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Comment by unmole | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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