5 ms·

Facebook is convinced this man is his mother

61 points by denzil_correa 12y ago

laoba 12y ago
The same thing happens with my daughter: periodically Facebook thinks she is my wife or myself.
- jack-r-abbit 12y ago
  Same here. But then again, my wife and I do sometimes tag photos of our children with each others name to draw attention to a picture posted when the other is not there. (I'm not sure I explained that clearly but I see people do this a lot so I assume everyone knows what I'm talking about.) I would imagine that confuses FB's algorithm a bit as well.
  - electromagnetic 12y ago
    Yeah definitely. I get tagged in photos of my son, because he's my son and it's normally one of the grandparents taking the picture when we left him with them for the night. Our family Christmas party must destroy the algorithm when everyone who attended (50+ people normally) get group tagged into every picture. I do not doubt Facebook is running into problems because humans have a 3-dimensional perspective of time and events. It's the classic "why isn't mommy in any photos with us dad?" because she took them! Dad remembers, he was there. He's not seeing the photographs perspective, he's seeing his own perspective standing with his kids looking at his wife. To him his wife is in that photo even though she is visibly absent.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Facebooks algorithm is spooky. Early on my son labeled his cousin as "Dad's brother's daughter". Later that week it had changed magically to 'cousin'.
ejain 12y ago
I'd be more intrigued if a service like 23andMe made such a claim...
- jack-r-abbit 12y ago
  Just yesterday there was a story on HN about 23andMe where a guy discovered he had a half brother but 23andMe tagged him has potentially his grandfather.
  - madcaptenor 12y ago
    Both of those pairs would share one-fourth of their genes; how would 23andMe be able to tell them apart, other than looking at their ages?
IvyMike 12y ago
Facebook is racist against fat bald guys with beards and assumes we all look the same, because it's always suggesting I'm one of the other random fat bald guy with a beard I know. (Actually, after going through a lot of bogus suggestions over the course of a few months and correcting them, it's a lot better. But the joke doesn't work as well this way.)
- crpatino 12y ago
  Mmmm, interesting. You mean that if I eat more, groom a mightier beard and, ahem... wait for my hair loss to run its course, I will be immune to the spook-industrial-complex's tracking? Pass the burgers, please!!!
- skrebbel 12y ago
  What does being fat, bald and bearded have to do with race?
  - keerthiko 12y ago
    Semantics; clearly he meant "discriminatory towards". But you know, "being racist against" has kind of been accepted to have essentially the same meaning colloquially. You know what he meant :)
    - darrhiggs 12y ago
      >> You know what he meant :) How can you say this? I certainly didn't; colloquialisms are often geographical in nature.[0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquialism#Examples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquialism#Examples
      - keerthiko 12y ago
        If you want to argue, way to cite a flagged Wikipedia section, for not having any citations and "possible original research," and also being exactly just that one sentence long with no added explanation. I'm from south India/grew up in the middle east/studied on the east coast/worked on the west coast of the US, lived in Singapore and Thailand briefly. And there are definitely some colloquial usages that are fairly universal. In my experience this is one of them. Please also note appended smiley face. Obviously not everyone is familiar with every colloquialism. It's too bad if you were confused by the implied meaning of "racist against", and if my clarification of its colloquial usage was insufficient for you, but i find your comment adding very little value here.
bagels 12y ago
This is likely caused by the age difference, and the fact that they probably have some overlapping friends, even if it's not just one another. I'd have to guess the way it works is that Facebook looks at the poster, the poster's friends, and maybe the poster's friends of friends for a decent match among them when it encounters an untagged person. He probably scored higher because he does look like her, and those pictures are quite old and lack features that his mother currently has, such as wrinkles.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
xnull 12y ago
We had this exact same thing happen when we bought funeral services for my (late) older brother. They asked us for a bunch of pictures of him and some of his favorite music to use in a slideshow they were preparing as part of the funeral package. We have everyone at the service, in the pews and settled in. The lights dim, a projector screen rolls down and music starts to play. His music. Their slideshow was not exactly a slideshow, but an automatically generated remembrance DVD. It started with a flyover of some nature/rambling rivers and then rose into the air into parting clouds. So far so good. The DVD was an interspersing of stock nature footage and pictures of my brother. Face recognition algorithms were used to find where he was in each picture and slowly 'zoom' into them, or pan over to center on him. I think basically so that there was some sort of movement to the pictures. But their software (or more likely the software they had licensed) hadn't gotten his face right. Instead it kept zooming in on family members and (tragically) cutting him out. Instead it zoomed in constantly on my sister. It was obvious that either the software didn't have a way to correct such errors, or that the funeral home hadn't bothered to preview the DVD before making it a part of the service.
- jewel 12y ago
  I work on slideshow creation software for funeral homes. Stories like yours are something I worry quite a bit about, since we've found that once users trust our software, they stop bothering with the preview. We let the user choose custom zoom points but don't yet incorporate face recognition. As far as I am aware, none of our competitors have face recognition or even face detection. Some funeral homes hire or outsource to a local videographer instead of using purpose-built software. It's possible that the videographer could have used a slideshow plugin with that feature and then combined it with the stock footage.
sebastianavina 12y ago
It's going to be interesting how all this technology finds an use and abuse in the long term
blueflow 12y ago
This is also related to one of my greatest fears, when such algorithmic results are (mis)used for prosecution or other legal stuff.
rglovejoy 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies

61 points by denzil_correa 12y ago

laoba 12y ago

The same thing happens with my daughter: periodically Facebook thinks she is my wife or myself.

jack-r-abbit 12y ago
Same here. But then again, my wife and I do sometimes tag photos of our children with each others name to draw attention to a picture posted when the other is not there. (I'm not sure I explained that clearly but I see people do this a lot so I assume everyone knows what I'm talking about.) I would imagine that confuses FB's algorithm a bit as well.
- electromagnetic 12y ago
  Yeah definitely. I get tagged in photos of my son, because he's my son and it's normally one of the grandparents taking the picture when we left him with them for the night. Our family Christmas party must destroy the algorithm when everyone who attended (50+ people normally) get group tagged into every picture. I do not doubt Facebook is running into problems because humans have a 3-dimensional perspective of time and events. It's the classic "why isn't mommy in any photos with us dad?" because she took them! Dad remembers, he was there. He's not seeing the photographs perspective, he's seeing his own perspective standing with his kids looking at his wife. To him his wife is in that photo even though she is visibly absent.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Facebooks algorithm is spooky. Early on my son labeled his cousin as "Dad's brother's daughter". Later that week it had changed magically to 'cousin'.

ejain 12y ago

I'd be more intrigued if a service like 23andMe made such a claim...

jack-r-abbit 12y ago
Just yesterday there was a story on HN about 23andMe where a guy discovered he had a half brother but 23andMe tagged him has potentially his grandfather.
- madcaptenor 12y ago
  Both of those pairs would share one-fourth of their genes; how would 23andMe be able to tell them apart, other than looking at their ages?

IvyMike 12y ago

Facebook is racist against fat bald guys with beards and assumes we all look the same, because it's always suggesting I'm one of the other random fat bald guy with a beard I know. (Actually, after going through a lot of bogus suggestions over the course of a few months and correcting them, it's a lot better. But the joke doesn't work as well this way.)

crpatino 12y ago
Mmmm, interesting. You mean that if I eat more, groom a mightier beard and, ahem... wait for my hair loss to run its course, I will be immune to the spook-industrial-complex's tracking? Pass the burgers, please!!!
skrebbel 12y ago
What does being fat, bald and bearded have to do with race?
- keerthiko 12y ago
  Semantics; clearly he meant "discriminatory towards". But you know, "being racist against" has kind of been accepted to have essentially the same meaning colloquially. You know what he meant :)
  - darrhiggs 12y ago
    >> You know what he meant :) How can you say this? I certainly didn't; colloquialisms are often geographical in nature.[0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquialism#Examples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquialism#Examples
    - keerthiko 12y ago
      If you want to argue, way to cite a flagged Wikipedia section, for not having any citations and "possible original research," and also being exactly just that one sentence long with no added explanation. I'm from south India/grew up in the middle east/studied on the east coast/worked on the west coast of the US, lived in Singapore and Thailand briefly. And there are definitely some colloquial usages that are fairly universal. In my experience this is one of them. Please also note appended smiley face. Obviously not everyone is familiar with every colloquialism. It's too bad if you were confused by the implied meaning of "racist against", and if my clarification of its colloquial usage was insufficient for you, but i find your comment adding very little value here.

bagels 12y ago

This is likely caused by the age difference, and the fact that they probably have some overlapping friends, even if it's not just one another. I'd have to guess the way it works is that Facebook looks at the poster, the poster's friends, and maybe the poster's friends of friends for a decent match among them when it encounters an untagged person. He probably scored higher because he does look like her, and those pictures are quite old and lack features that his mother currently has, such as wrinkles.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

xnull 12y ago

We had this exact same thing happen when we bought funeral services for my (late) older brother. They asked us for a bunch of pictures of him and some of his favorite music to use in a slideshow they were preparing as part of the funeral package. We have everyone at the service, in the pews and settled in. The lights dim, a projector screen rolls down and music starts to play. His music. Their slideshow was not exactly a slideshow, but an automatically generated remembrance DVD. It started with a flyover of some nature/rambling rivers and then rose into the air into parting clouds. So far so good. The DVD was an interspersing of stock nature footage and pictures of my brother. Face recognition algorithms were used to find where he was in each picture and slowly 'zoom' into them, or pan over to center on him. I think basically so that there was some sort of movement to the pictures. But their software (or more likely the software they had licensed) hadn't gotten his face right. Instead it kept zooming in on family members and (tragically) cutting him out. Instead it zoomed in constantly on my sister. It was obvious that either the software didn't have a way to correct such errors, or that the funeral home hadn't bothered to preview the DVD before making it a part of the service.

jewel 12y ago
I work on slideshow creation software for funeral homes. Stories like yours are something I worry quite a bit about, since we've found that once users trust our software, they stop bothering with the preview. We let the user choose custom zoom points but don't yet incorporate face recognition. As far as I am aware, none of our competitors have face recognition or even face detection. Some funeral homes hire or outsource to a local videographer instead of using purpose-built software. It's possible that the videographer could have used a slideshow plugin with that feature and then combined it with the stock footage.

sebastianavina 12y ago

It's going to be interesting how all this technology finds an use and abuse in the long term

blueflow 12y ago

This is also related to one of my greatest fears, when such algorithmic results are (mis)used for prosecution or other legal stuff.

rglovejoy 12y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies