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Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

I've never liked Facebook's "do you want to tag your friend" feature. It's a loaded question, like... have you stopped beating your wife? However you answer it, you've given Facebook feedback about their facial recognition.

If I hit yes, I'm tagging friends who might not want to be tagged. Furthermore, I might end up in the same boat with friends tagging pictures of me! Either way, I help better Facebook's facial recognition, which unnerves me.

On the surface, clicking "no" means that they got the facial recognition wrong. But what am else am I revealing? If the match was 98%, would they infer that one of us (or both) is concerned about privacy? That we have something to hide?

The third alternative is to click nothing. The only information that gives Facebook is that I'm not interested in helping curate their data any more than I already am.

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That's a good point and it also brings to mind a way to fight it.

This http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.1897v4.pdf could be one way. You could generate images which are not of someone who wants to protect his privacy, but tweak them to strongly correlate to an image of that person by the neural net, whereas it could be a picture of anything you have just optimized (the images could be just noise, or another person, etc). You could generate batches of those and upload them, and confirm to Facebook that they are indeed photos of the person who wants their privacy back. You could repeat this (automatically) and corrupt the weights in FB's neural net, which would overcome their face detection abilities for the individual in question.

Interesting paper, but I'm not sure that's entirely practical.

If I were Facebook, I'd look at the entropy of an image before attempting to classify it. Anything particularly high (noise) or low (squiggles) would be discarded before running through the classifier.

So, why do you still use Facebook again? FOMO > privacy?

For now, it's still the simplest and easiest way to keep in touch with my family and friends. I tried living like I'm a CIA agent for a while, True Crypting everything, disconnecting from social networks, and I came to one conclusion:

I'm still just as vulnerable to attack, if not more (ie: trying to host my own email service). The only difference is I'm markedly more isolated from my friends. It simply wasn't worth the trade off.

It's similar to people who get ridiculed for stockpiling guns and food in underground bunkers for the coming War-for-Independence 2.0. Sure, I could become a "digital prepper" and survive the data-pocalypse--likely at the cost of my relationships.

It's not like a "10 Cloverfield Lane" lifestyle is particularly appealing to me, either. I'll live with my friends for now, with only a mild sense of paranoia.

Same reason everyone used Windows in the workplace in the 90s/00's? Network effect = no reasonable alternative, and abstinence means you become a pariah.

I say this as someone who has exercised the option to avoid Facebook entirely for the past 7 years (including noscript+faceblockers for the pervasive thumbs-up buttons.

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