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Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

• JonnieCache 15y ago
  The important thing to take away from this: If they can make guesses this accurate about your photos, imagine they guesses they're making behind the scenes about your life, your personality and your innermost thoughts. If there was a page on fb where it showed all the inferences they had made about you, sexuality, income, religion, philosophical viewpoints, mental health, etc. then people would run screaming. Of course, a lot of people have already told fb that info voluntarily, and that's why its possible to guess it for everyone else. Also potentially terrifying: a facebook fortune telling engine. I bet they can predict your future with frightening accuracy, or they will be able to after another decade or so of data anyway.
  • johnyzee 15y ago
    That is true. Mere statistical analysis on the word count on articles you prefer to read will give a very accurate insight into your interests and mindset. Facebook has access to this data through the "Like" button trojans that exist on many websites. If anything, they haven't been very impressive in putting this data to work yet (or I would be seeing a hell of a lot better targeted ads than currently).
    • gresrun 15y ago
      Statistical analysis can give you a lot more than just what I like to read. The power of statistics never ceases to amaze: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
      • johnyzee 15y ago
        Funny you should mention it. I am in the middle of Cryptonomicon - a thoroughly enjoyable read with a heavy focus on this area of study.
        • jordan0day 15y ago
          I read Cryptonomicon a month or two ago and really enjoyed it. Seemingly serendipitously, a post about encrypting email turned up on Slashdot the other day:(http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/20/0158227/do-slashdotters-encrypt-their-email http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/20/0158227/do-slashdotte...) and I realized that with everyone basically using webmail services now, the chance for something like Ordo to take hold at-large is even less (given that fewer and fewer people actually use email clients anymore). I'd like to fantasize that there could be a way to use a social network like Facebook with a tool like Ordo -- that is, most the data (photos, in this case) you upload to FB is encrypted, and only people who you've approved can decrypt it. Using steganography this is probably already possible with FB, probably not practical, though.
  • zerostar07 15y ago
    I thought google has more interesting data about all those.
  • drats 15y ago
    Indeed, with all the Facebook sharing buttons around the web they have more than your bookmarks too, they have the equivalent of uploading your browser history each day to them. With current machine learning technology, let alone improvements over the coming years, they'd know more or less what someone would know if they stood behind every time you were browsing for the last few years. Even if you were to cancel your account you'd turn up in photos of parties on other people's accounts and they'd follow pretty well you after you'd left too. With their dodgy history, Zuckerberg's contempt for his own users as evidenced by his quotes, the idea that this won't be abused is laughable. Given national security letters (NSL) it's almost certain the intelligence community has access. Hell you could hit a mid-level admin at one of their data-centers with a NSL and the top level management and legal wouldn't even be aware that there are outside entities with a connection to their database. That's to say nothing of the extra-legal capacities of these people. While people like to think that it's more or less anonymized clusters and demographics that are being passed to advertisers to target ads better - not a terribly scary thought, just more relevant ads - I think we need to be far more cautious.
    • nitrogen 15y ago
      While people like to think that it's more or less anonymized clusters and demographics that are being passed to advertisers to target ads better - not a terribly scary thought, just more relevant ads - I think we need to be far more cautious. How do you go about convincing the "I have nothing to hide" majority of the population that giving away such vast quantities of information is not in their best interests? I'm thinking of friends, family members, etc. who honestly don't care whether the TSA sees them naked at the airport, or how much the other agencies know about them. Where does such extreme deference to authority come from in the first place?
      • rhizome 15y ago
        Where does such extreme deference to authority come from in the first place? Gilles Deleuze said it comes from a desire to be led.
      • r00fus 15y ago
  • sandGorgon 15y ago
    or build a self-aware version/cylon of you.
  • kokey 15y ago
    Yeah it's scary that a site, where you and your friends share the details of your lives online, uses those details to... oh wait that's the point.
  • reinhardt 15y ago
    As someone with just a fake-info FB account that interacts with it maybe once or twice a week, I am more concerned by the fact that not having an (active|real) account is also a signal that says (or may say at some point in the near future) a lot about me.
    • colkassad 15y ago
      From the link - "Did you login with the facebook app on a smartphone while you were at the hospital? If so, they would have your GPS location at a certain time, when you later upload the photos from your camera, it would have a timestamp, and they could just look check where you had logged in from at that time." If you are a home owner and this is true, you could possibly be identified -- say for instance posting from home 75% of the time and cross-referencing with certain demographic statistics collected from your browsing history and property records. Would that be legal?
  • berntb 15y ago
    I hope they don't lose this info. What a boon for researchers in some distant future! (The problem, of course, is that a "distant future" today is 10-20 years... Probably even in my lifetime.)
  • iradik 15y ago
    Why does FB need to make guesses about this stuff? People are supplying all this information in form fields in triplicate. Also they are a fortune telling machine. That's a good pun actually. They are hoping to make a fortune by telling you what ads you'll click.
  • tomjen3 15y ago
    I found googles page where they tell you which catagories of things they believe about you (basically age and interests). Some of them where right, but more than half of them was wrong (I am not, for the record, interested in Paleontology).
    • pnathan 15y ago
      Can you provide a link? I'm curious now!
      • tomjen3 15y ago
        Can't remember.
      • davux 15y ago
        http://www.google.com/ads/preferences http://www.google.com/ads/preferences See "Your categories" Edit - Sorry, I copied the link from the Google results page, it acutally shows up as adspreferences in the ad, but ads/preferences below. Kind of strange.
        • kang 15y ago
          gives me a 404
          • waffle_ss 15y ago
            I think he meant http://www.google.com/ads/preferences http://www.google.com/ads/preferences
          • omegaworks 15y ago
            google.com/ads/preferences
        • deleted 15y ago
          [deleted]
      • sk5t 15y ago
  • joelthelion 15y ago
    "It seems you've been watching a lot of porn lately. Do you want to post an update about it?"
    • fl3tch 15y ago
      That's funny, but I've been told some porn sites have social widgets. I don't know who would want to share that, but there they are.
  • freshhawk 15y ago
    They already sell that data to credit agencies who use it to produce more accurate credit scores (and get the answers to those questions they are not legally allowed to ask).
• donkeymonkey 15y ago
  magic.
• giulivo 15y ago
  I think it's just GPS positioning by the smart phone. I wouldn't be fooled by a liar.
  • nmunson 15y ago
    Quite a few people mention the pictures were taken with a camera and uploaded at a later date, so GPS wouldn't have been a factor. With the amount of data Facebook has I wouldn't be surprised that they could do more than just use GPS information to place locations.
    • giulivo 15y ago
      I'm sure there are other technologies which can be used for geolocalization and can achieve similar "performances" (I'm thinking about WIFI networks or IP, in some cases). Still, I wouldn't expect a digital camera to put those informations in the EXIF (assuming it does have a WIFI and/or an IP address) Also, to me Facebook doesn't seem to be using any magical machine learning algorithm capable to recognize the location of a PIC from a face, it never did on my PICs, not even when there were landscapes in it. The guy could instead have uploaded the photo using a smartphone which added the GPS coordinates. But what do YOU think instead? How does that work? Is it working also for your uploads?
• freedompeace 15y ago
  How could Facebook do this (technologically)? According to a redditor, " - It's not IP address. Facebook successfully identified a number of specific locations (bars, theaters, etc) even though I had uploaded the photos from my home - It's not geo-tagging. All of my photos were taken with a camera that does not geo-tag (Nikon d700). - It's not contextual tagging. There were no people tagged in the photos, no comments in a lot of them, no words or phrases or names in the captions that could have given clues - It's not image recognition. One set of photos was taken at Cafe du Nord in SF, CA and every single shot was of the performer onstage, with no identifying characteristics or clues to be had. " I would really like to know as this is very interesting and none of the reddit comments (as of now, 12 hours after submission) really answer this question. What technology or methods are they using to suggest (accurate?) locations where pictures have been taken from? Even more strangely, I have never used my mobile phone with Facebook, but when I uploaded a photo just now of a place from my childhood to which I haven't ever been since using Facebook, Facebook correctly suggested the location. What the heck?!
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • loopdoend 15y ago
    Purely speculation but perhaps he is carrying his phone with him and it is correlating his location with the timestamps on the images, or perhaps he marked himself as attending an event which is at the venue. From an image recognition standpoint, if anyone else was at the event and took similar sets of photos which they then tagged, that could also be used.
  • iradik 15y ago
    This is how it can be done without any EXIF/GPS data with a fairly dumb algorithm. It's a picture of a baby at a hospital. There are probably hundreds of baby photos being taken per day at that hospital being posted to FB. Some have GPS and some don't. The images that do have GPS, get recognized and lumped together as the same "entity" since they all look the same. FB then looks up where she lives, then looks for any photos that don't have a location (like her baby photo), then tries to match it with any photos within a 50 mi proximity to her hometown. Bingo finds 90% match on the baby pic in the hospital, and asks user for verification. She says YES, then this pic gets lumped together with all the other entities. FB also asks more often since it's "right".
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• phpnode 15y ago
  Here's my guess at how it's done: Redditor has facebook app installed on their smartphone (or just uses the website), sets status to "OMG wife is going into labour, at the hospital now". Facebook now knows roughly where redditor was at the specified time based on the ip, they can narrow this down further by looking at keywords in the status message and check it against a list of addresses in the local area and select the best match. When the redditor comes to upload their photos days or weeks later, facebook just checks the photo timestamp against the user's location +/- X hours and makes a guess at where the photos were taken.
  • Peroni 15y ago
    The logic doesn't hold up. I uploaded a bunch of photos taken in Christchurch, New Zealand. The pics were over two years old and I now live in the UK and uploaded them from here. The photos were also taken on a cheap, point & shoot camera, not a smartphone.
    • phpnode 15y ago
      Also, does the location info purely say "Christchurch, New Zealand" or is it more granular? I'm guessing that when facebook only has sparse information about your location, as in your case, it "zooms out" to the city, state, country etc, but the more information it can collate, the more accurate the suggestion it gives is.
    • phpnode 15y ago
      but did you use facebook at all when you were in new zealand?
      • Peroni 15y ago
        Indeed but when I posted the pics it was 2 years later from a totally different continent and no reference to the location on the photos.
        • phpnode 15y ago
• barrkel 15y ago
  Maybe it infers from the locations of your friends. It looks like more than one technique is used, though; probability-weighted heuristics.
• richardburton 15y ago
  Eventually someone evil will do something truly monstrous on Facebook and it will make this WTF look like a drop in the ocean. I fear for my friends who are still Facehooked.
• ErrantX 15y ago
  I first got these notices about... oh, best part of 2 months ago. I assumed it was everywhere but perhaps not!
• nodata 15y ago
  I vote cell tower info. I have a Nokia phone with no GPS. Many programs uses the cell tower info added by the phone to determine where the photo was taken.
• drats 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo... Facebook almost certainly has more photo information than TinEye or Flickr, and of indoor environments probably more than Google (which has reverse image search too). Across any given bar or hospital Facebook would have maybe 5-10 other people with albums tagged with the name/gps/check-in. They'd only need one other album though. SIFT more or less turns every image into a bag-of-words. Your single photo, even at different angles, is going to have a heavy match with photos they have. If you upload a whole album they are going to have tons of matches and they can be more or less certain of the location. To say nothing of adding even the most basic geoip-to-city lookups that would narrow you down to at least five cities that you and your social network inhabit. But the extra information they have is besides the point, SIFT is enough; hospital rooms look alike to us, to SIFT they don't.
  • yogrish 15y ago
    But why that whole technology for just making a Suggestion? There is something else they are working on...something really BIG and a complete game changer I guess.
    • drats 15y ago
      Well if the accuracy is 95% why not turn all Facebook users into one huge mechanical turk batch process to get to 99.9%? And it's just convenient for people not to have to tag. Then you have the data sitting around for mapping the insides of all buildings like Google has it for street view. Sure your Asimo-style robot butler/"something really BIG" will be that more efficient with internal mappings of most public spaces when you release it in 2030, but the convenience is sufficient. Remember that Facebook beat Myspace more or less on interface (combined with a few other factors like exclusivity), they aren't going to let Google or some other competitor get ahead of them by having an interface convenience edge of 5-10% which might cause a Myspace-to-Facebook style exodus. Kings who have committed regicide on their predecessor are all too aware of how they got into power.
    • drats 15y ago
      Also consider this, use SIFT on video stills and collect all the handheld video of a particular concert. Use machine learning to combine all the audio tracks and clean them up into high quality audio. Stitch the video together, using textures from the higher resolution stills people take, to allow people to relive the concert with a massive panoramic video (or 3D) with high quality sound. Use it to launch a music competitor to Google or destroy Ticketmaster (well overdue..) as bands and venues won't have to hire video production companies to record concerts if they sell tickets through FB. All that technology is in current research papers and prototypes at the moment, it would probably only take two years to put it together at worst if they aren't working on it already.
• yogrish 15y ago
  Wow! A serious competitor to SIRI in place. My guess is they are using combination of techniques - Semantics of your Status as phpnode mentioned with example(heard they have plans to get into semantic search to beat google), EXIF info, IP address and also your friends replies - when is the due? which hospital or Gynic? If hospital name is not mentioned then Gynics details and her hospital location. Do you think all this is used just to make a SUGGESTION?? Its a Billion$?
  • pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    If image info that users wish to enter can be guessed well this reduces friction substantially. Having this info makes FB a more valuable marketing tool. Why not make such suggestions.
• yread 15y ago
  I just tried to upload some photos that facebook hasn't seen yet with or without EXIF info (obviously no or invalid geotagging) and tried geo-tagging some photos I already have uploaded and Facebook hasn't made any suggestion whatsoever. Perhaps I found a way to switch it off but I've just checked the settings and none of the options seems to be concerned with suggestions for geotagging
• jagira 15y ago
  Just checked this. I took some pics on a regular digital camera (no GPS) in Indore. I uploaded them from New Delhi a few weeks later. And now FB is asking me "Were these pics taken in Indore?". Crazy shit. Update - I dug through my FB updates. Just before leaving for airport, I updated my status to "Off to Indore" and after coming back to New Delhi, I had some status updates about my office and a local park. Facebook is probably using the the timestamps from image and relating it to locations using some heuristics like status updates, IP addresses, image recognition etc.
  • kokey 15y ago
    I think you are actually getting to the bottom of it. A combination of timestamps, and status updates, and probably that of friends tagged in the same album. Could be quite effective, as we can see.
    • forensic 15y ago
      yeah this is by far most likely. The guy's wife or whatever had her phone turned on while in labour, facebook knows her GPS coords, facebook knows she's his wife, and so on doesnt take much to throw out a guess based on a single GPS location + timestamp. Even if the guess is only right 5% of the time it is still a profitable guess to make.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• paraschopra 15y ago
  I was freaked out too, but I had relevant names for those albums like Turkey, Shillong, etc.
• grifaton 15y ago
  It's not perfect yet -- Facebook knows that I went to university in Cambridge (UK) but keeps asking me if photos from my undergraduate years were taken in Cambridge (Massachusetts).
• darklajid 15y ago
  Immature, but I really loved this comment/idea and wonder about the feasibility of such attacks: "You know what this means: Time to rewrite your EXIF info and location bomb the hell out of popular attractions. Eiffel Tower in Paris? Nope, it's in Iowa ..." [1] Possible? Google bomb with a twist? 1: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_really_creeping_me_out_with_this_how/c39vpwh http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_reall...
  • yaix 15y ago
    Yep, it would be good to show that this kind of data is not reliable and easily manipulated. But probably it will not happen.
  • rufibarbatus 15y ago
    There's anecdotal evidence, a little bit further down, of this actually happening: someone mentions Facebook thinking that their pictures of a trip to London were taken in England, Arkansas! http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_really_creeping_me_out_with_this_how/c39xepe http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_reall...
• jfoster 15y ago
  A test that might fool this. You will need: 1. A facebook status update/checkin/access from a particular location. 2. A photo taken without EXIF data at around the same time as the update/checkin/access above, but from a completely different location. Upload the photo using your facebook account. Check whether they get the location right. If yes, the mystery continues. If no, but the location is somewhere other than where you updated your status/checked in from, the mystery deepens. Else, they're pairing the times together.
  • finnw 15y ago
    I think I'll set the date on my camera to 1911. A human seeing the timestamp on the picture will just assume its a Y2K bug and will guess the correct data. Since that's extremely unlikely IRL, the Facebook algorithm probably won't know to make this correction.
• archangel_one 15y ago
  I've seen both extremes on my photos. One set it suggested the nearby town, which was creepily accurate; another it asked "were these taken in England, Arkansas" which was a hilariously poor guess. Weirdly, they managed the difficult part (figuring out the photos were taken in "England" without any obvious clues) but then failed to sensibly geolocate it.
• ChaitanyaSai 15y ago
  Highly unlikely that there is anything sophisticated here. It would be too many computing cycles thrown at something with very small RoI. Most likely some straightforward text, date, and location matching. Many of the previous commenters are assuming you need sophisticated pattern sifting to get any good insights. Not true. Large numbers of facebook users are including this data voluntarily or with their unexpurgated photos. Going after the sliver who don't is just not a worthy investment -- yet.
• sondh 15y ago
  I don't think this is machine learning. I have Facebook suggested a few albums today (2 hours ago). Some of them are from 2+ years ago, others are recent ones. The suggestion is quite accurate (89%, 8 out of 9 albums). With the incorrect album, Facebook suggested another city with the same name but from another country! So Facebook probably just combine as much data as possible and when the matching rate is larger than some threshold, it will temporary tag the album and confirm with users. Data may include: 1. Album info (yeah, most of my album includes the place in it's name or description) 2. Comments group. 3 of my albums have a large number of comments, they are all from my highschool friends (I grouped them all in the same group) so it's quite accurate I guess. Also, if Facebook use the information in their smart lists, that makes sense too. 3. EXIF data. Some people says Facebook can read the data and cross-check the date with its database of check-in. This doesn't happen to me but I think it's possible. And of course, if the EXIF has geo-tagged, that info can be picked up. Thought?
  • Pedrom 15y ago
    Guessing from that data might still be using machine learning (e.g Collaborative filtering). I guess you meant it is not computer vision related. At this point I don't think it matters too much, they are using a combination of techniques (including the famous social graph) and that is giving good results.
  • emw 15y ago
    I second the idea that this doesn't sound like machine learning. I wouldn't be surprised if there were no machine learning or data mining algorithms involved in Facebook mapping EXIF-embedded geographic coordinates in digital photographs and suggesting locations for an album based on points-of-interest near those coordinates. Maybe some neat work with GIS enabled this, but I don't see anything that strongly indicates machine learning.
    • nandemo 15y ago
      The reddit poster claimed they didn't have GPS on their camera. What happened is problaby (3) above: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_really_creeping_me_out_with_this_how/#c39tl7n http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_reall...
• zombielifestyle 15y ago
  I've tried it. i don't use fb for pics. i don't use wifi on my smartphone and i had the fb app only briefly installed. i also weren't on any trips outside my city. I've uploaded 4 screenshot-ed landscape (including one building) pics from flicker with absolutely no metadata. at least 2 of them should be very recognizable. the only thing that fb suggested was the single check-in that i had, minimum of 500km off. i'm pretty sure that there is only minimal (if any) intelligence on image recognition and that they guess locations by information that "leak" from you and your hardware.
  • zombielifestyle 15y ago
    fb don't even matches the check-in of my fake wife at hollywood walk of fame to an pic of it uploaded by me.
• uptown 15y ago
  Since Facebook knows your social connections, isn't it also possible they check the location of the people to whom you're connected, and use their location as a guide as to where your photos may have been taken? If a cousin checked Facebook on a phone near a hospital while you posted a hospital photo, they know there's a chance the cousin was visiting you and that's where your photo was taken. They use your social grid for everything ... why wouldn't they use it for this too?
  • myared 15y ago
    I think this is a highly likely scenario. The reddit user isn't taking into account that much of what Facebook knows about us comes from our connections.
• dhx 15y ago
  LinkedIn appears to build "social graphs" based on profile views. If person A visits the profile of person B and C it is quite likely that some form of relationship exists (perhaps an inverse relationship too). It doesn't just have to be profile views -- LinkedIn most likely keeps track of search terms too. If a random unknown visitor comes along and searches for both "Person A" and "Person C" then it is likely that a connection exists between these two persons. It would be easy to train this system by displaying a "guess" (a friendship recommendation for person A) to persons B and C. If person B or C show interest in the recommendation then perhaps a relationship exists. Guesses could also be formed by comparing keywords/metadata found on profiles in two different social circles. The reason I mentioned LinkedIn is that I think they do a better job of recommending/guessing who your acquaintances are than Facebook.
  • reinhardt 15y ago
    I was about to post about LinkedIn too. I am convinced it uses, among others, reverse view lookups. I have had suggestions for people I know whose LinkedIn profile I had never viewed or searched for myself; the only explanation is they had looked for me. I don't know if it's because I interact with it more frequently and using real personal info but its "people you may know" predictions are eerily more accurate than FB, or anything else for that matter.
  • finnw 15y ago
    I've found the opposite. LinkedIn has been right only once for me. The other 23 people it suggested I might know were people I have never heard of. Facebook usually suggests people I have met but do not want to be "friends" with.
• simondlr 15y ago
  Facebook has suggested twice accurately places I've visited, but I pretty much specified it in the album (Singapre and Australia). There is an album now with random photos, with the location "Plekke" (which is afrikaans for "places"). They are suggesting "Plekke, San Juan, Puerto Rico". So, currently I wouldn't suggest machine learning, although it is not entirely dismissible. They have the largest photo db in the world, they could eventually learn and then seed it with stuff like checkins, status updates, etc. EDIT: I have another album called "Kuala Lumpur and Thailand", which have pretty iconic pictures in it (Wat Pho, KL Towers, Batu Caves, etc) and they haven't asked me about that album at all.
• deleted 15y ago
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• deleted 15y ago
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• Turing_Machine 15y ago
  It keeps asking me if some screenshots from a virtual world that I'd location-tagged with "Cyberspace" were taken in some net cafe with that name in British Columbia. I'm really tempted to answer yes.
• DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  Years ago I worked with a guy who used to sell computer equipment to businesses. He told me that when he went to different divisions in each company, they all had org/structure charts somewhere around the office. And in every one of them, their section was in the middle and everybody else was serviced by them. No matter what you did, you were the center of the universe to you. Likewise, I've had experience building and working on many computer systems for businesses. Each of them, if successful, wants to handle not just their thing but everything for their customers. No matter what they did, they wanted to be the center of the universe for their customers. You can laugh at these examples, and we all know most software companies have much great ambition than they do traction, but Facebook and Google are actually doing this. They are becoming the center of the information universe to their customers. This is not a good thing.
  • zombielifestyle 15y ago
    i can't manage fb to share location information from friend accounts. if 2 accounts upload an (similar) image including one active check-in fb only suggests locations based on the check-ins of that active account. this is even true for public images. until someone provides a POC that states the opposite it's just YOUR data that YOU freely give to fb. no magic behind, just FUD. responded to top post for karmawhoring. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3377267 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3377267
    • rhizome 15y ago
      I've been working for some time (solo) on a concept that could manage to alleviate some of your concerns. There are ways around them today (API), but who knows if they'll be foreclosed upon in the future. Like many old farts, I imagine, I see your post in terms of the thick-client/thin-client battles of years past. I don't think FB will ever see it in their interests to completely close their garden, which would really be remaking the mistakes of the past, but stranger things have happened.
  • safetyscissors 15y ago
    Its also not a good thing that we don't know who Facebook or Google is selling this or giving this information to. The advertising agencies, meh kinda. The organisations with acronyms, they are more worrisome. I also wonder, to what extent the amount of information they have about the average user.
• brown9-2 15y ago
  Ignoring the how of this new feature, what is the upside to me as a user of confirming to Facebook the hospital in which my child was born? Why do they think people would generally be interested in clicking "Yes" on these suggestions? That they are helpfully filling in the blanks on photos I "forgot" to location-tag?
  • ddw 15y ago
    FB might say that it enhances the timeline, which is essentially their way of organizing your life for you.
  • devonrt 15y ago
    The upside to you is that your photographs are tagged and categorized in more and more useful ways. Without this suggestion what is the likelihood that you would go back to old albums and tag them in such a way? I know for me, it's almost zero. When it's presented in such a frictionless manner (and is eerily accurate) it becomes a hell of a lot more likely. I think that the typical HN user is either too cynical or too tech-savvy to really find this useful. Most users have huge collections of photos that aren't necessarily categorized in useful ways. Facebook wants its users to catalog their lives. For them, this data is marketing gold. For end users, it means their content (photos, status updates, life events, etc) are categorized more thoroughly and in a more meaningful fashion (geographically, chronologically, etc).
  • henrybridge 15y ago
    Disclosure: I work on location products at Facebook. I think that real world places are an important part of who you are. Where you're from, where you've lived, and where you've travelled to, for instance, all help tell a story about you as a person. The way that's represented on Facebook today is the Map on your Timeline. These suggestions help you put more photos on your map so you can share experiences with friends. That trip you took to Disney World 5 years ago may be far down in timeline, but it's going to be easy for friends to find it on your Map. Hope that helps explain the "why" a bit.
    • brown9-2 15y ago
• ananthrk 15y ago
  Yup. I had a similar experience couple of days back when FB listed three of my albums and correctly predicted the place names for confirmation. I was shocked when it _correctly_ predicted the location of one of my private albums which is an obscure town in southern India. Given that most of my pictures were taken with cameras with no geo identification mechanism, I can only conclude that they identify the location based on any comments and similar photos available in _my_ network.
• steve8918 15y ago
  I noticed this yesterday as well. I have photos uploaded from a Canon camera from 2007. There is simply not enough information to determine the location, but they correction identified the bar that the photos were taken at. I have no idea how they did it, but it really does bother me.
• randysavage25 15y ago
  Encouragement for the creation of a facebook replacement
• chinmoy 15y ago
  I googled Zooey Deschanel several hours ago. I was logged into facebook at that time. I log into facebook again and Zooey Deschanel in now on my 'People to Subscribe To' list. I came to hacker news to post an ask hn thread about if fb tracks my browsing history..and bummer I find this thread.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• berberous 15y ago
  This had been freaking me out for months! But I think I finally figured it out in my case. I had used Picasa to upload the pics years ago. In Picasa, I had entered a caption with enough detail for Facebook to guess the location. The caption had never been uploaded (i.e. set as the photo's caption on Facebook), but I'm guessing they did somehow capture that info on upload.
• jhferris3 15y ago
  (Disclosure: FB employee, but nowhere near the photos/locations teams, just personal experience) In all likelihood, there's no magic. Its just comparing 'dumb' manual album labels with places pages and trying to match them up. I've had similar experiences with the location-suggestion feature where I was totally bewildered by how it was getting the data to recognize the locations. As it turns out, all of the albums they've done this for were pre-location tagging and so I'd manually put in a location (like 'Bowery Ballroom'). So there wasn't any particular magic in how they seem to be doing it. This would also explain one of the other comments on here about the location suggestions being England, Arkansas (if she just labeled the album England and the location suggester goofed). I also had it goof when I had an album labeled "Rhode Island and Massachusetts" and it tried to suggest a real estate agency with that in its name.
• sliverstorm 15y ago
  I dunno about everybody else, but I'm pretty impressed. It guessed some obvious ones- but I also had an album of photos of a car at a dealership. All you could see was the car and the service bay, but it knew what dealership it was.
• idunno246 15y ago
  Anyone else find it amusing he is complaining about Facebook knowing the location of a photo by posting it to a more public place and confirming the location?
• silentscope 15y ago
  I actually think fb needs to own up to how they do it. If it's geolocation with a correlated timestamp I'd like to know. If it's just album name suggestions, I still don't like it, but I suppose I'll live with it. This is creepy.
• shalmanese 15y ago
  I asked this question on Quora a few days ago: http://www.quora.com/Facebook-1/Why-is-the-new-Facebook-Add-a-Location-to-Your-Photos-feature-so-good-at-guessing-the-location http://www.quora.com/Facebook-1/Why-is-the-new-Facebook-Add-... but did not get any responses.
• tlrobinson 15y ago
  The outrage expressed by some of the commenters on Reddit and here is curious. Clearly Facebook and other companies have the technology to make these connections. Would you rather they keep it hidden to sell to advertisers and other potentially unscrupulous buyers, or expose it to you so that you can either make use of the features, or decide it's not worth playing their game?
• nbm 15y ago
  Karan from the locations team at Facebook posted a response on Reddit. He said: """ I am an engineer at Facebook working on the Locations team. We use the text entered in the location field of the album by the album owner and match it to the best guess for an existing Facebook Page using text matching. The popularity of the place is also used to rank the suggested places. """ http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_really_creeping_me_out_with_this_how/c3a0a0p http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_reall... (I work at Facebook, not on locations/photos.)
• brlewis 15y ago
  This was just answered on Quora: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-predict-my-photo-albums-locations/answer/Henry-F-Bridge#ans883901 http://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-predict-my-photo-albu... Henry F. Bridge, Product Manager, Facebook Photo albums on Facebook have long had a text input field for location, but until recently, there was no way to put in structured data in this field (like a Facebook page). We added that ability earlier this year, and the "add a location" feature just performs a search on whatever text the album owner put in originally (ranked by place popularity etc) and suggests the first result as the location of the album.
  • devonrt 15y ago
    Very sophisticated. Almost like magic :)
  • iamandrus 15y ago
    I uploaded pictures from a class trip on Facebook back in 2009 and had no captions or names that suggested that the pictures were taken in California. My camera at the time was not capable of GPS. Facebook still managed to get the location right. Scary stuff.
    • henrybridge 15y ago
      Like I said on Quora, we use the location field that you put into the album when you uploaded it. The album location isn't displayed in the caption for individual photos and isn't displayed that prominently on the album page, so you're probably just not seeing that you set it when it was uploaded in 2009.
      • iamandrus 15y ago
        I never entered anything into the location field (I would have remembered doing it), yet it got the exact city and state where I took the photos.
        • modeless 15y ago
• mhartl 15y ago
  s/alaramed/alarmed/ in the article title
• sajidnizami 15y ago
  There was an old vision that machines would do the stuff for you somewhere back in the day. Sad that we've got to a point where we can make this possible but won't because we can't trust pie in the sky. Torn between the two options and can't decide!