Facebook is now scanning your photos to make sure you send them to your friends
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
Or, you know, ditch Facebook, since this is far from the total extent of their creepiness.
1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them over email/gchat/texting/in person.
2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method? This hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very limited population strata. As a followup, do these people find any difficulties when connecting with non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those?
3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just the accepted dogma at this point. I don't mean to demean the group by suggesting that, I've certainly watched myself do the same in hindsight to other things (video games), but I do wonder if it's at least being considered.
For a lot of social circles, facebook is the only service that almost everyone will regularly check and that lets you coordinate events. My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them, it's because they opted out of the platform.
The other big point of stickiness that I can think of is that facebook is many people's cloud. Years of photos are backed up there and only there. It's unfortunate that they've relinquished control of their files to a closed-platform third party, but that's the way it is.
Clearly it is, unless you make a conscious decision for every gathering to only include people via Facebook. Does no one ever stop and think "Hey, Jake is pretty cool but he doesn't use Facebook. Maybe someone should call him?" I'd guess that no one thinks like this, and that his omission comes from simply not thinking to invite people who aren't on Facebook.
I'd love it if you could explain that I'm wrong and that you are making this conscious decision to exclude them. The justification for this would be even more interesting.
The situation of course is already familiar in the business world and many companies try to mitigate this kind of risks by supporting open source for example, or open standards.
It's more frequent for me with parties of 100+ invites.
The way I accidentally don't invite people is
1. I setup Facebook event.
2. I scroll through a list of my friends on Facebook.
3. As I scroll through I invite any friends I think would have a good time at the party and are in town.
4. Never realize I didn't to invite Jake.
5. During or day after party I wonder why Jake didn't come. Then remember that he doesn't have Facebook
I don't think most people sit down and try to remember every person they know. Then create a list of people to invite and then use Facebook to invite them. I think they go through Facebook and invite the ones they recognize similar to the way I do it. It's also hard to keep track of who is, and isn't using Facebook at any given time.
I'm throwing a party on Sunday. I don't throw parties very often. The last time I did was a little over a year ago. I created a Facebook event for parties as I usually do, and about half the people I invited didn't even see the invite (Facebook helpfully tells you who has and hasn't seen such things). So I had to chase down these people through other means (texting, hangouts, and yes, FB messenger). Last year when I did this, pretty much everyone saw the invite.
I'm not sure what changed. Perhaps it's notification fatigue, perhaps some quit or curtailed their use of Facebook. But it kind of sucks from my perspective, as there is no clear better alternative. I do not know the email addresses of all my friends, and people aren't necessarily responsive to email either.
Demographic here is late 20s-late 30s, in the Bay Area.
1. People use it for event planning. I don't get texts asking where I am anymore or what i'm doing. Events are organized... Personally, I despise this because I love impromptu meetups, but that's just not how my friends do things anymore it seems.
2. For all non-business communication the answer is yes. Professional contact is still E-mail driven (or Slack/IRC for dev-friends). That said, LinkedIn is starting to pickup some of the professional communication in my circles.
3. I've been okay with the trade-offs, but that decision fits my social profile. I have to make an active effort now to get invited to things though which kind of sucks, but I suppose that's OK too since it allows me to be more selective about what I go to.
My main circle of friends, clustered in our late-40s for the most part, use a variety of different online media. Facebook and email are primary, though I wouldn't say either is ahead of the other at this point. Texting is of course very common. Facebook Messenger has been our primary chat for the last couple years.
We're also on Twitter and Instagram, at least big chunks of us are. One connected subgroup of us with a common interest have been on a private google groups for a long while, and a private yahoo group for years before that. We set up slack for the group this week.
In other words, we're using whatever seems handiest at the moment for whatever it is we're doing. It's not a particularly tech-savvy group of people, though nearly all of my main circle is quite well-educated.
I don't use FB, but it turns out that people can form pretty strong bonds over incidental things. At least those bonds appear to be strong to the people on the outside, and that's all that really matters when you're talking about social stuff.
At this point in my life, the costs are negligible, but ten years ago those same cost would have been closer to 'devestaating'.
FTFY
> 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the
> point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I
> still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them
> over email/gchat/texting/in person.
I have a reasonably large extended family. We could start up a mailing list, but we're not all related to the same people. When I see them in person, I have been "keeping in touch" because I've been seeing their family photos, seeing daily updates from them, and interacting with them. Again, I don't have the time or energy to do this actively.
We have a party organized this weekend. There are 40 people on the invite list. A Facebook event has meant that we've invited a whole load of people who we might not have invited to a more intimate event, but also that we got suggestions for a bunch of people to invite - we went through our friends list, and often thought "haven't seen Joe in ages! I'd forgotten he was in town, let's invite him". Facebook has kept track of who's coming for us, and will gently nag our guests to reply either way. We don't have cellphone numbers of email addresses for many of these people.
Conversely, a couple we don't know very well has invited us to an event in a fortnight. We're not that close to them, but we can see on Facebook that a whole bunch of our mutual friends who we do really really like are going. As a result, we'll probably go.
Many of these things are possible without Facebook, they're just much much harder, and we probably wouldn't bother.
> 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively
> to facebook as their sole communication method? This
> hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very
> limited population strata. As a followup, do these
> people find any difficulties when connecting with
> non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those?
I have three ex colleagues who I'd love to be more in touch with, who aren't on Facebook. I try and see them when I am in the same city as them, but I often forget they're around, and because I'm not up to date with what's going on in their lives, we often have less to talk about.
> 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people
> you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy
> with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just
> the accepted dogma at this point.
The trade-offs seem hard to articulate. I don't feel like my social graph is particularly private. There are plenty of things that I do like to keep private, but Facebook knowing who my friends and family are isn't really one of them.
Anyway, hope this wall of text helps a little.
2. Messenger + some Snapchat basically. I have only one friend that didn't make the switch to Facebook and keeps on using old IM software that used to be popular. Our friendship (wasn't a huge one) kind of died cause of it.
3. I don't think most people care. It's the way things are. Most also seem to be fairly aware of what's being exposed publicly and curate their behavior accordingly.
I have to note I basically only have friends online. I'm 22, I kind of consider myself an early adopter. Just 4-5 years ago it was pretty weird to most, nowadays its slowly entering the mainstream. Younger people seem especially adept.
Because Facebook has a searchable, discoverable database of real names. Many people skip or haven't gotten to the "write down each others' contact information" step but still want to talk to each other. Actually there is a deliberate, important progression in a relationship from using Facebook Messenger to exchanging cell phone numbers.
>2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method?
Yes. Some people have international friends or care about proper handling of long messages, delivery confirmation, read receipts, etc. excluding SMS. Some people have friends with Androids, excluding iMessage. Some people have friends with Outlook.com or Yahoo email addresses, which excludes GChat/Hangouts. People are too scattered around Whatsapp/Telegram/WeChat for any of them to be worth anything. Everyone has Facebook. The cognitive overhead of "Which of 8 different services do I use to talk to this particular friend?" is fucking annoying and people avoid it by just using Facebook.
Many people in my (millennial) generation touch their emails as little as possible. Email is for bosses, professors, receipts, and annoying mailing lists. People I know are as likely to write a social email as they are to walk to their local Western Union office and ask to send a telegram.
>3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know?
Yes. Facebook is the only option inclusive of everyone, even those with the cheapest, broken phones that are out of free space.
If you have only 1 or 2 of those in your network, isn't the big 'one IM service to rule them all' idea dead? If you already are at a point where it's "FB for most, except for mail/whatever for X", is it a big step to "everyone chooses what to use again"? The overhead is already there, no?
All I can say is: This works fine for me. I have neither FB nor WhatsApp (I stopped using the former a long time ago and never joined the latter). People can reach me just fine and ~probably~ get a faster response from me anyway. I really don't understand this whole concept. "Overhead" to contact someone? Let's be real here: Either you care about contacting someone or you don't. If you don't, then I'd just not name them a 'Friend'. If you do, the mental exercise to open a different app (like - mail) shouldn't even be worth mentioning?
> Either you care about contacting someone or you don't.
Cuts both ways. If Facebook is someone's primary communication system and you refuse to use it, then you don't particularly care about contacting them either.
>"Overhead" to contact someone?
Most groups of friends I'm aware of have running group chats. In an effort to be inclusive of people with Androids, many switched from iMessage to Facebook. But if you refused to use Facebook and an event was planned that way, yes, someone would have to make the effort to reach out to you individually. Overhead. Even if they really like you despite your self-righteous inconveniencing of everyone else, it's not obvious whose responsibility it should be to bridge between Facebook and your smoke signals, and they're likely to forget sometimes.
> between Facebook and your smoke signals
Whoa there. I'd say that was both a bit over the top, no?
I'll end my participation in this thread with this: Obviously anyone/everyone can choose to use FB - I never tried to talk a single person out of using it. I consider it utterly useless for me, personally, and am so far unconvinced by any 'you have to use it or miss out' arguments and certainly don't buy the 'you are inconveniencing your peers' line of thought.
Yes. Absolutely. People communicate via Facebook Messenger instead of SMS or the likes of WhatsApp. They organise social events using Facebook. Announce weddings and divorces, births of children, new jobs. Everything via Facebook. You're clearly not a Facebook user (or not a regular user) otherwise you would know the extent to which people are using it.
And most people really don't care about Facebook privacy issues to any significant degree. It's more convenient to use Facebook and have compromised privacy than not to use Facebook for many.
It really is quite simple to live without FB.
And by which I'm not saying that negatively. You perhaps have a group of friends who are not big social media users or that use Facebook and the like to organise almost every aspect of their social lives.
For me, I would say if I wasn't using Facebook I would be missing out. The biggest thing I would be missing out on would be keeping up to date and in contact with a multitude of friends and family back in the UK where I'm originally from (I live in Australia now).
Sure, there is always email but many friends and family don't use email very much any more and it would be me expecting them to change their habits to suit my preferences.
Know what? May be it does not matter. May be it is a "learned necessity". For example, you don't need to have facebook to keep up to date with all the family members. You just need to call your mom back home and have a chat with her once in a while. Wouldn't you think that would be much healthy way to do this that steals very little of your time and attention?
After this comes the next solution, and next, and then next. Think about it.
Edit: of course I am half joking, but only half.
"I should never have allowed my friends to use their telephone in the way they want!"
"I should in fact terminate my friendships with any hooligans who don't use my preferred choice of social network!"
(To be honest, this sentiment doesn't make much sense to me)
To be honest, yes, indeed, when it is in your power to help to not to make the mistakes (or at least try). Say for example you see that your friend is drunk and wants to go driving. You have taken the keys but you still return them and your friend dies. I can say that this was also your fault then.
"I should never have allowed my friends to use their telephone in the way they want!"
I think that one should at least make a honest attempt to explain the situation to your friend. Say your friend has installed a hypothetical (but real and fully functional) "Meet the serial killer" app and is hyper super excited about it. Would you then at least somehow try to say that this is maybe really not a good idea? Or not?
I should in fact terminate my friendships with any hooligans who don't use my preferred choice of social network!"
You mean a Facebook friendship? Or could you maybe explain why you should terminate your friendship with your friend? Sounds silly to me, to be honest.
(To be honest, this sentiment doesn't make much sense to me)
I am sorry.
Although, I don't know why I would ditch it. At least now I decide what they have in the profile on me. (afaik)
I don't run it on my phone. Only log in when I hear there is an event I need to organise, or a message i need to send to a long lost friend or something of that kind.
Drop all the apps. Use the web interface.
The lion's share of my friends, and their friends, and their friends, are not on and posting to Facebook almost at all. For most of them it's just an app to schedule events.
A lot of the now college students a generation younger than me are using it like Twitter if at all -- self-promotion for the ones that are like event promoters or self-styled social movers, and passive consumption of that traffic.
The only reason I'm on it at all is because I moved pretty far away from home, and folks in my parents' generation and/or geography in the last year or two seriously dug into it en masse. So, I post to remind Mom I'm still alive.
Messenger is a thing, WhatsApp and Instagram are things. But the core Facebook is hollowing out with the people I interact with, and they're quite the opposite from Luddites or technophobes.
Success for that company is a assured as their ability to acquire the next big social connection app. When they stop making good bets, we'll see how they're doing I guess.
Only thing is, I still find some values of using Facebook, so to suck it up I am submitting myself to the product, and decides to work around.
Facebook as a good history of making some "features" opt-out. Tomorrow it could enable "auto-sharing", you wouldn't even notice. So yes it is a choice, until it is not. The only real choice here is to use or not to use facebook.
I have so many friends whom I couldn't reach if it weren't for Facebook. This is why I'm skeptical of people predicting peak Facebook. They've managed to entrench themselves to quite an extent in a way that few companies have done before.
If you can't fathom what "normals" get out of Facebook then you need to get out of your HN/Valley filter bubble.
So it is not a HN / Valley exclusive thing to be ditching facebook, but there are probably regions/groups where the social cost of leaving is higher than the discussions here suggest.
Facebook is useful but not on their terms rather than mine.
Thanks.
I've disabled every permission messenger has until there is clarification here.
All the recognition happens on the device. Faces are detected, poses are estimated and frontalized, and features are extracted on the iphone. Then, the feature vector is compared to a small gallery of your friends' features living on the telephone. No upload.
That's what I hope happens.
I don't really see much a problem with the above potential strategy, but then again, I wouldn't want my recognition model living on my friends' phones. (One could imagine an attack that tries to extract the images used to train the recognition model given just the model blob...are there any private images there? sounds like a juicy paper!)
Or maybe the features are extracted but sent to Facebook, which returns a recognition result. I consider this less trustworthy because Facebook would learn the identity of everyone in any picture I take, even if I choose not to send the full picture to facebook.
Or: perhaps faces are detected, but then cropped and the image fragment containing the face is sent to Facebook.
Or more Orweillian still, perhaps the entire image is simply sent to Facebook and the recognition happens there.
"You said we could come on the golf course, you didn't say anything about air horns, though!"
That is to say, you get permission/consent for one ostensible purpose, and then abuse that consent for something that is technically okay by the letter of the law, but goes way beyond what the user would agree to if they knew why you were asking for permission.
I don't trust that you'll keep this opt-in, as I have no reason to believe it.
--
If you were developing this feature, that is in my opinion a very interesting problem from technical point of view, then what were your thoughts about the possible social and moral implications of such feature?
For example, to give you an idea, did you think that this may outrage people? Or they may at least find it intrusive?
If you had any such thoughts, then how did you mitigate them?
Also is there some kind of program in Facebook that addresses these kind of problems?
I could not throw a rock at you. I am just interested about your personal experience.
There's a lot of openness, including around issues like this, at the company. There's weekly all hands meetings, where a developer could directly ask Mark about his opinion on a feature like this. The user experience, including creepiness, was almost certainly discussed. They may have misjudged in this case, but that's fallibility, not because it was ignored.
I'm not sure hiding that in an "About privacy" section would get a reasonable level of informed consent either, very few would read it.
This is an issue that keeps coming up: useful features involve slurping a lot of personal data in order to do the processing remotely, that distinction is not understood by a large number of the users and explaining it fully is determined to be bad UX ("overly technical explanation") and bad marketing (makes the privacy implications obvious).
The moral imperative to not be confusing.
What if the entire recognition pipeline happened completely on the device without any data being sent to Facebook?
Even if you have 1,000 friends, it might not a huuge deal to download a gallery of 1,000 models to compare to.
Of course, we can't be sure how this system works without the source.
It's pretty rare to have this kind of thing done on the device these days, but this example has a trade-off between the app using a lot of battery and using a lot of bandwidth so it's possible something else is going on.
You could probably get a good idea just by monitoring bandwidth usage while this feature is processing a new picture.
Perhaps I'm too used to the standard approach of "slurp everything because the users won't know or care and we can use that personal data to train models/sell/etc." and very biased against Facebook when it comes to privacy issues.
Like you've ever met a developer who would risk the extreme likelihood of platform incompatibilities across a disparate menagerie of hardware platforms and mobile devices, instead of simply base64ing some images and JSONing them into a restful webservice, where they gain explicit control of the computation environment, and get to conveniently crawl the entire dataset in a high availabilty data center.
As if you've ever met anyone who would trade that, in favor of re-developing the same features 20 times for 20 different compiles, and risk the inability to deploy those builds to unreliable nodes, across throttled mobile contract pay-as-you-go bandwidth, to achieve a goal that doesn't align with the company's bottom line. As if you've ever seen any company anywhere do that... for privacy.
I also think that uploading tons of photos is going to be very hard on the "throttled pay-as-you-go bandwidth contracts" that you mention. It certainly sounds much more expensive than shipping a binary patch once in a while.
You bring up privacy, so let's explore this topic a little. I disagree that privacy inherently conflicts with a company's bottom line. Some Fortune-500 companies treat privacy as a desirable goal because it increases the perceived value of their business.
As one example, let's compare to Apple's public privacy statement[1]:
> We also refuse to add a "backdoor"
> into any of our products because
> that undermines the protections
> we’ve built in. And we can’t unlock
> your device for anyone because you
> hold the key — your unique password.
> Finally, I want to be absolutely
> clear that we have never worked
> with any government agency from
> any country to create a backdoor
> in any of our products or services.
> We have also never allowed access
> to our servers. And we never will.
> Apple has no way to decrypt iMessage
> and FaceTime data when it’s in transit
> between devices. So unlike other companies’
> messaging services, Apple doesn’t
> scan your communications, and we
> wouldn’t be able to comply with
> a wiretap order even if we wanted to.
The comparison isn't very far-fetched. Like Facebook, Apple also deals with biometrics. Rather than face recognition, they use fingerprint recognition. Do they upload fingerprints to Apple's servers? Or, despite your claims of impacting the bottom line, do they do the recognition on the device? Here's their official statement[3]:
> This [fingerprint representation]
> is stored in a Secure Enclave within
> your phone’s chip, and is never
> accessed by iOS or other apps,
> never stored on Apple servers,
> and never backed up to iCloud
> or anywhere else.
If Facebook wants to win these kinds of brownie points with their customers, maybe they could write a statement like this:
> Facebook knows that the photos you choose not
> to share are deeply personal to you. That's
> why we take special steps to keep them that
> way. If you choose not to share a photo in
> your camera roll, it will never be sent to
> Facebook.
So. From a privacy perspective, it makes good business sense to implement the recognition pipeline on the device. And Facebook knows they could win back some public trust by doing that. The delicious question is: Is the trade-off worth it? Do the costs you mention outweigh the perceived benefits I mention? I think there were certainly developers on the Photo Magic team who wished it could be this way. It might have even been a close decision. But we can only find out for sure once Photo Magic rolls out to everyone.
1: http://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/
It's not really good news either way though. In my mind this would have been a smaller team, tasked with pulling the data over and then working on it to construct recognition scores, and passing a message back to prompt the user. This would have been a smallish team of 20 or 30, to do it quick and dirty.
For on-device processing, the project grows much more complicated, not just to develop, but also to test and prove end-to-end. So time and human resources are both more costly. And so too, come trade-offs. Network bandwidth, versus device battery/procesor/memory resources.
But all of this to push the envelope and solicit the user to expose more data to a for-profit service. Is it really something more convenient? Another nagging reminder, to do something the user doesn't need much prompting for?
The more weight thrown behind these sorts of projects the more curious the motives become.
- Find the face in the image. This can easily run on a telephone no sweat. Viola and Jones practically solved this problem in 2001.
- Find the parts of the face (eyes, nose, mouth), and then warp the face so it looks like it's facing right at the camera. A recent paper at CVPR last year was called "Face alignment at 3000 FPS," so this is also no sweat at all anymore.
- Extract the face's features. This turns the pixels into a smaller vector representation (maybe a list of 1024 numbers perhaps). This is a bit tricky --- many current systems use convolutional neural networks to do this step, which typically take a lot of compute time. Maybe Facebook could shrink them down to a telephone.
- Compare that feature vector to your friends' vectors. In the verification setting, you know the "feature vectors" of your 500 friends, so you find the Euclidean distance between the image's vector and the 500 others. No sweat.
- To get a recognition result, just pick the closest vector. Or, if the closest friend is too far away, return "No Match".
There are many ways to build a good face recognizer. This is one of them.
This might or might not be what Facebook's doing. Last year, they published a paper called "DeepFace" which works essentially this way but with some extra tricks. (The paper is here, but the focus was on comparing to academic state-of-the-art on a strictly academic dataset. It's totally marketing / PhD recruiting bait. :P I'm sure their internal system they have now must be far better. https://research.facebook.com/publications/480567225376225/d... )
The AI and ML people at Facebook are darn smart. I would be impressed (but probably not surprised) if the wizards found some clever way to shrink the pipeline to fit on a phone without too much accuracy loss. So it's possible. I have no clue though.
Sounds interesting. Source please?
* We can guess your age from your face: https://how-old.net/
* We can guess your emotion: https://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2015/11/11/happy-sad-angry-...
You're replying with a list of some of Microsoft's technologies that use face attribute estimation.
That's not what I was asking for. These are two very different things.
That being said, Microsoft has developed a piece of technology called PhotoDNA[0], which is designed with the specific purpose of identifying child pornography. This is actively used on OneDrive and Bing, among other services - including Facebook. It's safe to say that OneDrive does not just delete the content if child pornography is detected - it reports to the authorities. Now, it's hard to argue that they don't have a right to do that, as long as the person is voluntarily using their services. That's where I draw a distinction here: Facebook could elect to turn on PhotoDNA on photos uploaded to their new service, and not properly educate their customers that stuff is being uploaded automatically. This does, essentially, constitute a passive surveillance system. Mind you, if it is used to establish that child pornography is found, you will have a hard time convincing most people that it is overstepping what Facebook should do. That's my concern - that this will be pushed as a "for the children" thing, and then extended to "to cut down on crime" later, once everyone stops caring about its existence.
That said, that's my concern. It's not necessarily what I think will happen. I have no reason as of yet to believe that it's the next step. I do not, however, want Facebook automatically uploading (or even scanning) my photos.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...
It's not a huge leap to assume that any and all information they capture, including faces, is susceptible to government data surveillance programs.
Seriously. As others on the thread have pointed out, it's not as hard to live without as you think.
Don't believe me? Well... why don't you just try it for one week? If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Isn't it worth a try, though?
Try a step out of the social Skinner box.
It's an that is a wrapper for the website and allows better control over things like location and access to phone data.
Getting it running smoothly in the background without draining the battery? That might be a different matter. :)
For some people, it's simpler to keep in touch with friends and family by having a "least-privileges" Facebook account.
For those people, convincing every single person to also ditch Facebook would be very complex indeed.
That means that every single dick photo, or vagina/boobs photo that you have ever taken, is now with Facebook and readily available to the NSA under the FISA or Prism programs.
Basically the NSA has the biggest amateur porn collection in the world.
> For Android, [it's realtime]. For iPhone users, it will scan through your camera roll "periodically".