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Comment by nmltprand | Hacker News Reader

They want your selfies for facial recognition in order to track you better across the web and possibly resell that information to third parties.

Also a great dataset for "AI" training, so your face can appear in modified form in laundered pictures.

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> They want your selfies for facial recognition in order to track you better across the web

How on earth does facial recognition help with tracking someone across the web?

If they get a match with a high school picture for "John Smith" from a school in an affluent area, they can adjust advertisements.

If your face appears in a riot, they can resell the information to the government.

> If they get a match with a high school picture for "John Smith" from a school in an affluent area, they can adjust advertisements.

Right, it's not like they gather location data and insist on real world names or buy data from brokers or use cookies. Facial recognition is the missing piece of in the puzzle!

> If your face appears in a riot, they can resell the information to the government.

It's not like governments have databases with photo identification.

Being able to do it before has never stopped meta or google from wanting to do it harder and more effectively.

Retail store outlet surveillance video used to advertise to past store visitors

Similar to beacon advertising but instead of bluetooth it'll use your face.

"Welcome back Jim!"

If you've uploaded photos of yourself on other services and those services have agreements among themselves to share each others' (anonymized?) data, then you can be tracked across services through, among other things, your photos.

Nice theory. But quite different from what the OP claimed.

I think they want selfies to enforce a one-account-per-person policy, to limit scraping. They already enforce phone verification, but there's plenty of ways around that (e.g. services that redirect verification SMS from hacked phones, or just buy phone-verified accounts from someone else). Facial recognition raises the bar and gives them extra confidence that two accounts are unrelated even if they have similar IPs/access patterns/whatever

Guessing that'd really suck for anyone who seems to be a lookalike for someone else. :/

Twins are against the meta EULA

For this reason I decided to give up Instagram completely -- my account was flagged for whatever reason that I cannot possibly understand, and I would rather not use the service than give them my selfie

god save GDPR!

> god save GDPR!

When it will be enforced ...

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