago>presumably a trained neural network counts as a derived work I just spent about 15 minutes trying to confirm that and... I have no idea. I suppose it's not surprising that a software engineer would not be able to suss that out in 15 minutes. Every definition I find tends to focus on on art, visual and auditory creations. Disregarding a legal interpretation (you know, the thing that actually matters), I can see it either way. Certainly the model is based off of data derived from the characteristics of these images. On the other hand, if I saw e.g. a shade of blue in one of these images that I liked, would I need to provide attribution if I measured it and used it in my own work? I have no idea, I suppose I'm just thinking out loud here. I do understand the taking something to a logical extreme (the color example) is not the end all be all of legal arguments.
- nitrogen 8y agoIsn't the purpose of a ML model to describe actual facts, derived mechanically and not creatively, and thus might not be subject to US copyright in the first place?
- benatkin 8y agoThe owner of Kabosu, the Shiba Inu in the famous Doge picture, puts hearts on peoples' faces. https://kabosu112.exblog.jp/22453542/ https://kabosu112.exblog.jp/22453542/ These include just strangers on the street - anyone who doesn't consent to public photos. There are thousands of lovingly censored faces in her photos. If everyone had done this I guess the situation would be different...
- fixermark 8y agoIronically, using a neural network trained from this wide-sample dataset harvested from the public Internet, one could easily automate that process. And the result would be significantly less reliable without a wide sample of lighting conditions, genders, ethnicities, etc.
- codedokode 8y agoThis is common in Japan. If TV reporters are taking an interview in a street, for example, they hide the faces of random people passing by because they did not consent to being on TV. They really care about privacy unlike people in other countries.
- exolymph 8y agoSee also: Germany and Google Street View.
- laythea 8y agoThis is no surprise to me and I wager that far worse is happening with your data.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago> As the algorithms get more advanced — meaning they are better able to identify women and people of color, a task they have historically struggled with — legal experts and civil rights advocates are sounding the alarm on researchers’ use of photos of ordinary people. This is written as if algorithms were sentient beings overcoming the next level of obstacles, rather than just being written by mostly white men who train them on photos of people who mostly look like themselves.
- helsinki 8y agoA friend and I built a web crawler that published images to a pool of workers that generated feature embeddings for all faces it found. After indexing all the feature vectors, we had effectively built a search engine for faces powered by images found on the public web. The results were terrifying and they really affected me in a very negative way. Needless to say, we moved on to other projects. The world is not ready for the harm such technologies can cause. Our index contained 100+ million faces and the compute costs were obscene.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ig1 8y agoYandex search already does this
- nostrademons 8y agoPretty sure Google, Facebook, and Apple already have this. They limit it to little convenience features like "Auto-tag your friends" or "Here are some friends you may know" because they don't want to scare people, but they have both the data and the models to do large-scale person search over the entire world. If they wanted to they could launch a search engine where you snap a picture with your cell phone and they tell you who it is, what their home & work addresses are, who their friends are, where they've been over the last week, which businesses they like to frequent, and probably roughly how much money they spend.
- doorbellguy 8y agoWe're almost living inside the black mirror world.
- imglorp 8y agoRight, I don't want it matching general public but I'm curious why a subset of this feature isn't commonplace: celebrities. As a user, I want this all the time to identify an actor, a politician, musician, etc. It would take a random new photo and give you 3 or 4 likely matches. Tineye only matches already known photos. Google/Bing image search will abstract a given photo and show you more of the same type: eg more white men wearing red shirts, rather than identifying the person and showing only photos of that person.
- NoblePublius 8y agoNot sure what the secret is. Who didn’t know this?
- davesque 8y agoYou mean that they cut ethical corners to get ahead in our competitive free market economy? Someone stop these mad lads!
- munificent 8y agoWe are truly in the "revolution" part of the Information Age now. Our social and legal structures are as ill-equipped to handle problems like this as the Georgian-era England was able to handle things like millions of its people becoming factory workers. I don't know what the future is going to look like, but, man, we're going to be going through some shit to get there.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dheera 8y agoSomeone once mentioned to me that scraping online dating profiles was an excellent source of thousands of faces nicely and cleanly labelled by gender, age, and ethnicity, if those are the class labels you are looking for. I'd say there are lots of unethical use cases but also a few ethical use cases of such a trained model.
- ykevinator 8y agoThis is stupid. People put their stuff on the Internet and someone used it. It's good, not bad. We all participated in training data at this point. Google crawls us all.
- ysopex 8y agoAnd sells us our data back via secret government contracts. Yay!!
- alexcnwy 8y agoThis brings up a very interesting and important question around differential privacy. If I scrape millions of photos from Facebook (including yours) then train a differentially private model that can extract features from a new face, is that a privacy violation? A differentially private model is one in which you cannot identify the inclusion of any single datapoint which means you cannot tell the difference between a model trained on the dataset and the same model trained the same dataset with the addition of your one datapoint. You might argue it’s a privacy violation because the scraping process might involve people looking at your images but if that was fully automated and nobody ever looked at your images - the model can be trained then the data inmediately deleted...
- FesterCluck 8y agoI'm not usually one to rant, but I'm getting a bit sick of media outlets behaving like they don't have a duty to understand the subjects they are writing about. While in the past it may have only been "techies" who understood these things, at least the general understanding of how privacy rules have developed exists in the populace. All of us read these articles and give the author the "laymans" excuse like a southerner excuses their grandparents' racist vocabulary. I'd like to make the situation very clear: This article is clickbait, it's attempting to inflame readers by misinforming them and/or feeding common misconceptions. As journalists we should expect more of them. I do. We shouldn't allow ourselves the luxury of accepting "that's just the way journalism is now". It wasn't always this way, and it doesn't need to be. I beg of readers: know when you are being played to raise agendas based on false premises. The author just wants to stir up the public so they have more to write about later. If by some chance the author believes anything they wrote, then perhaps NBC should consider moving them to the obits.
- codedokode 8y agoIn Russia developers of face search engines like findface or searchface usually scrape images from largest Russian social network, VK. They usually do it following that motto about asking for forgiveness, and there are no effective legal countermeasures anyway. I think there should be no problem to scrape other social networks like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter from the countries where there are no legal restrictions and the photos are considered to be a "public data". You can outsource face recognition tasks to such countries.
- rapjr9 8y agoThere are lots of other ML models built using training data derived from the public. Voice models, gait recognition models, WiFi mobility models, Bluetooth location models, activity recognition models, emotion models, etc. It's essentially impossible for people to tell if their data was used to train these models. And it's very difficult to know what companies and individuals might do with access to both live data streams and these models. Worth thinking about though.
- aaron695 8y agoI love the faux outrage culture getting dragged in for clicks.... First how awful it is minorities are (allegedly) left out - > "As the algorithms get more advanced — meaning they are better able to identify women and people of color, a task they have historically struggled with" Then how now they are included it's also awful - > "That’s a particular concern for minorities who could be profiled and targeted, the experts and advocates say."