A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system
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Check out the video here http://sightcorp.com/ for an ultra creepy overview. You can even try their live demo: https://face-api.sightcorp.com/demo_basic/.
I feel a little bad about calling out one API provider specifically, so here's a bunch more: https://www.kairos.com/ https://skybiometry.com/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service... http://www.affectiva.com/ http://www.crowdemotion.co.uk/ http://emovu.com/e/ https://www.faceplusplus.com/
Face tracking, emotional analytics and vision based demographics analysis is a pretty huge industry. There's a entire spectrum of uses for this tech, from the altruistic (psychology labs, humans factors research), to the well, not.
We need HIPPA for all personal information, not just medical. We have an expectation of privacy in being "lost in the crowd" when we're out and about. Our physical & online whereabouts, who we're physically with, who we're communicating with, our personal contact information, and obviously payment information is private information that can be harmful if not kept private (false positives in automated legal systems, identity theft, and including all the defenses of securing medical information).
Anybody who chooses to hold such information must regard it with a high level of respect and privacy. Since nobody is doing so, and there are no penalties for violating privacy, and this gets into fundamental rights and proper functioning of society, it seems applicable to federal law.
Sure, paper medical records suck and aren't inherently more or less secure, but no one breaks into a car and runs away with 500 patients' medical histories when each patient's record fills pages, folders, or filing cabinets, rather than bytes on a hard drive (or even better, it slips away through a network connection that no one in the hospital even knew existed thanks to a back door on a piece of medical equipment).
HIPAA largely means that your medical information has been outsourced to whatever software/network/hardware provider claimed they could do the job (and whoever they outsourced the job to in some cases). If you don't sign whatever HIPAA agreement(s) your provider puts in front of you, chances are they can't treat you, so what choice do you really have?
The UK has the Data Protection Act which does some of this.
One radical option would be to grant people copyright over their own PII (with about a billion caveats to allow journalism etc.)
I thought Minority Report was still a few years away...
Thanks for the links, this stuff is both fascinating and scary.
https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/
Sentiment analysis for everyone!
The cameras retailers use with their surveillance systems are coming with facial recognition built in now. [1]
And lots of retailers, banks, etc, are using systems that track people's visits across multiple locations. [2]
You'll see a lot of these systems being sold as fraud/loss prevention solutions. The reason for this is that it's a relatively easy sell this way - customers can count how many thieves they've caught this way to easily determine the ROI they're getting on the system. Once the systems are in place, it's relatively easy to start using them for marketing related purposes.
Not all uses of systems like these are necessarily unethical. Consider a case where you want to set up a rule like 'if the average lineup length at the checkouts exceeds 5 people, call backup cashiers'. The problem is that once you have something like this in place, it's very tempting for company execs to want to use the data for legal but less than ethical purposes.
[1] https://www.axis.com/ca/en/solutions-by-application/facial-r... [2] https://www.facefirst.com/solutions/face-recognition-predict...
Note that some ethical consensus is key---without it, companies can just price "Well, some customers think image recognition is creepy" into the risk model and do it anyway. Compare privacy concerns---people talk big about their concerns over privacy, but in practice, we're still in a world where a survey-taker can get very personal information from a random individual at a mall by offering a free candy bar. Until and unless people arrive at a common consensus that their personal information---including their face---has value or they have a proprietary right to that information, even in public, there's no real tractable solution to this problem.
... because there's no real agreement that there's a problem to solve.
The department of commerce tried to facilitate talks about establishing a voluntary standard. The surveillance industry was so terrified of the idea that they should be held to a principled position that they wouldn't even budge on one of the weakest possible protections: A voluntary-participation standard that said people must opt-in to be identified by name through facial recognition when they are on public property.
https://www.eff.org/document/privacy-advocates-statement-nti... (and previous HN discussion on negotiations falling apart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9729696 )
Your source in the marketing material of an IP camera manufacturer.
We research that space and I can guarantee that less than 0.1% of IP cameras have facial recognition built-in or running. These manufacturers, like Axis, whom you cite, would love for such capabilities but they are still very uncommon.
While I'm sure this is true (since the majority of IP cameras in the world are cheap things little more than webcams), do you have a number for retail stores specifically? I know many of the larger chains spend a lot of money on their cameras and movement detection and other intelligence has been onboard those for at least 15 years.
Consider Amazon Go (https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/5/13842592/amazon-go-new-ca... setting up an account with a store, users enter, grab what they want, and leave. The system of cameras and biometric trackers observing the store figures out after-the-fact what you grabbed and charges it automatically to your account through a sensor fusion including face recognition. That's a level of convenience rivaling ecommerce for things people want to grab by hand (often produce and small items, for example), and it's completely enabled by this category of technology.
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I get your basic point and I don't disagree that we need more privacy protection. But, no, we do not "need HIPPA" for all personal information.
This is a wonderful app. I will use it every day!
It also picked up the colors in my aloha shirt perfectly. (Anyone who knows me knows that I am to aloha shirts as Steve Jobs was to black turtlenecks.)
When I want to feel young and go shopping for shirts, now I know what to do!
But it also scores me high for anger and sadness, despite (what I thought to be!) a rather neutral expression. Perhaps it knows more than we think :)
Though I'm guessing it gets a lot more accurate when it can take and average multiple shots.
(Anyone else with a glasses, a beard, or other non-typical facial features want to comment? I'm curious now how well their system handles these?)
Thinks he is 45 years old. He is 64! Not calibrated for the superior Russian genetics.
I don't think glasses and beard are non-typical facial features!
The second time it thought I was 28, which increased my happiness even more.
My partner tried it and it took 10 years off her age, and found an angry 31 year old man hiding in the folds of her clothing!
(edit)... on the other hand they probably were just trying to sell product so thought flattery was the right approach...
Covered up my receding hairline a bit and it said 29. I reckon if I shaved I could get it down to about 22 since that's how old people usually think I am.
Pulled a disgusted face and it said 47. Hmm.
Rekognition guesses a wider age range - but gets a "correct" answer - the sightcorp one guesses me as 7 years younger than I am.
Applied Science has a good video on how they work:
https://benkrasnow.blogspot.si/2015/11/how-anti-theft-tags-w...
http://lifehacker.com/how-retail-stores-track-you-using-your...
I tried variations of the standard expressions and pulled off sad, disgust, anger quite easily.
I knew binge watching Lie To Me before my psychology mid would come handy at some point!
Someone recently thought I was 30. People aren't any better than computers.
I am not 91.
Understand how your customers feel. Detect and measure facial expressions like happiness, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and fear."
Creepy, indeed.
(There's an old joke that sometimes shows up on HN about augmenting an automated bugtracker to snap a photo when a crash is detected or a bug is reported, so developers can be reminded that bugs tie down to real people who are actually sad / angry that the software failed them ;) ).
I'd rather not give them my facial image so they can optimize for me.
Here, instead, there is no indication that you're being watched, analyzed and kept recorded for indefinite amounts of time.
It's just creepy.
The salesperson doesn't know in what shops you have been before.
The salesperson might also not know you talked to his colleague the day before.
This is about trust and privacy. You can't trust what they do with your data.
Well, you never know into what dystophia you are heading...
There's a huge double standard in place that makes it somehow wrong for computers to do what humans have been doing without objection for decades or millenia.
I don't believe this. This kind of advertisement in public would be illegal in germany as it is mass surveillance.
Not that this is a bad thing---being able to think differently like this is one of the positives of having countries!---but relative to the rest of the world, what Germany considers "surveillance" is unusual and sometimes surprising.
I also tried it on a few internet porn images. It looks like it is definitely only relying on the face for determining gender, or it thinks that there are a lot of women with hairy flat chests and large penises...
https://gitlab.com/crankylinuxuser/uWho
Runs on CPU only, realtime 1280x720 @ 15 fps.
Is it creepy? Sure. But anyone can run it. I was looking at a rewrite to work in CLI with a web interface instead. But the core loop is the magic part that makes everything work nicely.
What's the worst that could happen? The local advertising regulator will order you to meet the regulatory standards or remove the cameras, but give you x number of weeks to act per unit installed.
Maybe i should try to sell it..
the idea of collecting who looked at your display is invaluable. It would be beneficial for both government and ad agency. Ad agency is obvious but government could learn if displays present information people want and it was presented in a manner to catch their attention. The negative aspects of government use could be limited through privacy laws and such.
Microsoft's service is much more consistent and accurate (I've tested the same images...): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
"WorkSmart can track workers' keystroke activity and take webcam images to ensure they're doing their jobs."
http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2017/05/j...
Edit: Here is what the buttons look like. Gender and age. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/hvc-c-android-prototype20141...
The cash register had a matrix of buttons
M: [0-9][10-19][20-29][30-54][55+]
F: [0-9][10-19][20-29][30-54][55+]
They'd just push a button as they punched in your order.
No idea if the operator is also recording gender and perceived age group etc., but I do know that on most occasions, you can opt not to answer the post code question.
I actually did some experiments - for different properties in roughly the same area/price range, I told different real estate agents different postcodes. It is beyond reasonable doubt that the code you tell them play a huge role on how they rank you as potential buyers. When you tell them a random north shore post code, you are guaranteed to receive a nice & friendly follow up on the coming Monday, however if you tell them that you live in the west (when mostly inspecting north shore properties), they would smile and immediately end the whole conversation.
The sample size here is ~50, which I believe is big enough to draw some reasonable conclusions.
It's really handy to see how many people the activities attract, and who they appeal to most. You're tracked everywhere!
Facial recognition is a unique identifier but cashiers have access to almost nothing they can record... [Edit] What was it?
Edit: clarified that I am asking about the history here, what information was manually collected by cashiers as parent stated
The tweeted advertisement system also looks like it's only recording demographics. Not individual personal IDs.
You could make a note of a person's seeming affect—positive/negative/neutral emotion.
Best part - we got a first gen raspberry pi to crunch all the data locally at 2-5fps. Gender, age group (child, youth, teen, young adult, middle age, senior), and approximate ethnicity were all recorded and logged. Everyone had a unique profile and could track people between cameras and days (underlying facial features do not change).
Next time you look at digital signage, just be aware that it is probably looking back at you.
For me I knew how our data was anonymized. So while our system would be able to say "I have seen person 1234 at locations 4,7,9,11 on dates x,y,x" we had absolutely no way of knowing who 1234 was or anything about them, even the unique identifier was just a hash.
Obviously it depends on how much data you collect/store, personally I don't think the things shown in OP are all that onerous (sex, age group, gender, rage, time spent looking at ad).
Minor nitpick, but giving someone a nickname isn't the same as anonymization.
"Hey Bob, thanks for logging on. Did you know we've been calling you 1234 these past five years!"
When a passive recognition system _uniquely_ tracks & identifies a person, it just takes time before that gets cross-referenced.
(different story if the data gets aggregated, or you scrub the uid completely after some window)
What's the difference between this and an anonymised dataset? No PII is tracked, it's just looking at you and calculating what emotion you're likely feeling to show more targeted advertising.
I mean, I'm personally against it but we've got to prove a higher and higher ROI to justify the cost of digital signage, this leads to just that.
Inadvertently spill the name of the company making this and those wanting to use it to the public so they can receive their well deserved backlash.
"Hi. I am the original taker of the photo. There is a screen that normally shows peppes pizza advertisements in front of peppes pizza in Oslo S. The advertisements had crashed revealing what was running underneath the ads. As I approached the screen to take a picture, the screen began scrolling with my generic information - That I am young male (sorry my profile picture was misleading, not a woman), wearing glasses, where I was looking, and if I was smiling and how much I was smiling. The intention behind my original post on facebook was merely to point out that people may not know that these sort of demographics are being collected about them merely by approaching and looking at an advertisement. the camera was not, at a glance, evident. It was merely meant as informational, maybe to point out what we all know or suspect anyway, but just to put it out in the open. I believe the only intent behind the data collected is engagement and demographic statistics for better targeted advertisements."
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/norge/comments/67jox4/denne_kr%C3%A...
Do we really want to commodotize the simple act of walking down the boulevard? Make every moment in public space (and private digital space!) sliced, diced, and scrutinized by God knows how many data munchers, middlemen, analytics brokers, and ethically challenged people in order compel as much thoughtless consumer spending as possible, long term consequences be damned? Allow incredibly detailed profiles to be built up on every person, spanning the decades of their life? And of course, there is always the danger of governments co-opting and abusing this information years or decades in the future, after adminstrations have come and gone, and laws have been overturned, drastically altered, or ignored. As the tech and richness of the data increases, the temptations will as well. Well meaning people can do nefarious things in certain contexts.
I believe our societal institutions and corporate entities are not mature enough to safely handle the power granted by unrestrained, high resolution data on the entire populace
Granted, I don't think things would get too terrible without overwhelming protest, but I don't see why we should bet on that.
I am equally surprised by the comments about how come engineers implement such systems, how they find it ethical, etc. I'm sorry, but it sounds just a bit out of touch with the real world, or just outside of HN bubble. Given the things that money motivates people to do, it's probably one of the least unethical things that has been done.
I am not judging that this is right or wrong, I am simply stating the fact that nothing about this should be surprising. Yes, this is slightly sad, but that's simply the reality of technological advancement. It's not really possible to expect the rest of the world to use the technology only for things considered 'right', etc.
Looking at things from a little distance, the whole thing is abhorrent, and paints a really sad state of our society. I wrote this many times, and will keep writing it: if you did the same things personally to your friend that people in advertising industry do to everyone, you'd most likely get punched in the face. And yet somehow marketing became a respectable occupation.
It feels straight out of Black Mirror.
OTOH, what is so interesting in simple face recognition, innit? That future became a past quite fast, meanwhile teh human rights never get old. (smile.jpg)
- it should be made clear that you are being analyzed e.g. by big yellow sticker near the camera
- no raw data should be stored
- it should be used to collect statistics, not identify individuals (?)
Is it sufficient to consider such a software as a fair use? What else would you add to the list to make it reasonable?
It's not enough to put a warning next to the camera because you've already captured them at that point and it's too late. If anywhere it would need to be at the entrance to the store.
But guess what? Customers HATE this stuff. The backlash and lost business is not worth it. See: http://abc7news.com/business/philz-to-stop-tracking-customer...
If a store has a warning label on the device engaging in this, it's bad because it's too late for not entering the store. I'm gonna complain right now at the store manager, maybe call the cops or sue. I'll be vocal about actively hating the store, the brand, the manager, the employees.
If I went to a store engaging in this without telling and I later learn about it, then I'm calling Keyser Söze and it's pitchforks and beheading time.
I suppose it will take a couple more generations of brainwashing to have the population ready to accept this kind of highly invasive technology. IIRC about 10 years the big brother awards was awarded to a french industry group for their blue book describing how to condition a population to accept surveillance and control technology over a few generations.
Advertising? No. Sales? Definitely no.
Augmenting that single-player video game so that it adjusts content depending on emotions and gaze of the player? Ok. Better if the player is explicitly told the game will track their reactions though.
EDIT:
Also, another angle. Even for advertisers / "sales optimization", I'd forgive you if that was a local, on-site system. But if it's meant as a SaaS, with deployments connected to vendor's butt, then I am gonna actively try to screw with it if I learn there's one installed anywhere I frequent. Hopefully new EU laws will curb that, though.
What about collecting statistics to make better decisions? Let's say, you go to your favorite jeans store, but find out that current collection is disgusting. Does it sound ok for you if some sort of system would analyze your attitude to the product to improve it in later versions?
When these things are used outside a controlled environment, things could get even more complicated: weird beards, squeezing of your eyes because of excessive sunshine, reflexive glasses, etc.
1. Accurate collection of facial features. Illumination, occlusions, head rotation, etc. may seriously affect accuracy, but this is exactly our main focus right now. We are at the very start of the process, yet early experiments and some recent papers show that it should be doable.
2. Correlation between real and detected emotional state. At the moment we concentrate on the 6 basic emotions and don't detect less common expressions like depression with smiling face. This topic is definitely interesting and I'm pretty much sure it's possible to implement given enough training data, but right now we try to concentrate on different things.
Facial recognition is by essence creepy.
I should also state that I think the first use of my data is ultimately unprofitable. Will the extra cents you make by advertising cinnabon to depressed looking people or hairdressers to long haired people really offset the cost of developing such a system? If applied to a broad population any customisation effects will be marginal.
I also believe that the non-anonymous tracking system is much more likely to produce value for companies and it would be very tempting when gathering anonymous data to cross reference with actual individual information. My concern about any tracking system is that by the motivation of profit it could easily shift from an ethical to non ethical space.
For it to not be used without opt-in consent. And to not hold any other benefits/privileges/incentives behind the wall of opting in.
http://www.dinside.no/okonomi/reklameskilt-ser-hvem-du-er/67...
Edit: there is more information in the article. Not going to read it, though.
The screen uses a software called Kairos to analyze faces. It can estimate age, gender, and whether you are "white, black, hispanic, asian, or other".
According to the marketing manager at Peppe's Pizza, he thought there would a label on the screen saying what's going on, but in fact there is just a small sticker on the back of it, which is quite hard to see.
The company making the screen, ProtoTV, says that people should be okay with this because ads on the internet are even more targeted. A government representative says that the system might violate laws about surveillance cameras.
(If the "Am" part of the name seems familiar it's because it's Alan Sugar's son)
They installed one at a local petrol station so they lost my business. Perhaps I should be more vocal about it.
I'm not saying there isn't an absolute right and wrong, but I certainly don't find this as abhorrent as most people here, apparently.
I suppose a banner saying "you are being tracked" on tom of such a billboard could have quite an interesting effect. Come to think of it I've seen "Smile, you're being recorded!" in some shops.
If you're not sharing this position it could be that you are younger or have been subjected to the conditioning of population by industries to make intrusive surveillance technology acceptable to them which has been going on for at least 15+ years afaik.
As an ethical programmer, I'd be sure to incorporate security, anonymization, and be able to draw the line so that I can help businesses make more money (since that's what they pay me for), and advance technology at the same time.
This is only unethical when it's used in a system that infers more information aside from general demographics (which, BTW nearly everywhere collects), and makes them vulnerable to interception outside of the pizza company.
and from the same guy:
"Don’t ask how you’re going to pay your rent working ethically. Ask why you’re open to behaving unethically in the first place." https://deardesignstudent.com/ethics-and-paying-rent-86e972c...
The movie was released in 2002, so fairly prescient.
http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/intelligence/2017/0...
Ethical vs. Unethical, Pro-Privacy vs. Against Privacy are the two common discussion points. I, however, think the bigger problem here is that there's a very non-zero probability that this technology may cause unintended consequences simply by relying on false/inaccurate data.
For one, I work in analytics (loaded catch-all occupation) and I work with people who would marry their "data skills" if they could. In my industry, false positives of 80% is acceptable, and openly admitted errors in "machine-learning" logic (quoted to highlight my company's buzz-word usage, but practically non-existent) are made daily. People create algorithms, and people make errors.
Let's let our imagination run wild here for a second: It's 2030, and this technology becomes ubiquitous to the point where no one objects. Businesses take all the data from sentiments, gender, age...etc. to optimize for their target demographic, and price accordingly. In other words, let's assume this tech is used for perfect price discrimination. Economic theory dictates this is a win-win for everyone since everyone starts paying their willingness to pay. But, let's assume there's a catastrophe and medicine is in dire need. Price discrimination works fine assuming perfect competition, and is a useful framework, but it breaks down empirically where we live in a society that doesn't behave so rationally. Who survives? Those willing to pay the most, and the algorithm worked flawlessly here. But it was not intended to dictate who survives.
What I'm trying to say is that we should be cognizant of the fact that we don't live in a perfect bubble, and technology like this should be scrutinized for it's effects exhaustively- including any unintended consequences. We live in a society (duh), and as a society, it is up to us, with the help of policy makers, to determine the fate of this technology.
However, there is one situation where monopolies achieve market-efficiency: when the monopolist can perfectly price-discriminate. This eliminates the dead-weight loss. But, crucially, this also means that all of the gains from trade accrue entirely to the monopolist, as consumers are all paying their own individual 'indifference' prices.
It's a value judgement, but I don't see this as a socially optimal outcome even if it is the market efficient one.
Furthermore, The scenario you highlight is price discrimination to the first degree, where the monopolist captures all the "surplus." Economists generally claim this outcome to be "unrealistic" but it helps us understand the more traditional outcome: https://courses.byui.edu/econ_150/econ_150_old_site/images/8...
As you can see, there is still consumer surplus from a monopoly price discriminating, but at the cost of a deadweight loss.
But I would love to come back to this post in 2050 and be proven completely wrong!
(see:
http://jesse-pearson.com/interviews/william-gibson/
from: "(..) What’s interesting with regards to the book while thinking of this stuff is that the garment that sort of helps to save the day is a t-shirt. You call it the ugliest t-shirt in the world."
for some expansion on the reference.)
a) You're assuming that the AI is looking to find the first face it sees, rather than all faces in view - both your shirt and your real face will be picked up as two separate individuals. Even if it's "one face at a time", why would you assume the shirt gets picked up instead of your face?
b) It really would not be difficult teach a neural net to detect one real face located above a face on a shirt, and ignore the lower one. The only potential false positives would happen with a taller individual walking with a shorter person in front of them, whereby the shorter person may be filtered out as a shirt.
So no, shirts with faces on them are not a countermeasure. You're adding additional noise, but you're not eliminating your own face from being picked up as well.
Also IR LEDs: http://boingboing.net/2008/02/20/infrared-leds-make-y.html
http://tucson.com/news/arizona-s-monkey-masked-speeder-gets-...
http://hackaday.com/2010/10/15/window-curtain-moves-to-scree...
I don't really think that's the case (here, yet) but I do think it's scary that it's so easy to do that its not just done as a proof of concept but actually used in production in a low tech industry.
Gathering demographic or sentiment without storing, cross referencing (has this person been here before etc) or otherwise using the data for anything such as targeting ads - is kind of acceptable. I mean it wouldn't be hard to do that manually via a camera if you wanted to test the engagement of an ad. I'm sort of hoping this is just some tech project from a university or something, and not an actual product you can buy and hook into some adtech service.
Edit: as someone else pointed out - it's not a proof of concept it's an adtech off the shelf product. Because of course :( http://www.adflownetworks.com/audience-detection/
How to ZAP a Camera: Using Lasers to Temporarily Neutralize Camera Sensors
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/03/21/park-uses-facial...
Google translate is readable, if not super-mega-accurate: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
Five years ago it didn't seem so sinister. A lot has happened since then, I guess.
I think this is what they did, anyway.
It's likely hard to legislate against software that attempts to detect if there is a person, what their expression is, and guesses at their gender.
You could imagine that job being done by a person (just noting how many people stopped at the advertisement, and what their expression was). I don't think there's really a way to make that illegal.
I suppose I think it's something that people should be aware of, though.
If you enter most of our stores with a phone in your pocket, you're being tracked. They track where you went, in front of what shelves you stopped and for how long, if you went to the cashiers of just left...
And if we track people here in the third world, you can be sure you are being much more tracked in first world stores.
https://www.reddit.com/r/norge/comments/67jox4/denne_kr%C3%A...
"...peppes pizza in Oslo S."
Quote from their website: "Audience Measurement included
The information and statistics needed in order to realize audience targeting in DOOH is gathered through livedooh’s integrated anonymous video analysis, which collects information about gender, age and length of view. Audience metrics are used by the ad server’s decision engine to optimize advertisement delivery and increase performance."
The problem is that this is an agency(of the government) owned facility.
http://www.rediff.com/news/column/the-aaadhar-effect-say-bye...
https://thenextweb.com/tech/2017/01/04/anti-facial-recogniti...
Every time I've visited it's been quite accurate on me, my friends, and on the other visitors.
EDIT: here is a pic of what I'm describing: http://fredly.fhs.no/dancemixbloggen/wp-content/uploads/site...
I think they zeroed in on their demographic, good job!
seems like you would either need a collapse of the economy to such a degree that cameras and computers aren't affordable...or some kind of extremely aggressive regulation.
i can't see how the latter would ever come about or be effective.
If it is hidden (no clear warning) and there's no way to opt-out, then yes, it is unethical imho.
Not as advanced as this, obviously, but industry has been thinking about ways to do automated visual analysis like this for a long time.
Ubiquitous surveillance is only going to get more, uh, ubiquitous. It's the end of privacy but also the end of crime...
it would be interesting to see the ad and how / if it changes based on who is watching
Amateurs.
I wouldn't be alarmed by this, they probably don't even now the accuracy of the algorithm they are using or how to interpret the collected data correctly.
What is absurd is there is someone like you in every privacy-related thread claiming that everyone who is outraged is also a Facebook user, or somehow is fine with what Facebook does.
But here's the thing, you can choose to not use facebook or deploy some kind of mitigating strategies for online surveillance[1]. On the other hand ublock origin is useless to protect you from meat space surveillance and tracking.
Understand that surveillance in public space physical world is different from its online counterpart, that it is way harder to detect and counter and as such ought to draw a bigger outrage before it gets generalized.
If this is true, it's all stuff that they're taking by stealth.