https://ai.facebook.com/blog/teaching-ai-to-perceive-the-wor...
As VP that doesn't suprise me. The problem is trust, and it is continuously eroding further and further the more we get to know how your company operates.
for example, can FB provide a list of recording locations and times, so I can request my image/audio removed?
How good is facebook's anonymisation system? what % of faces can be removed (on average)
Has every single piece of footage captured with Aria been anonymised?
"Participants will only record in either Facebook offices (once they reopen), wearers’ private homes (with consent from all members of the household), or public spaces, and won’t record in private venues without written consent from such places. Before any information gathered in a public place is made available to our researchers, it will be automatically scrubbed to blur faces and vehicle license plates."
So we anonymize all the content collected in public. I don't have the stats for the face blurring algorithm, and while you can ask for your data to be removed, we don't provide locations/times. These are good suggestions though.
I see some contradiction here.
You don't know "the stats for the face blurring algorithm" but you're saying you "anonymize all the content collected"?
If the stats don't say it's 100% (which is impossible afaik if done by machines) you obviously don't anonymize upfront all the content collected.
1. You don't think upfront about the consequences your products have for people's privacy.
2. You don't care about the consequences your products have for people's privacy, and leave the particular details for the lawyers of how such products could still be distributed legally.
Which of this explanations should we prefer?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28898645
So just to be sure: Is this feature one of the goals of this research, yes or no?
From the same post:
> How would such other people who don't want to be recorded for these purposes opt out?
To make the obvious very explicit: The previous question (which you just praised as a "good question") is about this feature. Wasn't this clear to you until now? I'm wondering. This is a simple conversation thread not hard to follow.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-i...
I think in the coming years FB should invest more in a public conversation on these issues. How can we meet the future in a way that our data is in factuality is our data, even though it’s stored by a third party such as yourself.
Especially in light of in the FB model, where the user seems to be the product, and advertisers the client.
And I agree completely on the public conversation, this is why we released this dataset and why we are doing project Aria.
How do we prevent becoming “walkable surveillance machines”? How can we control the scope and and the issue of consent? These are more rhetorical questions, but hopefully it is part of the dialogue internally at FB.
https://about.facebook.com/realitylabs/responsible-innovatio...
but I don't expect you to take it at face value yet, we have a long way to go.
Nobody should believe Facebook's privacy promises when the largest penalty it has ever received for profiting from user privacy violations over many years equates to one month's revenue. The incentives are simply not strong enough for Facebook to be a good actor in this area.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20692524/facebook-five-bi...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/21/facebook-paid-billi...
> What are you all doing to allow those of us that don’t want to be a part of your utopia to opt out?
Answer from Facebook VP of AI:
> I encourage you to read the details of the news that doesn't actually answer your question but gives you an idea of how we think
I'm glad to see that even on a industry-specific forum like Hacker News, we can't get straight answers from people like this. Giving people "an idea of how we think" seems like a great way to stay vague enough that your thinking can change however it needs to over time to fulfill your business objectives, health or safety of the community be damned. Facebook doesn't need to give us vague "ideas", it needs to provide straightforward answers to straightforward questions.
> AI-powered wearables will have stringent privacy guarantees, both for the wearer and the people around.
Reading a sentence like this from a Facebook exec completely stretches credulity for me. I have zero confidence that your definition of "stringent privacy guarantees" is anything close to something that actually benefits the community as a whole.
pesenti - I have respect that you come forward like this and attempting to push mankind's boundaries. Unfortunately, FB is probably the second worst company ever (first could be Palantir) to take on this. I don't trust them a attometer, and never will. Any attempt to change this attitude always ends badly, see ie Carmack.
Very mixed feelings is probably the best description I can give.
Facebook just released Ray Ban smart glasses that don't look any different from standard Ray Bans and don't provide a solid design affordance to communicate to others when they're active, so I don't really get the feeling that Facebook cares at all about who is being swept up in their systems.
What I can assure you though is that if you are not a user, we are not recognizing you in these pictures and videos. We won’t do that without explicit consent from users.
I do have a follow-up on this if you'll entertain me: why is it that Facebook stores content of people that it doesn't recognize?
Granted, I'm but a lowly web developer, but it seems like creating business logic that automatically removes content with people that aren't Facebook users would be pretty straightforward to implement. You've already solved the hardest part of that problem, the facial recognition, so why not go all the way?
Moving forward, you'd have a really simple approach to privacy that's transparent and people understand without needing to get into the weeds.
Receiving assurance that I'm not being recognized in photos and videos isn't very comforting when I see Facebook releasing products like the "smart" Ray Bans. Recognizing people in images is only one of many types of data that Facebook gleans from that content, and I don't want anything involving me being processed in any way by that company, whatsoever.
Which is a basic right under GDPR.
No private entity is allowed to store or process data about you for their purposes without your consent.
Did FB just said they are doing it though?
Facebook trains its models on your data, in particular your pictures and (in the future) your video - your behavior, voice, face, etc. But feat not, your name will not flow directly in the algorithms (until you sign up an account - and the rest of your data is already there!)
And as presenti openly (and quite arrogantly) stated just one post up: There is no conceivable way for you to ever do anything about it, except if FB stops operations of this kind. Which they can't, of course, because it is the very basis of their business model.
The lack of data-privacy regulations is likely rooted in the fact that the US never had an experience like the EU with the Nazis who literally killed on behalf of data.
Sure, the US famously "kills people based on matadata"¹, but not US people so most US people don't care.
But I've also heard that some people in the US start to recognize the value of data-privacy regulations. That's positive to note.
In several countries of the EU, if not all, you have the right to decide whether anyone takes picture material of you, and how it is used. This, of course, includes video.
As I wrote elsewhere, there is no way for such glasses (that are uploading to facebook) to ever be used legally in these countries. Even if they merely feed an anonymous algorithm, they are still based on illegal actions. And what facebook likes about it, is that it's the people wearing the glasses who break the law. And the small details about uploading and processing the data... well who's gonna sue (successfully)?
So, the replies in this thread indicate that facebook will develop this technology, knowing full well it will profit from people breaking the law with it. They slightly cloud the issue here (open, data, yada yada) in hopes countries do not disallow such tech from the get go ... but only slightly. No, they are cocksure about this scheme working out.
In the US, of course, there's no issue in the first place.
Do you gather data about those "unknown" persons.
Do you try to match information about "unknown" persons form different sources?
This part is easy to answer: if a user uploads a photo of you and there are other people in the photo or a recognizable location, then that's data about you. Even if it's just stored as a photo now, it'll take a neural network a millisecond to turn that into feature vectors that can be used to build a knowledge graph. This goes for Dropbox as well as Facebook.
It's the usual trick to be able to say afterwards: "I didn't say that! You just made up some interpretation. I'm not responsible for your interpretation."
We don't want HN to be a hostile place that tars-and-feathers people who show up to explain another side of a story—especially not on a topic they know about. For most of us, our work is what we know the most about. Therefore, people showing up to discuss something related to their work are among the highest-value contributors HN can have. We don't want to discentivize that, and attacking them for it goes directly against the mandate of the site. You don't have to agree, obviously, but you do have to stick to the site guidelines. (Btw, that also means that you shouldn't be posting generic-indignant rants here.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=disincent%20by:dang&dateRange=...
Edit: I just noticed that you got much nicer later in the thread. That's way better—thanks.
I don't care to hear about the consent you received for this controlled study. I care to hear about how I/we can opt-out from something like this when it is eventually deployed in the wild en masse as part of an actual product. I'm pretty sure that's what OP was also asking about. Can you elaborate on that?
Here are the principles we are using when developing these products:
https://about.facebook.com/realitylabs/responsible-innovatio...
In practice, it will mean that some things you will know about, but don't necessarily give consent (i.e., someone taking a picture or a video of you), while other will likely require consent (i.e., recognizing you in these pictures/videos).
This would be outright illegal in the EU.
Even someone is taking photos / videos of me this person is not allowed to share those with third parties without my consent.
If this content is going straight to FB this wouldn't be legal in the first place.
Of course FB is fine with that as they just shift the responsibility for the illegal actions onto the person who is uploading things without consent. (Same "trick" as with phone contacts upload).
FB is using a legal loophole here. Nobody will sue his / her friends. And even if someone tried, it's after the fact anyway: FB can't be forced to "unlearn" the gathered information.
Is that really true? Does that mean every tourist taking photos with an iCloud connected phone is violating some European law?
This makes me and so many others upset. I hate that people can upload photos of me to social media without my consent. And with the new glasses, it’s disingenuous to even say I’ll even know it’s happening. The little light on it is a bad solution.
Then how about you try again and answer it directly this time?
Wouldn't it be nice if selected external researchers too could collect data on the Facebook platform with the explicit consent of users?
Who knows it with greater accuracy, you, or FB?