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Comment by mosquito242 | Hacker News Reader

I had the strangest interaction with the Messenger app a few months ago.

I was spending time with friends, and I took a few pictures of all of us (didn't send them through either FB or Messenger). A few hours later, messenger popped up a notification telling me something along the lines of "Hey, I see you took pictures today of <friend>. Want to send them to her?"

Made me feel incredibly creeped out that FB would take my photos and (presumably upload and) analyze them even when I hadn't given them to FB.

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It's called Photo Magic:

"By recognizing your Facebook friends in the photos you take (just like when tagging or sharing photos on Facebook), Messenger can create a group thread for you to share the photos with those friends in just two taps."

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/12/messenger-adds-new-feat...

http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9696760/facebook-messenger...

You can opt-out by turning off tagging suggestions: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline&section=sugge...

That should be opt-in. What a fucked up feature.

Edit: I don't give any of my friends consent to use that feature - yet the would still scan my face. How can this even be legal.

Lax data privacy laws in the US (compared to Europe).

Lobby your congressperson to fix it.

Congress is broke and the tech companies know it and optimize against this and will continue to make hay while the sun shines (i.e. before the US produces any effective consumer privacy legislation).

It doesn't cost anything to enact legislation. Congress is a sunk cost.

Funny.

Congress cannot afford the lawyers needed to write that kind of legislation. The lobbyists write the laws they advocate for.

Strangely enough, Elizabeth Warren was able to put together comprehensive legislation to work towards ending Intuit's (to name the largest offender) corporate welfare [1] in the tax prep software space. Or is there an anti-private corporation/pro IRS tax prep lobbyist I'm missing?

[1] https://www.warren.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=1110

I don't follow the sausagemaking process in DC, so I don't precisely know in that instance, but my guess would be a public advocacy group.

In my state legislature, which I follow, it's really common for various groups to write sample legislation. Everything from duck habitat preservation to open source software.

You don't need to take it to the congress; just stop using the services of a company whose practices you don't agree with. If more people would do this, maybe the company will get the message and change its practices.

Pragmatically, its easier for me to hold congresspeoples' feet to the fire.

This information is too valuable to dissuade companies from collecting and using it. You can't do much as an user if everyone is doing it. In many situations you might not even know that you're being tracked, there already technologies that track you in public places.

IMO this is something that should be regulated.

The article says it is opt-in.

I saw that now too. Opt-in isn't enough here, the user of the messenger app should get consent from all folks on those pictures before auto-uploading anything.

What another trove of data for FB. Disgusting.

Facebook lets you opt-out of being tagged, which is about all they can do. The photos don't being to you, plus they're not going to know that you're in a photo until after it gets uploaded.

>which is about all they can do

They could not use facial recognition in the first place.

It's opt-in. Do research before experiencing moral outrage.

I am still shocked about that feature. The messenger app is installed by millions of people. Does anyone know how the app does the friend recognition? Local on the phone or on FBs servers?

Facebooks servers. Phones could not be capable of doing that much facial recognition that quick. Plus that bandwidth to grab all your friends images to compare to would be a metric ton of images given some selfie-addicts.

The other day tinfoil me finally gave in and installed the Instagram app. Marshmallow gives me more granular permission control, but naturally I had to give it access to the file system to be able to upload pictures. Knowing about their ways with Messenger, I guess it's only a matter of time before Instagram scans my whole phone for images and videos to perform biometric analysis.

It gets even more fun to consider all the apps using the Facebook SDK (which is basically everyone - https://gist.github.com/ryanolsonk/e33bf9e89677da9fe8ce ). Gave any of those apps access to your photos ?

This is actually terrifying to me.

People also use to think putting hour real name on the internet was creepy. Little by little the privacy erosion has brought us where we are today - standing naked in front of a corporate monster profiting off our data.

So invent an open-source federated server with deep learning capabilities that can do this and keep us in charge of our data.

I'm not sure anyone would pay for this feature to use themselves; to me it seems to exist as a side effect of searching for better advertising

> I'm not sure anyone would pay for this feature to use themselves

I said open-source.

Try getting pictures downloaded from other sources directly to your phone and see if Facebook prompts you the same.

Try getting pictures of other people and see if Facebook suggests them to be added as your friends.

>Try getting pictures of other people and see if Facebook suggests them to be added as your friends.

That's a whole new level of stalking people right there.

Wow I never heard of that before, that's insane...

The worst thing is you can't "boycott" the app because even if you don't use it but your friends do, the pictures of you WILL be analyzed. Even if you explicitly refused their ToS...

Are these kind of things possible with WhatsApp? (on iOS specifically, and now that it even uses e2e) I don't know if I should trust them with Facebook being behind the wheel...

That’s quite disturbing. Was it on iOS or Android?

Creeped out that FB used the permissions that you gave them? I am guilty too, those permissions are too wide...

were they just stored on your phone ?

yep.

Deny the application permission to access your camera, photos, and contacts. That's a start.

If that is how it went down, that alone is a base for another lawsuit.

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