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The question was about opting out of our "utopia", I wouldn't call that a "straightforward question". If you do have a straightforward question, especially abou

The question was about opting out of our "utopia", I wouldn't call that a "straightforward question". If you do have a straightforward question, especially about this or another specific project, I can try to provide a straightforward answer.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
Great! How do I make sure that nothing about me ever passes through a Facebook server/ETL job/datalake/neural net/whatever? Can that even be guaranteed? Is Facebook generating a shadow profile on me or using data I've generated either myself or through friends that have taken pictures/videos/etc of me, and if maybe, how do I opt out? Facebook just released Ray Ban smart glasses that don't look any different from standard Ray Bans and don't provide a solid design affordance to communicate to others when they're active, so I don't really get the feeling that Facebook cares at all about who is being swept up in their systems.
- pesenti 5y ago
  No, that’s not a reasonable assumption. Photos or videos of you are likely on Facebook’s servers, uploaded by friends or others when you are in public. What I can assure you though is that if you are not a user, we are not recognizing you in these pictures and videos. We won’t do that without explicit consent from users.
  - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    Thanks Jerome, I really do appreciate your answer and I know I'm probably not the most fun person to talk to. I do have a follow-up on this if you'll entertain me: why is it that Facebook stores content of people that it doesn't recognize? Granted, I'm but a lowly web developer, but it seems like creating business logic that automatically removes content with people that aren't Facebook users would be pretty straightforward to implement. You've already solved the hardest part of that problem, the facial recognition, so why not go all the way? Moving forward, you'd have a really simple approach to privacy that's transparent and people understand without needing to get into the weeds. Receiving assurance that I'm not being recognized in photos and videos isn't very comforting when I see Facebook releasing products like the "smart" Ray Bans. Recognizing people in images is only one of many types of data that Facebook gleans from that content, and I don't want anything involving me being processed in any way by that company, whatsoever.
    - still_grokking 5y ago
      > Recognizing people in images is only one of many types of data that Facebook gleans from that content, and I don't want anything involving me being processed in any way by that company, whatsoever. Which is a basic right under GDPR. No private entity is allowed to store or process data about you for their purposes without your consent. Did FB just said they are doing it though?
      - zwaps 5y ago
        Of course. FB openly ignores the GDPR and will be happy to pay a fine if the EU manages to ever show enough courage to levy one of significance. Facebook trains its models on your data, in particular your pictures and (in the future) your video - your behavior, voice, face, etc. But feat not, your name will not flow directly in the algorithms (until you sign up an account - and the rest of your data is already there!) And as presenti openly (and quite arrogantly) stated just one post up: There is no conceivable way for you to ever do anything about it, except if FB stops operations of this kind. Which they can't, of course, because it is the very basis of their business model.
        Osiris 5y ago
        I'm not a lawyer but my understanding in the United States is that a person in a public place has no legal expectation of privacy. If you are in public and someone takes a picture in which your face is visible and then upload that to Facebook, I wouldn't expect that to be a violation of my privacy nor would I expect Facebook to allow an unknown person to request the picture's removal.
        still_grokking 5y ago
        I'm not form the US and also not a lawyer but I've heard that this goes even to the point that someone using a public communications network has no legal expectation of privacy in the US. The lack of data-privacy regulations is likely rooted in the fact that the US never had an experience like the EU with the Nazis who literally killed on behalf of data. Sure, the US famously "kills people based on matadata"¹, but not US people so most US people don't care. But I've also heard that some people in the US start to recognize the value of data-privacy regulations. That's positive to note. ¹ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Hayden_(general) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Hayden_(general)
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    What does "we are not recognizing you" mean? Of course you can't "recognize" someone you don't know, so what do you try to say here? Do you gather data about those "unknown" persons. Do you try to match information about "unknown" persons form different sources?
    - mortehu 5y ago
      > Do you gather data about those "unknown" persons This part is easy to answer: if a user uploads a photo of you and there are other people in the photo or a recognizable location, then that's data about you. Even if it's just stored as a photo now, it'll take a neural network a millisecond to turn that into feature vectors that can be used to build a knowledge graph. This goes for Dropbox as well as Facebook.
  - wonderwonder 5y ago
    Thanks for answering questions. In regards to this. If I have a Facebook account, and then close it, is my existing data in Facebook's systems erased including image recognition / tracking based preferences, etc?

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

Great! How do I make sure that nothing about me ever passes through a Facebook server/ETL job/datalake/neural net/whatever? Can that even be guaranteed? Is Facebook generating a shadow profile on me or using data I've generated either myself or through friends that have taken pictures/videos/etc of me, and if maybe, how do I opt out? Facebook just released Ray Ban smart glasses that don't look any different from standard Ray Bans and don't provide a solid design affordance to communicate to others when they're active, so I don't really get the feeling that Facebook cares at all about who is being swept up in their systems.

pesenti 5y ago
No, that’s not a reasonable assumption. Photos or videos of you are likely on Facebook’s servers, uploaded by friends or others when you are in public. What I can assure you though is that if you are not a user, we are not recognizing you in these pictures and videos. We won’t do that without explicit consent from users.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  Thanks Jerome, I really do appreciate your answer and I know I'm probably not the most fun person to talk to. I do have a follow-up on this if you'll entertain me: why is it that Facebook stores content of people that it doesn't recognize? Granted, I'm but a lowly web developer, but it seems like creating business logic that automatically removes content with people that aren't Facebook users would be pretty straightforward to implement. You've already solved the hardest part of that problem, the facial recognition, so why not go all the way? Moving forward, you'd have a really simple approach to privacy that's transparent and people understand without needing to get into the weeds. Receiving assurance that I'm not being recognized in photos and videos isn't very comforting when I see Facebook releasing products like the "smart" Ray Bans. Recognizing people in images is only one of many types of data that Facebook gleans from that content, and I don't want anything involving me being processed in any way by that company, whatsoever.
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    > Recognizing people in images is only one of many types of data that Facebook gleans from that content, and I don't want anything involving me being processed in any way by that company, whatsoever. Which is a basic right under GDPR. No private entity is allowed to store or process data about you for their purposes without your consent. Did FB just said they are doing it though?
    - zwaps 5y ago
      Of course. FB openly ignores the GDPR and will be happy to pay a fine if the EU manages to ever show enough courage to levy one of significance. Facebook trains its models on your data, in particular your pictures and (in the future) your video - your behavior, voice, face, etc. But feat not, your name will not flow directly in the algorithms (until you sign up an account - and the rest of your data is already there!) And as presenti openly (and quite arrogantly) stated just one post up: There is no conceivable way for you to ever do anything about it, except if FB stops operations of this kind. Which they can't, of course, because it is the very basis of their business model.
      - Osiris 5y ago
        I'm not a lawyer but my understanding in the United States is that a person in a public place has no legal expectation of privacy. If you are in public and someone takes a picture in which your face is visible and then upload that to Facebook, I wouldn't expect that to be a violation of my privacy nor would I expect Facebook to allow an unknown person to request the picture's removal.
        still_grokking 5y ago
        I'm not form the US and also not a lawyer but I've heard that this goes even to the point that someone using a public communications network has no legal expectation of privacy in the US. The lack of data-privacy regulations is likely rooted in the fact that the US never had an experience like the EU with the Nazis who literally killed on behalf of data. Sure, the US famously "kills people based on matadata"¹, but not US people so most US people don't care. But I've also heard that some people in the US start to recognize the value of data-privacy regulations. That's positive to note. ¹ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Hayden_(general) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Hayden_(general)
- still_grokking 5y ago
  What does "we are not recognizing you" mean? Of course you can't "recognize" someone you don't know, so what do you try to say here? Do you gather data about those "unknown" persons. Do you try to match information about "unknown" persons form different sources?
  - mortehu 5y ago
    > Do you gather data about those "unknown" persons This part is easy to answer: if a user uploads a photo of you and there are other people in the photo or a recognizable location, then that's data about you. Even if it's just stored as a photo now, it'll take a neural network a millisecond to turn that into feature vectors that can be used to build a knowledge graph. This goes for Dropbox as well as Facebook.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  Thanks for answering questions. In regards to this. If I have a Facebook account, and then close it, is my existing data in Facebook's systems erased including image recognition / tracking based preferences, etc?