Facebook Applied for Patent to Predict Who’s in House Based on Family Photos
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I used to be somewhat naively optimistic about companies like Google and Facebook. I knew so many people who worked at those places, and I had such positive feelings about their ethical core...but, in hindsight, that optimism and that faith was poorly placed. They're companies that make money entirely based on the profitability of violating people's privacy. Of course they're gonna be evil; evil is where the money is in the advertising industry.
Just look at them!
They don't wear suits, they wear t-shirts with corporate logos - completely different. They're relaxed and chill and they take Soylent because they like it not because their corporate non-corporate overlords demand the time something resembling lunch would take.
They celebrate losing money! Who else does that (other than activist investors who will intentionally restructure a company to bankrupt it)?
They're not greedy, they just want to be fairly compensated with life-changing amounts of equity. That's just the value they bring.
They're anti-capitalism man! They just voted in favour of more taxes so that they don't have to see as many homeless while they wait for the company bus to take them from their company-issued container home to the company campus. They don't live to work like those Wall Street drones.
They're not cocaine-infused Wall Street Dude Bros! They're micro-dosing LSD and Adderall because they're performance hacking - can't you see the difference?
It's totally not like Wall Street. Have you not seen the map? It's California man. West coast is the best coast!
1000x yes. This is exactly what happened.
An entire generation of impressionable youngsters, essentially brainwashed into believing to the depths of their soul that Silicon Valley is a utopian meritocracy, composed solely of founders out there saving the world by exploiting zero day vulnerabilities in the individual/social/collective/national psyche.
Like a burning-man-gone wrong style acid trip, where everything starts out peachy and Friendly and then somehow, imperceptibly, so slowly that you never even saw it coming until it was far too late, the place for your friends turns into the circus, like LinkedIn but even more shameless self promotion and rampant fakery, and one day you wake and realize to your horror that real people’s lives are being destroyed due to this tone-deaf technology juggernaut. Shifts in global politics. Bullying. Teen suicides. Cognitive bias amplified by the collective intelligence of some of the greatest and most misguided minds of our generation, all united behind their leader’s vision of a world of programmable social interactions, backed by an absolutely ruthless win at all costs mentality.
The war on reality has begun, people. It’s actually been going on for the last 14 years, but the masses are finally starting to pick up on it.
Facebook employees: it’s time to pick a side and engage in some public collective action like your frenemies at Google. The #techlash is upon us. Ethics is coming back into fashion. Take a stand. Not only will it help save the world, for real this time, it will look good on a resume.
When individuals get into positions of unaccountable power and have access to infinite resources they don't do as great a job as we think they can.
In politics, military...even science, the arts and entertainment again and again we are seeing we overestimate what people at the top of the food chain can do.
With speed and scale technology produces larger and larger interconnected networks that can be exploited.
Our traditional power hierarchies that get propped up to make this exploitation efficient are highly efficient only during the growth phase.
You really hit me right there, I've genuinely considered things like microdosing and nootropics in technology, but derided the old fashioned version of the same thing happening in business spaces as if taking drugs to get more work done is somehow better if the drugs are more trendy.
I need to rethink.
Assembling a set of false dichotomies (capitalism vs taxes), stereotypes, over-generalizations, and outright fabrications (company-issued container homes) into an extended non-sequitir and caricature proves nothing, other than your non-constructive intent.
But this much I'll give you: it's easy to take all your rage and craft it into a diatribe targeted at a scapegoat.
> they don't have to see as many homeless
Would you want to have people suffering through homelessness in the place you live? There are only a few options for dealing with it humanely, and they do involve spending money. Otherwise, you are suggesting leaving the problem as it is, or doing inhumane things to deal with it.
to me, amorality is preferable over warped morality. it is clear what wall street wants: money. it isn’t clear to me what facebook and google actually want. i fear they strive for control.
Google's net positive has almost certainly been search. I believe this has probably had a huge net-productivity improvement across the world. I don't even use their search engine anymore, but they started the modern search engine and made a great deal of information more easy to find. I don't think they've improved communication otherwise. I don't believe Gmail or Hangouts have improved communication. I don't think buying Android and mostly giving the OS away has been a net-positive either.
Facebook is much harder to say. They've definitely connected many, many people via their service, but it has also been shown that the more someone uses Facebook the less happy they are. Now, this could easily be conflating causation with correlation (sad people use Facebook more), but they've also been caught doing bad things.
It's fun to think about, but there are so many what-ifs. How long would it have been before modern search came about without Google? If we had a federation of smaller social networks, would that have limited the damage that a single company could have done?
It all comes back to the leader and culture they set...
I think it comes down to having founders who define changing the world as "better for all" rather than simply "obscene amounts of money for us". Even if they sell up later the hollowing of a formerly ethical brand under a multi-national often means it stops performing.
We seem to be in a gilded age of no consequences currently. Money, and absurd amounts of it, seems to be the be all and end all of everything. There have been times where philanthropic founders and industrialists have thrived. There can easily be another. Hopefully we can get it without need of pitchforks, but that seems like an evens bet right now.
What words or actions could you invoke that would allow it to be distinguished from what some previously friendly sounding companies said or did during their ascent?
1. Provide your service with the option of collecting nearly zero or precisely zero data about customers if they so choose. In order to do this, it may be necessary to provide your services as open source software they can operate themselves on hosts they own or lease.
2. Adopt a comprehensive privacy-respecting mission statement analogous to the portions of the Mozilla manifesto [1] pertaining to privacy.
3. Provide full transparency about when, how, and in what measure data is collected about users who have not opted out via #1 above.
4. Ensure that your revenue streams are firewalled from user data. Never allow user data to be considered a potential source of revenue.
5. To the extent feasible under the law, provide transparency about revenue and finances. Provide evidence that the business is healthy thanks to voluntary exchange of money from principal users for products or services, and not exchanges that are involuntary for users.
Very similar to the game theory experiment of having a piece of cake to cut: one person gets to cut, the other person gets to pick the piece they want. You have to handcuff yourself to doing the right thing. Your decisions about "being evil" then become easy; you simply can't pick those paths knowing you've locked in the consequences.
But, that doesn't account for Amazon who have become (or were always?) evil in their own special ways.
Obviously that's a poor risk assessment: of course it's easy to make the annoying-bug-beneficial choice when it doesn't cost much. The actual test is what happens on a very bad day when you're exhausted and worried about other problems. Most people eventually end up caving and "cheating" on their diet, simply because we're terrible at judging risks and overestimate our ability to resist temptation when it isn't actually being tested.
The solution to this problem is to have the humility to admit our weaknesses in assessing risks and how easy it can be to overestimate our own abilities. From that point of views, prudence suggests a good idea might be using the benefits available on good days to prepare for the bad days and moments of weakness. Don't allow the temptation into the house so succumbing to temptation isn't possible or involves a much higher cost.
Words that promise that you won't fall to temptation are hard to enforce on yourself if the company has as bad quarter/year and finances are tight. Instead of words, the way for as company to distinguish themselves from the mostly-empty promises of the past is to publicly remove your own ability to make the wrong choice. If your hands are tied by a Ulysses Pact[2], it doesn't matter if someone offers to drive a dump truck full of money to your house if you sell out your users[3]: the decision has already been made and you no longer have that power.
[1] https://youtu.be/Yth7O6yeZRE?t=18765 (Doctorow's talk starts at 5:12:45)
Even one bad actor, at the right position and power, can make the ethical values of thousands of developers irrelevant until it's too late.
I often wonder about companies that are filled with ordinary folks, companies that do real nasty stuff. Like say Nestle, or even Enron. How do normal, ethical people get by in these companies. Do big companies and corporate culture destroy the inherent compassion and empathy in people?
For example even if they have no intentions to use it, they know that their competitors might, so they patent it so that their competitors can't, and thus no one can?
Does this happen? I see patents all the time that never made it to market, so I guess it's plausible. But is it even legal to patent something without intent to bring it to market?
This is a very large international corporation deriving additional information about you based on something that you have shared. This is of course a major part of the very modus operandi of FB n Co. We are all dimly aware of things like shadow profiles and the like and that our mobile (cell) contacts are mined routinely and cross referenced. Our browsers spew personally identifiable info. and so do our browsing habits.
This is all very new (15 years or so) and very odd (hasn't happened before). FB, Google and all the other data miners for ads for cash pushers are a new phenomenon. These companies are massive, international and seemingly insensitive to anything that doesn't adversely affect their bottom line. Now we have an example of FB proudly attempting to patent a creepy (my term) process because it is now considered normal.
I'm not sure I like the kind of environment that allows FB to consider that sort of process as being potentially patentable. Actually I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that that sort of process being patentable is normal.
I'm going to tentatively label that sort of environment as toxic.
I do have a FB account (named as per my name here) and don't get me wrong, it is quite handy for keeping in touch and having ads blasted at me in return. OK, I use Privacy Badger, uBlock O and a few other tricks to attempt to tame the tsunami of crap. As you say, it is very much: "mildly cool use of tech." but it is also insidious and corrosive when you look at the effect it has.
I am not advocating throwing out all tech (I'm fitting up Home Assistant at home right now, carefully) but I am pointing out that what is seen as normal today is not what was seen as normal a few years ago.
Same goes for foreign and domestic governments.
For instance, in the US, the only right to privacy we truly have is in our own homes, with the blinds closed. If you are in your home standing in front of a window naked, I can legally take your pic as long as I'm on public property (street/sidewalk) and I'm not trespassing. There are other places where people have a "reasonable expectation of privacy," such as a restroom or changing room, etc.
> Corporations should have my permission in order to store, process and sell information about me.
Are you sure you haven't already given it to them? Most people don't read that fine print of the contracts, or terms of service, or privacy statements that they are signing or otherwise agreeing to, but it's generally in there how they will use your info.
If you use FB, have you read all of this? You agreed to it: [1] https://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation [2] https://www.facebook.com/policies
> If you use FB, have you read all of this? You agreed to it
There's something messed up about the idea that you shouldn't expect privacy unless you wade through the fine print perfectly, every time. The deck is stacked against the privacy-seeking individual, and it's practically impossible to guard one's privacy as an individual.
Businesses have gotten used to getting a free ride when it comes to managing consent for personal data use. Those costs need to be shifted to be more equitably shared between those businesses and individual consumers. We reforms that put GDPR-type requirements around the use of personal data.
All European countries. If you live in Europe you own your data.
>> Are you sure you haven't already given it to them?
"And then you're sitting at home at your desk and have the option to only say yes. This is not what any reasonable person would consider a fair deal." -- from 60 Minutes.
You clearly didn't watch 60 Minutes last Sunday. But you can still read the transcript here, where every point you raise has been addressed: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gdpr-the-law-that-lets-europe-t...
Yes, but it's not exactly that simple if they're inferring details about me based on information that I've given them permission to use.
You gave Facebook your data and agreed with a ToS that states pretty clearly this is what they will do. And then are upset when they do it ?
Could be a hard one. I imagine that the voice recognition is processed in the cloud, where for privacy it should be on the device.
As it is, there's no need for the Government to bend the law to store meta data on citizens; these companies do it all for them.
Steve Kroft: "You signed on. You made the deal."
Max Schrems: The individual doesn't have the power, the time, the legal expertise to understand any of that. And then you're sitting at home at your desk and have the option to only say yes. This is not what any reasonable person would consider a fair deal.
Read more here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gdpr-the-law-that-lets-europe-t...
I empathize with the regular user and lack of time/skill to read complex legal text but you cannot say that the only option is to say yes when anyone can just not use the service.
That's ridiculous. Imagine the outcry if the US government had to pay facebook for that. horror! but thanks to the NSA and coercion, it's all free.
The technology was available for as long as people have had smartphones and social media, smartphones specifically due to their geolocation capabilities. I'm just surprised if they only just now started doing this.
True, though it seems me and a few others in this thread thought they were already doing this. They at least should have a rough idea by what users already tell Facebook, but I guess they want to make it even more aware of people who don't tell Facebook everything about their personal lives. I also found it creepy that Instagram had Bluetooth data enabled, like if it wants to know where I am and compare it with where other people are by keeping track of bluetooth devices around me, of course it could just be some weird Android permissions thing I usually don't give apps permissions and reset them occasionally though.
No doubt the EU governments themselves will not be beholden to such regulations.
(When your cynicism gets so bad that you just support your rage against everything with made-up facts, that effectively removes any incentives for politicians to do good. Why bother, when your actions never even make it to all the red-faced constituents screaming all sorts of invectives at whenever you appear in public?)
Tangent: Now I'm curious if criminals can patent methods for committing crimes. There's a whole science to pick-pocketing, I'd love to read clever pick-pocketing technique patents if they exist!
Don't be part of the problem. Don't justify contributing to mass surveillance just because you can work on cool tech. Don't be evil, goddammit.
Try searching "bikini" if you have any snapshots from your beach vacation uploaded. Even with all location metadata/camera information stripped from the images, Google was able to find 99% of them using keyword searches like that. You can go further and search specific body parts, too. I think that's pretty creepy as well.
The typical HN response is to dismiss arguments like this with, "Well, don't be so careless to upload photos in the first place!" but what happens when laypeople use Google Photos as marketed and as a backup service for their entire lives? I don't think those people would be comfortable knowing that Google can not only accurately identify 1) people and their friends implicitly and 2) identify when those people are scantily clad or nude.
Just imagine a bad actor getting access to your photos via Google and being able to instantly pull up any compromising or sensitive information you may have forgotten about with a simple keyword search because that's something they, for some reason, index.
Someone, sometime, took a party photo with you in background on Android. Google recognized your sorry mug, and stamped it with location, date, time and list of present people. And now it is evidence in court.
(yeah, yeah, I hear ya.)
IP address patterns joined with timestamps, tags, and other social interactions are too easy to link and beneficial for all sorts of targeting.
It's very common for relevant companies e.g. telcos to try and predict the composition of your household so they know what plan you should be on and how much data you are likely to use.
Likewise for energy companies it's useful to optimise their demand curves.
The problematic parts are that 1) Facebook was thinking about using personal photos in way that users don’t expect and don’t intend; 2) the data is photos, meaning it’s possible to ID the subjects with high accuracy; 3) Facebook is not using this to plan their costs, but rather to help advertisers get inside our heads.
How about "Utility Co. shares data with city, predicting when you have an Airbnb guest or take a vacation"?
I'd say a utility using data from its own systems is the definition of what used to be allowable. Sharing that data without consent and using unorthodox sources (detecting objects in the background) is what most people find objectionable.
But in all seriousness, in the coming weeks, when I was able to get the Echo Show to actually work, it was an incredible tool for communicating with my elderly grandparents. The two main problems with it (besides being unable to say "Alexa") were them hardly ever being in view of the fixed camera and the volume buttons not being user-friendly. Ultimately it didn't work out. My grandmother is now between assisted living / rehab / hospitals and I'm seriously considering the Portal.
It's already a ghost town for most part where middle aged people are adding random political articles.
That doesn’t make it better, though.
On first level, such a system (let's call it A) is equivalent to a imaginary loaded die with a control that lets one control what comes out when rolling it. A system (let's call it B) without social media is more like a fair die. On a long run, the net outcome of system A will be heavy with induced biases and that of system B will be fair but could be with slight biases due to natural randomness. If the system A is controlled by private interests rather than societal welfare, it would lead to unhealthy societal setup. Hence, the system A is inherently flawed and is also dangerous to overall well-being. System B doesn't have this flaw inherently.
... PS: purely thoughts and so abstract.
What if FB execs "checkin" every place they are?
Do they want this? No.
What if FB were to scan every single license plate that drove by their HQ campus and reported that to the authorities?
Would people want that?
Where is the line drawn?
Yeah, definitely cool.
Or is this what slack is?
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/06/big-data-whats-even...
Human beings have a right to privacy and right to control who knows their personal information.
If you haven't, then that means that you've ignored an opportunity to discover a different viewpoint. It means that you'd make a unilateral decision without even thinking about the other people it will affect. It means you didn't give them even an opportunity to change your mind or change their living situation beforehand. It means you're marginalizing their opinion or viewpoint and perpetuating the aloneness that people can feel despite living together.
For me, I see that tracking me and putting me in groups gives you power over me. It means that you have the ability to try to influence me without my knowledge (let alone consent). And where there's ability there will be people who will use it. And they will use it for whatever they want. Case in point: "democracy". Until and unless someone can demonstrably prove that tracking me does not provide that ability to literally buy votes, I believe it to be completely unethical to have pervasive tracking.
Further, many business track exactly how I interact with their applications. How that tracking gets used is extremely... opaque. All of the telemetry in the world are worthless compared to simply asking why I did something. Why did I move the window? Why did I click here? Why did I choose to backspace my entire message to my friend?
But all of that telemetry needs to pay for itself. So you get data scientists unethically mining it to figure out what drives me. Often enough they either come up with an incorrect conclusion or else lump me in with outliers and stop caring about me. Or worse.
I didn't ask for free software. It's just extremely popular. Many of the software titles and services that I paid for have subsequently transitioned either to a free model (where my activity is clearly sold to the highest bidder -- or even multiple bidders) or the company is unethically double-dipping by accepting a subscription and still selling that data.
I pay for internet services. What gives companies the right to mine me and my data? I pay for products I purchase. What gives companies the right to monitor me? If you want my information, then pay me for my information. It's obviously valuable.
That's just my opinions. What about my friends?
One friend in particular has been a victim of stalking. They have ex-lovers, ex-friends, ex-family who try very hard to get this friend back into their life, to control what they do and how. There's strong and specific reasons those people were cut out from my friend's life in the first place. If I were to say "fukkit, I don't care if people track me", then I would literally place my friends in danger merely because I meet with them.
Because I meet with them, and because I am a known friend, and because tracking me therefore means tracking my friend too. Suddenly my friend can be found, again, by very nasty people who want to emotionally and physically harm.
That's just one friend's life situation. How about another?
I have another friend. We live in America where mental health is unfortunately swept under the rug and ignored. This friend does not behave well around other people. This friend is very shy and doesn't like to talk a lot or especially about emotions. But they get physically ill when they realize someone they cared about did something which could harm them. Not just harm them physically but, because they're poor, harm them financially, and that's to ignore the emotional pain that comes too.
That's just the viewpoints. That is, that's just the myself and people around me who could be affected by things that are used in tracking. Let me also illuminate some of the things that are often tracked:
My username on here is inetknght. A few searches with some engines and you will find that I'm not superbly careful about my information. You might come to the conclusion that I agree with you: that I, too, choose to offer the information being used to track me. If so, you would be wrong.
Let me point out instead that small pieces of information, when tied together, provide a very grand picture, much like a puzzle. A name here, a location there, some background information somewhere else, a few comments on public forums... eventually you've built an entire profile about me with everything about me.
Sites take advantage of the fact that it is more difficult to create endless streams of pseudonyms than it is to re-use the same one over and over. People aren't very imaginative at the best of times. Could you imagine how obtuse things would be if you had to create a new name for every site you use? Imagine if you use just ten sites. That's quite a lot of information. On the other hand, if you're like me and you use the internet a lot, then there'd be a hell of a lot more permutations to keep track of. So it becomes literally impractical, if not impossible, to prevent the puzzle from being created in a way which can be solved.
Solving the puzzle, though, is very creepy. Most online sites actively remove (kick, ban, etc) people who post such comprehensive "doxxing" information. So, clearly it's unethical at the very minimum. It may also be illegal in some jurisdictions.
Now, imagine doing that in a grand scale. Someone (something, some countries) have written software to do that. Tie everything together.
Can you imagine the power behind it?
Take off your white hat for just a moment. Put on a black hat. Start thinking about all the things you wish you could do if only the law didn't prevent you. And suddenly so much of that becomes possible.
Want to show those compromising pictures of your ex? All you need to know is their phone password, email password, or computer password. 2-factor authentication got you down? Guess what, you can spoof that if it's through SMS. Want to cause a nightmare in credit problems for someone? Easy if you realize how the USPS works. Want to cause problems for a competitor? The avenues are almost limitless when you start to consider blackmail techniques: secret affairs, target family to target your hated person, or, hell, just discover that their shipping department isn't too bright and you can spear phish them and gain access to their network and cause a ruckus.
Not that I'd advocate that. But holy shit would it be easy if you've got the mindset for it. And all you need to enable it? Data. Weaponized data.
The biggest thing that holds back criminals these days is the law and simply not understanding the tech. Unfortunately the latter part is becoming less and less a thing. Just look at rampant-and-growing phone spam^H^H^H^Hfraud. Just look at rampant-and-growing identity-theft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbank fraud. Look at democracies being torn asunder by malicious actors.
I do have issues with companies not paying me for my data. To take information about me and to neither compensate fair value for it nor allow me control in how it is used is an injustice. I understand that you're entitled to an opinion but I certainly hope this will help you to understand some of the reasons why people disagree with you.
1) Are you married?
2) Do you have kids?
3) If you do have kids, are they in K-12 or are they older?
We all have our opinions and biases, but personally I'll be surprised that anyone with a family and younger kids and aware of where this leads would be in favor or even be OK with this.
This is what I want to hear more about. I wasn't asking if my indifference was naive rhetorically - I genuinely want to know where people are thinking this leads and why I should be concerned.
If strangers ask personal details online we think twice or become concerned. If someone then proceeds to ask where are your kids now, it would become creepy as hell.
But if a corporate can do that by looking at photos and possibly sell that data to ad agencies, it is even more scary. The 3rd party can share it with anyone or the data can be hacked. All the corporate would do is update their policy. Maybe much more info is already being collected which has not yet come out and we have no clue. We are just pushing the "how bad can it get" line. Humans have messed up real bad.
I'm sure you will be upvoted, for creativity if nothing else.