Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
IIRC, Apple has invested specifically in reducing startup latency for the camera, but I don't know if that applies to apps.
iOS has events for gesture start, in progress, finished and cancelled.
In any case, I do think that providing visual feedback to the user is very important. Like a small picture-in-picture-overlay.
The OS should warn about it.
This is so spot on and pretty much sums up everything that's going on at the moment.
I don't understand why people read yet another story about FB's bad behavior somehow conclude all of big tech are bad guys. Is it really so hard to keep them straight?
For the same reason that people believe all politicians are evil, and the all lawyers kick puppies into a woodchipper for fun.
It's "otherism." Or to put it in gambling terms: Playing the odds.
95% of a given population ruin the reputation of the remaining 5%.
Remember that nowadays people call soundless videos "GIFs", browsers curtail web adresses, and companies report leak passwords as being encrypted when they were actually hashed.
If you are passionate about privacy, I believe one of the best things you could do in practice is is join a big tech co and work on E2E encryption, security, privacy controls, homomorphic encryption, etc. Change is easier from within
Consumers often have the mistaken assumption that they know what a large tech company is basically doing. In reality, there are thousands of projects, most of which you’ll never hear about.
In my experience people are more affected by their manager and working group than the company clashing with their ideals.
If we always say everyone behaves this way we make it acceptable to behave this way.
Look back at everything he revealed
That's LITERALLY conspiracy Theory proven to be conspiracy reality
And that guy, Keith Alexander, is now on the board of Amazon
so giving large tech companies like Google, Amazon, FB the benefit of the doubt is insanity
Here's what Facebook does once you give access to the iOS Photos app. Every time you open the Facebook app, it asks you - "Would you like to post these photos on Facebook?". Basically, they are reading the Photos library repeatedly to scan for recent (or past) photos along with their meta data. It could be just UX optimisation. It could also be UX optimisation for harvesting data.
These bizarre over-the-top conspiracy theories are really starting to get old, it's almost flat earth believers level.
But... that is data harvesting. When you upload photos to Facebook, you are giving them that data. That's not a conspiracy, that's just how Facebook's TOS works. It gets to look at the photos you upload and use that data to help build its internal profile for you.
What's your definition of data harvesting? I would say that getting people to upload useful data to your servers qualifies.
An advertiser is willing to pay tons more to serve an ad to someone who has bought similar products in the past, and is likely to buy their product again, or has recently abandoned a non-empty shopping cart. Or has even just interacted with a previous ad. That is the data that increases ad revenue. Not facial expressions while scrolling or group photos at restaurants.
There may not be obvious one-to-one connections that we would make from the information we see in a photo, but the more data points that can be fed into a model, the more accurate the model becomes.
Photos have quite-accurate GPS and frequently-accurate compass heading. Add face detection and you have location tracking for everyone in frame.
Online tracking is valuable for ad targeting, but physical tracking is as well, especially for brick-and-mortar businesses.
When you have facial recognition software, photos are a contact graph. When they're photos that a user explicitly uploads, they often come with location data. All of that stuff is useful to advertisers.
Facebook can and does target ads based on who you know. If you upload a photo, and the metadata says it was taken today, and it has you location attached to it, and it shows you smiling next to your friend who's recently searched for the new Avengers movie, then yeah, it makes a lot of sense to show you an add for the new Avengers movie, because maybe the two of you will go to it.
It doesn't even need to be that detailed. Just knowing that you're that person's acquaintance means that now Facebook can suggest that person as a friend, it means that Facebook can add that person to its social graph if they're not currently on the service. Just knowing your location means that Facebook can advertise you something from a nearby store.
All of that is stuff that Facebook wants to know, all of that falls pretty squarely in the middle of the category of data harvesting. Not all data harvesting is just to serve ads, some of it is to know how to tailor the service to you to make you more active (so that you look at more ads), or to suggest friends (which increases your investment in the platform), or how to engineer the service in general (so that more people use it and look at ads).
> Not facial expressions while scrolling or group photos at restaurants.
Facebook used to analyze unposted status updates (where you type out the status and then delete it before you press post) so it could figure out why people were getting cold feet before sharing their thoughts[0]. You really, genuinely believe that they're not interested in your facial expressions? You really, genuinely believe that nobody at Facebook is looking into research like identifying branded products inside of user-uploaded photos?
[0]: https://slate.com/technology/2013/12/facebook-self-censorshi...
If that's true, then how come there was a big hoo-ha a few years ago about Facebook putting pictures of people's friends in ads for unrelated companies, as if the friends were endorsing those products?
Sounds like a very useful way to use someone's photos for ads.
Also, with the state of machine learning, it's hard to imagine how image processing wouldn't be useful for advertising.
I can type "cat" into my phone, and its on-device learning shows me all the pictures with cats in them.
Facebook has the technical ability to scan people's pictures and tell all the cat food advertisers, "Here's all the people interested in cats." Or, even more precisely, scan the photos products or logos and tell an advertiser, "Here's all the people who use your competitor's product."
It's not hard to see where this is going, assuming it's not already there.
At Facebook's scale, even tiny, inconsequential data can be useful in aggregate.
They're great for facial recognition, finding out more about relationships that exist in real life, and building sets of training data. Facebook is in all of those markets.
Meanwhile they still gather shadow profiles on the same non-users.
They regularly use dark patterns to trick users into more tracking.
Theses are not conspiracy theories, over the top or otherwise, they’re just things Facebook do because they have no moral boundaries.
I fail to see how that is a conspiracy theory at all, much less one on par with believing the earth is flat.
You're responding to a statement regarding impact with a statement regarding intention. You can both be correct in this situation, and comparing your parent to flat-earthers is completely inappropriate.
At best, facebook is willfully neglectful of the impact of their data harvesting activities.
iOS doesn't really like providing APIs like that.
A developer went to their tech lead and said 'hey we can make the app much better by leaving the camera on all the time saves 200ms on camera startup time'
Tech lead: this is brilliant no potential problems here
Tech lead to management team: got this great new feature, we leave the camera on all the time makes the app 200ms faster.
Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no chance of reputational damage there.
And it's all innocent and noone has any idea why anyone would get the wrong idea?
Tech lead: Can we just leave it on or pre-start it somehow?
Developer: But...
Tech lead: I will think of something.
Tech lead to management: We made camera start 150% faster!
Management: Wow wow wow. It is so great to have such an experienced tech lead we pay so much for.
Tech lead drives into the sunset with his brand new Tesla.
There's no reputational damage because the world is already split between people who think FB is the devil and people who don't care.
I don't believe for one second that FB is going to be purposefully taking 'illegal videos' of people.
Nor do I believe Facebook is even evil. It's just a social network, end of story.
No one at Facebook gets to claim they were just following orders if they have _any_ understanding of the possible consequences of their work.
(If you believe the authors/operators that specifically maximize profits over responsibility are not responsible for their outcomes, you should read back into the posting about PG&E in CA: deliberately ignoring the wear & tear on 100 year old support hooks on high-tension power lines, thus sparking the fire that burned down Paradise, CA.)
Absolutely agree, but it also wouldn't surprise me if they didn't think about it or didn't care.
If 2020 has taught me anything, it's that a surprisingly high number of people / companies / groups managers and/or leaders, do not think about or care about long-term repercussions of the vast majority of their decisions.
2020? I was thinking 1980. To my memory, it seems to have started with the Savings and Loan scandals, and gotten worse.
Companies went from optimizing for 100-year growth to optimizing for the next three months.
business: "Opening the camera seems slow", dev: "it takes 200ms for the system to start it", "Can you make it faster?", "Not really, unless we keep the camera on", "Do that!", "Won't it have privacy issues?", "Don't worry about that".
EDIT: And in the end business is correct, because nobody really cares about this. Every happy instagrammer keeps happily instagramming.
For something that has no real legal ramifications, there’s no way you’re stopping it.
The implicit one we can never admit to is something like: Instagrammer has a different sensitivity for 200ms than the dev and never cared.
Dev has to justify his egregious salary by manufacturing statistics to “experiment with engagement” nevermind the literal reality of having such a gadget is titillating as is, manufacturing belief that specific dev making a camera respond 200ms faster is what really made the app is where that paper is.
If I had to bet my own money on what really happened, I'd guess that it's something along these lines:
DEVELOPER: Camera initialization is adding 200ms to app startup
TECH LEAD: Holy crap! We need total startup to be less than 500ms or users start to think things are slow
DEVELOPER: What if we initialize the camera early?
TECH LEAD: Can you do that without recording? It would be very bad if we were recording things.
DEVELOPER: Yes.
TECH LEAD: Do it.
Conspiracy ensues.
Not sure why someone is assuming Facebook did this for an honest reason when Facebook is the best example of an extremely dishonest large tech company
*
The founder Zucker berg literally wrote - They trust me, the dumb fucks
He wrote this in college
He has shown a pattern of treating his users as 'dumb fucks'
Again and again more and more data comes up that Facebook is a dishonest company. not a 'by mistake' dishonest, but a fundamentally dishonest company
And always White Knights like this guy show up claiming 'it is to optimize loading speed)
*
Now Facebook is finally getting into trouble with even the left, because instead of helping Obama get elected it seems now they are helping Trump get elected
So their own dishonesty is so extreme that they are trying to help both Democrats and Republicans thinking both sides are dumb fucks that will forget what Facebook did to screw them over in past elections
This is about consumer trust.
To the vast majority of consumers, a smartphone is a magic box with a lens and a display. What happens inside - how data is stored and processed, how the OS functions, how apps work,... - has been abstracted away behind those "UX optimized" interfaces you just mentioned.
Consumer don't buy black box devices because they trust the few big companies that manufacture the hardware and software: they buy them because there aren't any alternatives that provide the same level of convenience, and can solidly guarantee a due level of privacy as to what happens behind the screens.
When consumers buy a smartphone or download an app, they have to blindly put their trust in manufacturers acting in good faith. And just that has been damaged by plenty of scandals in the past decade.
So, next time you're in public, try to pay attention to this: how many people have taped off the camera of their devices? And why is this product a thing? [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=webcam+cover
It's because there's a fundamental trust issue. Consumers tape those things on their devices because they don't feel in control of what a device does or doesn't record. Covering the camera is literally the only way they feel they are 100% in control.
So, that should leave you with two questions here. (a) If there's a fundamental trust issue about "magic" technology, do you think people will remotely accept any rationalization about "UX optimization" and "not recording" (e.g. your asking them to trust them on your word)? and (b) If people go so far as to tape off their camera lenses because of a deep trust issue, how much sense does it even make to implement such an UX optimization in the first place? Isn't that a tone deaf act of sorts?
I totally understand why this happens, and I can see the convenience of having a snappy camera. It's just that the technical solution to enable this, flies against what people perceive as acceptable.
I usually do pay attention and so far I have seen one person with a camera taped over. This is just not a thing, no matter how the media wants it to be.
They had the health insurance company's logo on them, so when I saw one on a barista's laptop at the Starbucks down the street, I assume she got it from one of our employees and thought it was a good idea. Maybe people just don't know they're available, or cheap.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10102910644965951&se...
They still consent to it, though. People do perceive it as acceptable, and use it to share their private information. If they don't want to use smartphones, they're free to move to another country.
Pretty sure that now most people will be convinced that Facebook is recording them secretly.
Look at it from a user's perspective:
As a user, I don't know you. I have no reason to believe you. If I see my camera being accessed, I have no way to tell whether the data stream gets processed by the app or sent straight to /dev/null. I'd have to assume the latter on trust. But what reasons to do that does your app give me? The loads of ads assaulting me? Or perhaps the malicious UX dark patterns sprinkled everywhere? The regular media stories about omnipresent surveillance capitalism don't reassure me either.
It may very well be a performance optimization in Instagram, or in many other applications. But users have no way to know it, no way to be sure of it, or (in most cases) no way to even conceive that such optimization is needed. Meanwhile, they have perfectly good reasons to assume nefarious purpose.
That said, I think we're well past the point of no return vis-a-vis giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt on basically anything privacy-related. I don't know anyone who would argue that Facebook wouldn't do this if they thought they could get away with it; the "Facebook is listening to my conversations and showing me ads" conspiracy theory gained so much traction, not because people want to believe in conspiracy theories, but because people have no difficulty imagining that Facebook would do something like that if they could.
Advocating for the Devil generally gets you sent to hell. At this point I don't even really care to hear legitimate technical reasons for this because time and time and time and time again, Facebook continually acts in antisocial ways, and it does so with impunity. I'm so sick of it, and I'm so sick of the apologetics.
Facebook is incentivized to do bad things. Facebook indeed does bad things. Any action they take needs to be examined through that lens. Facebook started out as a social network (well, originally it was a tool to stalk women), and rapidly grew to be a democracy-ending ad machine.
So please don't sit there and make excuses for this company.
Ups sorry, that seems to be a message out of Bizarro world that crossed over.
Also Instagram isn't really essential to communicate and learn about events in the way the main Facebook service is, so stopping to use it is highly feasible.
Any responsible parent would make sure their young children didn't use it.
There is a minority of users who will feel rightfully violated in their privacy
So? Because they're in the minority their voices don't matter?
The worst that will happen is that FB will be sanctioned to pay a laughably low fine.
Sadly, you're spot-on with this one.
Honestly, what other people do with their data/privacy concerns doesn't affect my life. So, if they are cool with that, that's on them.
For me (my family), we are fairly anti-technology at the home. 'Anti' in the respect that we actually enjoy the simple life and retirement for us is on a farm, off the grid. So, this behavior, for me, is the last straw. I will be removing IG within the next 12 months. (I won't get a FB,Whatsapp, etc)
Many of the people who use Instagram are ones who stopped using Facebook due to privacy issues and their grandpa and grandma showing up
They didn't know Facebook owns Instagram
Facebook is stuck in this loop where it has to keep buying competitors because its own users lose faith and leave
If Instagram didn't sell to Facebook, Facebook would be screwed
Currently, FB has Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger
By some special deal with the Government they are trying to nuke TikTok
If that doesn't work they are in trouble
Many of the newer companies that are growing won't sell to FB
(Tik Tok, Snapchat, Telegram, etc)
The truth is though that as in ~100% of such sensationalist headlines there is nothing alarming in what the app is doing, which is why users don't care.
Spying or not, it's completely unacceptable.
Apple has the power to easily mitigate these concerns - yet they do not.
Why?
She is pretty good with tech and understands how computers and phones work, but she just does not want to browse a process list to see which process is using the camera.
It's the same as you have an engine temperature gauge in most cars. I'm not really interested on what's going on inside the engine, I just want to know if the engine overheats so I can check basic things (cooling system leaks, etc) and if I cannot see what's wrong I wait and try to get to the nearest garage or call roadside assistance.
As a power user, I see value in a process list but I see why it does not take priority over other features.
Edit: spelling
So I think it's a valid thing.
Though iOS is getting out of hand with complexity these days.
Sometimes I want a dumb phone.
That's because iPhones were always full-featured general-purpose computers, just severely locked-down and restricted from user control. We are simply seeing the results of that opaqueness.
How do you know until you've tried?
At the risk of provoking a tangential discussion, I don't think keeping users "in the dark" about what's happening is ever a good idea. They don't have to learn if they really don't want to, but deliberate opaqueness is bad --- if anything, it only leads to more learned helplessness and ignorance. Of course, that's probably what companies want in general, since it means they can control users more easily...
Instead we have to explain to people that their photos aren't "in" the photos app and their music isn't "in" iTunes. It's the thing you mentioned: file managers will just confuse people so let's not include one. Easier to have them think of files as "living" in the apps we assign to open them.
Users do understand the concept of apps, obviously. A log of "App X used the camera", "App Y accessed your location" is well within what non-tech-savvy smartphone users can understand.
Apple already has this. Little orange dot indicates audio. There's a blue arrow for location access. I don't know if there's something for video or not.
You can then go into the Settings app and see which apps were using those features.
So that's a step in the right direction.
A facial expression ML model would be trained beforehand so camera data would not have to be collected, but only pushed to users along app updates, and content would be analyzed and encoded at server side to determine what users are to feel, along with hints to aid learning and correlation between different stories, all subconsciously and automatically.
As for what to do with a system like that...I don’t know, make boatloads of cash by forcing in-app purchases? Push your favorite but little known novels and comics? Make group of people I like by my specifications? Promote good posture, regular exercises and force people to look up? I wouldn’t want to use it so specific elected officials pass or resign, or world’s atrocities to become accepted...
Then I got bored. But could it have been something like this?
I remember how I was blown away by this video a few years ago:
The word you are looking for is "sociopath". Oliver Wendell Holmes' "bad man" is an analytical tool, not a recommendation.
There's nothing inherently evil about the mood-detection feature you have described, provided it is deployed with continuing and informed consent from the user.
The feature is already deployed on billboards in public spaces, although this instantiation is evil as "users" are generally unaware of it, have not consented to participation, and cannot opt out.
> sociopath
ok, I mean no harm to humanity, but, um,
I don't think many people actually subscribe to that ideology, but enough do that it's worth challenging whenever it is articulated (as it seems to have been in your comment).
Scandal(s):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23950892
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513471
Though, my favourite (unrelated to the camera "bug" here) is the one Will Strafach uncovered: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1090394419902197761.html
Now I know it takes a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance to work for facebook in this day and age but the main reason this doesn't seem likely to me is that that's way too many people involved in something beyond shady (even for Facebook) for this to not get out. There's even a [formula](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...) to calculate how likely it is for a conspiracy to remain a secret depending on the number of people involved.
The reality is this was probably a marketing initiative - "Can we tell what users are most interested in on the screen" and the answer is yes - on-device eye tracking is very simple to achieve using Apple's vision framework.
There must be a very small mechanical part in my phone's camera (probably the lens when it focuses) that makes a subtle noise when activated. I noticed the noise was present every few minutes when I browsed on Instagram, but only when I forgot to turn off camera permission.
It is creepy, no matter what the reason behind this.
Facebook got caught on this one- but there are probably hundreds of Apple internal APIs that they are using to violate people's privacy.
New iOS 14 feature warns you if someone is spying on you through your iPhone: Look out for the orange dot at the top of your screen
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8744423/iOS-...
Also, strongly reconsider citing tabloids as accurate - reliable news' source, especially when it comes to tech.
Or they'd see whatever the front camera sees at the time, which in my case right now is the back of my phone case or possibly the floor.
I don't see that as valuable data to mine.
Instagram already does all of the above, but so does a lot of digital signage in shopping districts, in addition to tracking your BT HWID, to monitor trends in real time. Then they sell this info to eg- financial companies that operate things like mutual funds.
That's what I was doing with mine in the mid-2000s, anyway.
In general, "you're not being paranoid enough" is a true statement.
do you actually "react" to content? Like chuckle or make any other facial expressions? I just scroll and scroll and scroll with a neutral expression.
Well, how does it know?
A mirth-filled squint of the eyes, dilation of pupils at something unexpected, a tightening of the mouth signalling ennui, the movements that accompany a brief nasal exhalation at something on the nose to your taste in humor... all add to something.
You're not as implacable as you think.
More on topic, I doubt this particular feature is nefarious, but those who would spy often seem to rely on others’ doubt that it is happening.
To make matters worse, they usually tend to re-introduce the "bug" as some kind of feature a few years later, as their way of saying "yes, we really do thing our users are that stupid to not realize what we've done, why do you ask?!"
A part of that, Facebook still is responsible for their actions.