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Please don't attack people like this when they post to HN, regardless of how you feel about their employer. You may not owe $BigCo better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. When something remains unanswered, it's enough to ask substantive questions respectfully.

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.

The question was about opting out of our "utopia", I wouldn't call that a "straightforward question". If you do have a straightforward question, especially about this or another specific project, I can try to provide a straightforward answer.

Great! How do I make sure that nothing about me ever passes through a Facebook server/ETL job/datalake/neural net/whatever? Can that even be guaranteed? Is Facebook generating a shadow profile on me or using data I've generated either myself or through friends that have taken pictures/videos/etc of me, and if maybe, how do I opt out?

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.

No, that’s not a reasonable assumption. Photos or videos of you are likely on Facebook’s servers, uploaded by friends or others when you are in public.

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.

Thanks Jerome, I really do appreciate your answer and I know I'm probably not the most fun person to talk to.

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.

> 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?

Of course. FB openly ignores the GDPR and will be happy to pay a fine if the EU manages to ever show enough courage to levy one of significance.

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.

I'm not a lawyer but my understanding in the United States is that a person in a public place has no legal expectation of privacy. If you are in public and someone takes a picture in which your face is visible and then upload that to Facebook, I wouldn't expect that to be a violation of my privacy nor would I expect Facebook to allow an unknown person to request the picture's removal.

Like I said, this is a point where the EU and the United States differ.

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.

I'm not form the US and also not a lawyer but I've heard that this goes even to the point that someone using a public communications network has no legal expectation of privacy in the US.

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.

¹ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Hayden_(general)

What does "we are not recognizing you" mean? Of course you can't "recognize" someone you don't know, so what do you try to say here?

Do you gather data about those "unknown" persons.

Do you try to match information about "unknown" persons form different sources?

> Do you gather data about those "unknown" persons

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.

Thanks for answering questions. In regards to this. If I have a Facebook account, and then close it, is my existing data in Facebook's systems erased including image recognition / tracking based preferences, etc?

> "gives you an idea of how we think"

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."

This reminds me of the squid game when they say “You signed a disclaimer of physical rights today, didn’t you?”

I mean, what do you expect. This is public forum, he comes honestly unanonymously in front of huge crowd already in very negative mood towards this. You can't be a VP of such a thing in one of the richest companies globally ever, and not know how to play politics and lawyering safely.

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.

I expect that those who have power should bear the responsibility of being asked hard questions and answering them honestly, because a society which discourages us from asking difficult questions of those in power is doomed to fail.