Facebook sorry over face tagging launch | Hacker News Reader

Facebook sorry over face tagging launch

bbc.co.uk

18 pointscolinprince27 comments

"Sorry" is pretty fascile when it's clear that their default philosophy is "Ask for forgiveness, not permission".

Of course, the incentives are so high for Facebook that it's hard to imagine this happening any other way. This fully leverages both of their most valuable assets - the most comprehensive social graph and the biggest collection of tagged photographs.

"We're sorry, not in the sense that we're going to undo this feature or make it opt in or actually change our behavior in the future, but in the sense that we aren't entirely pleased that people are whining about us in the media for a news cycle or two again."

"The social network said that it should have done more to notify members about the global launch."

NOOOOO. They just don't get it. It isn't about notification. It's about violating my privacy without asking permission first.

You can roll out any feature you want silently, so long as it is turned off by default!

Of course they get it. They just don't care.

If this was opt-in by default, it wouldn't get nearly the same adoption. Lots of people would click no, then never change the setting.

The general public will eventually get over it, the same way they got over {the news feed, suggest a friend, changing interests to likes, letting people without .edu accounts sign up, ...}. Facebook knows this. PR probably had the apology written before the feature was turned on.

Until Facebook adds the possibility to prevent people from tagging me completely, then I don't believe they are sorry.

However, such an option is not available ... you have to untag yourself after the fact and some people just keep re-adding you ... how do you explain to people to fucking stop tagging you without hurting their feelings and without sounding like a weirdo?

I loved Facebook in the beginning, but their intrusion on my privacy is getting too damn annoying. I wish there was an alternative.

Tagging is a pretty fundamental feature of Facebook, in my opinion. That being said, there actually already is an option in the privacy settings to prevent anyone from seeing the images you're tagged in. That's slightly different from preventing the tagging in the first place, but the effect is the same.

No it's not - I want people to see pictures of myself that I'm tagging myself.

No they're not.

If you're sorry, you don't do it again.

Facebook do this again and again and again and again.

Always better to ask forgiveness than permission, no?

The people who trot this line out too much tend to be assholes in my experience.

Perhaps I shouldn't have omitted the sarcasm tag?

Probably not since I too have encountered people who use this as an excuse for anything.

Why does FB always have to be opt-out.

what I actually feared was being tagged in any photo - even not taken by my friends. Although it would be cool to find photos of myself by other people to try an piece my various evenings out back together ;)

Why opt-out? Because the apathetic 95% of the userbase will never opt-in.

What Facebook should do better is intelligently set defaults. Defaulting On for everyone is stupid. Defaulting On for people who already have privacy settings that indicate they would be ok with it is much better.

I don't mind opt-out, as long as I know it's opt-out.

The way FB rolls features out is they do it silently in the background, which is sort of grating. I wouldn't mind at all if there was a one-time "Hey, we made this cool new thing, I'm going to turn it on now, but I'm giving you a chance of not using it if you want" message on my next login.

I usually hope there were no pictures taken during THOSE evenings

Do you know why FB isn't asking for permission? Because it can get away with this patronizing and self serving behavior.

How would Facebook be able to innovate if everything they released was opt-out? This isn't some privacy-leaking piece of the site, it is a feature that helps one of their core components be better.

If you are that much of a privacy freak, don't make a Facebook account. It's that simple - either you want your data out there to some degree or not (and don't glorify Facebook into something that it is not).

So every Facebook user deserves to have their privacy invaded because they have an account on that site?

Facebook should have been clear about what the feature did, what it didn't do, and how it used their account. They also should have sent emails out warning users of the feature's activation.

Facebook does this all the time, but they'll get off the hook yet again just because they're Facebook. Sigh...

How does this invade somebody's privacy? I don't get it - because it makes detecting a friend's face possible?

Because it shouldn't be enabled by default?

(I think you meant opt-in)

How would Facebook be able to innovate if everything they released was opt-in? This isn't some privacy-leaking piece of the site, it is a feature that helps one of their core components be better.

This is definitely cool technology, and FB does have the right to do whatever they want. Kudos to them for also providing a switch to allow users to turn it off.

However, "How would Facebook be able to innovate..."? Isn't having a FB account opt-in? They're not exactly in a dearth for more users - if they want people to be happy with the feature, then educate and sell the feature to them.

If they're worried that by providing an option, people will ignore it and some developer's pet project is going to remain unused, then you might as well consider this feature mastubatory: FB is having fun doing face detection, and the users are getting nothing out of it.

Am I the only one who doesn't see any big deal over this feature? Normally, I'd be all upset about them forcing an opt-out approach, but I just don't really see this as changing your level of privacy at all.

If it's a friend of yours, and they're uploading a picture of you, well then what do you care if FB removes one step for them? I think most people already tag everything anyway, don't they?

I may be wrong, but the impression I'm getting is that people are offended that facebook have used the photos that have people tagged them in as data for training their facial recognition software without them agreeing to it.

It's the fact that they now have the power to determine whether you're in a photo, any photo, or even any video, anywhere in the world, that has people worried. What might facebook end up doing with that?

Of course there was nothing stopping them doing this without it being obvious to anyone.

Got it. That does make sense; the article and comments just didn't really seem like that was specifically what people were worried about. Given that I see no other reason to care, though, I assume you're correct.

Personally, I'm not so worried about Facebook being able to recognize me. I'd be more concerned about to whom they might give that data. I can definitely see room for a lot of concern there.

As someone who tags a lot of friends on facebook, I love this feature. It was so painful to tag even 5 people over even a 20 photos album. I don't think this is any kind of privacy violation. Moreover, desktop apps like picasa have had brilliant image recognition abilities for a long time. The only thing I want fb to do is to give me an option to stop being tagged by apps without explicit permission.

You ran out of "sorry's" a while back, guys.

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