Face.com acquired by Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Face.com acquired by Facebook

face.com

184 pointsalexcoomans81 comments

This marks the beginning of a new era of facial recognition in social media, which is essentially a labour saving innovation so that you won't have to spend all that time tagging your facebook photos.

Instead, you'll spend all that time untagging them.

I recently discovered that Facebook had decided to remove my 'must approve when I am tagged' - nothing incriminating, just reminders of their abuse.

I agree with you. But I think the majority of fb users would disagree.

Why do you say that? It seems like a generally unwanted feature. At most I'd think most fb users won't notice or care.

If it's true, a notification would have been nice. Or changing the setting back only for people who haven't specifically looked at and increased their privacy settings in the past

But then they'd be directly acknowledging the abuse, and then you could quickly change it back - however they want pictures to be tagged of you and to become public so they can be shared to everyone who they think will engage / comment on them, etc..

Disagree that they reversed a setting I put in place isn't abuse?

They do this all the time and it's infuriating. I recently noticed that my contact email had been updated to an @facebook.com email address and my normal @gmail.com contact email had been set to hidden.

This is simply incorrect.

Go to privacy settings, timeline and tagging, and change "review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline"

I don't think that is what he is saying. He is saying he did this already and Facebook reverted his selection.

What part is incorrect? The OP claims the setting was set before and now it isn't set anymore. Telling him/her how to put it back doesn't address that....

Watch out, Book.com - you're next.

hah, of course Book.com is owned by B&N. Can't wait for a FaceNook tablet.

Well, FaceBook is trying to develop a FB phone...so the FaceNook isn't as crazy as it may sound.

Pretty sure this is how Skynet got started.

They're also considering acquisitions of f.com, k.com and aceboo.com.

From the title I thought they were just after the domain name! Seems they have picked up some pretty cool face recognising kit.

In a local geeks gathering a few months ago with Yossi Vardi and some Facebook executive[1], Yossi asked the executive "Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Redhat, Motorola, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Philips, [.. more international tech companies ...], which one is the exception?", alluding to all of those companies excluding Facebook having R&D in Israel. As a local, happy to see them joining the list.

[1] Actually David Fischer, son of Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer

Facebook doesn't have R&D anywhere, not even in the US

I suspect Facebook has bigger plans for Face.com's technology than auto-tagging. I bet they integrate facial recognition technology into the Facebook Platform.

Tagging every face... everywhere... and sending that data back to Facebook. That could be monumental.

Monumental or invasive? I personally fear for the latter.

Most likely both.

Given the reactions to Facebook's past privacy debacles I would be surprised if they didn't allow people to opt out.

Curious -- given that you would be recognized in other people's photos, would they have a list of faces which are opted out, once recognized?

For the very purpose of storing your opt-out preference, they would have to keep a record of your facial features, or you would continuously come up again as people tagged you manually.

No, they just have to store the fact that you don't want your account to be tagged in other people's photos. Of course that doesn't stop people from tagging as your name (not linked to your account) or a variation of it, but that's a losing battle.

Actually they already allow you to opt out of the facial recognition feature:

"Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?" ("Friends" or "No one")

You can also set Facebook to require manual review of friends' tags of you. I'm not sure if there's a way to completely opt out of being tagged though.

Even if they don't tag you (as in, it showing up publicly), FB can still store whether or not you're there.

I believe Max Schrems, that young Austrian guy (who asked for the info FB had on him and received over 1,200 pages worth) told the press later about Facebook's 'shadow profiles'.

From an article I found,

* Shadow Profiles: Facebook is collecting data about people without their knowledge, using it to substitute existing profiles and to create profiles of non-users.

The problem is this: What if I don't have an account, but somebody still happens to tag my face with my name, for whatever reason?

I know that this is mostly about facebook users, but seeing how much facebook spam I get trying to incite me to join in, I could totally see them go this route - Encourage people to tag friends who aren't on facebook and thus give those friends no other choice but to claim their identity.

I'm only talking about faces tagged with an actual Facebook account.

It's unlikely they would enable facial recognition for non-Facebook users. How will they know the difference between two different people tagged as "John Doe" if they're not linked to a specific account?

By their faces! Also gender, location, preferences, web pages visited (they still track your browser even if you don't have a profile), and by the networks of people who talk about them.

This already happens. When someone goes to your neighbors and asks around about you, your neighbors probably spill everything they know about you immediately. (If not immediately, a little story about an "ongoing investigation" should push them over the edge.) It's going to work the same way on the Internet. It's a little scary, but I prefer to think about the good applications rather than the bad applications. Having realtime facial recognition at conferences, for example, would make my life a lot easier.

Having realtime facial recognition at conferences, for example, would make my life a lot easier.

This is an advantage? This is what you're willing to give up your privacy for?

Facebook already does facial recognition. It's part of the upload flow for photos.

Facebook kind of already has facial recognition. I've seen it auto tag before. I would doubt this is in an effort to increase their existing capabilities (which seem to be pretty good already) my guess is this is more likely an anti-competitive bid.

facebook's facial recognition was wholly (or at least mostly) powered by face.com already. They're just making sure no one else can threaten that flow.

With what Face.com is capable of, they could even figure out people's emotional profiles... combine that with age estimation and they can see how that profile changes over time. I wonder when Facebook will start offering therapeutic services.

I've been wondering if Facebook will do general object and/or product detection in photos to help them match highly targeted adverts to the content (and location, season, etc.) of a photo.

facebook really seems to be intent on becoming the world's largest photo-sharing site.

the question is: are they planning to transform that from "omg check out these crazy party pics" into "everything is photographed and we've identified everyone involved" variety?

it seems to me that the implications of this line of progress are incomprehensibly far-reaching...

I remember Facebook recently implemented their controversial Face detecting module. Privacy advocates were freaked out because Facebook was trying to automatically tag people in photos simply based on face recognition.

I assume they're going to be moving forward in that regard by acquiring Face.com's tech.

Facebook have been using face.com for face detection and recognition for a while. I guess they were happy enough with the results that they wanted control of the technology (and/or to stop others from using it)

Could it be that the license to process the volume facebook has in mind is near or higher than the price of the company? I don't know the price model for the face API but it's not unreasonable to consider a tipping point.

Probably not. It's so far been a symbiotic relation - face.com needed facebook as much as facebook needed face.com.

Facebook is probably making sure that this symbiotic relation is not going to be threatened by a competitor buying face.com

Shameless plug here: http://search.labs.face.com - a site we developed for face.com lets you scan for faces all your Facebook photos and do some interesting searches on them, like "smiling child, female with glasses" etc.

So I'm guessing the whole face.com acquisition was to increase awareness of context of photos?

yup, this is my guess. it's all about understanding users more deeply. hypertargeted ads. what's in a photo these days? location + time. along with captions and photo titles, FB can infer what you were doing, where you were doing it, and when. but many photos go untagged because it's a pain to tag everyone. face.com solves this problem, connecting a person to all the valuable ad data in each photo.

Facebook already used the Face.com API extensively. Rumors about this circulated here (Israel) this past month. This is great news.

$80-100m is far far too cheap. I think face.com made a poor decision here. Facebook will now be able to develop a system that will be able to recognize faces in any future or past photos (obviously including the 100s of billions they already have) and to link that face to a name and a bunch of demographic data. 3-5 years down the line, this ability will be incredibly powerful (think Minority Report, HUD overlays etc).

This is more vague than "support our service":

> We love you guys, and the plan is to continue to support our developer community. If there are new developments you can expect to hear from us here, on the developer blog, and through our developer newsletter.

I think the vague wording is probably intentional. It doesn't seem like the sort of service that facebook would be into providing directly to developers.

face.com -- all I can think of when I see this is "how much did they pay for that domain name???"

It must have been in the 10's of thousands of dollars. How that can be a good use of startup resources is a complete mystery to me...

facebook still considered a startup?

I meant the company that was bought. "face.com"

I wasn't saying facebook just bought it for the domain name. I was saying face.com, as a startup, at some point bought that the domain name "face.com" despite having little to no revenue.

Let the Facebook acquisition-as-innovation begin!

"Acquivation?"

Innoquisition?

It's a tough combo for sure.

Yet another reason to not use Facebook.

Yeah. Can't wait for my facebook using mates to make my shadow profile more accurate.

This could revolutionize the Facebook signup process. Instead of entering all that pesky personal information, just snap a pic with your webcam. They already know all that info!

You joke, but the early signup process for Google App Engine was just your Gmail password, then they told you if you were accepted into the beta programme or not. They already read all your mail, they know if they wanted you in or not...

wait why?

Perhaps due to the fact that automatic face detection is an invasion of privacy.

The fundamental problem is that a camera is a privacy removing tool. If someone takes your photo, now they are in charge of your privacy.

Right, we are back to the days when taking ones photo was like stealing their life.

Now that you mention that, that's a good reason. Would it be possible for facebook to use this to build a database of photos of people's faces or facial features? I really don't like the sounds of that. I apologize -- I really don't use any social media personally outside twitter on occasion.

How so?

Why is automatic face detection an invasion of privacy? Isn't sharing the picture in the first place the invasion of privacy? Facebook is making it possible, but your friends are the ones doing it.

"Drop the book. Just Face. It's cleaner."

But seriously, facial recognition is a useful feature to save folks time trying to tag people with names in every photo. Also helps with discovering new people you want to meet. And yes of course it could be used for "evil" both by Facebook and the government. But that's true of any other technology, so arguably a wash.

Wow, I assumed that Face.com was a part of Facebook.com...their look and feel seemed like a front-facing spinoff of FB, to get developers more interested in the technology. Their API has been very generous and useful for all sorts of projects, but I'm sure this is going to freak privacy advocates even more...frankly, the connections/derivations FB could make with face recognition will not be any more comprehensive than what they can already do with the interaction data they already have.

Facebook has already been using facial recognition for some time. If anything it will just increase the success rate of their current approach.

An interesting phenomenon may come when unintentional photo bombs identify either celebrities or wanted criminals.

So the next hot facebook app will be a photo tool to make your face unrecognizable by facial recognition software.

"Business owners and investors use systems, rather than their time, to generate income." --Robert Kiyosaki

They'd better need some gTLDs like .face or even .palm (unfortunately .book already has 9 pretenders).

Looks more like Facebook bought the company for the domain name. What's next? book.com?

Interesting. I didn't realize they were based out of Tel Aviv.

Get ready, http://book.com, you're next!

Just waiting for Facebook to announce their purchase of skynet.com now and then Facebook should have the market well and truly cornered.

Probably just for the domain.

This is incorrect. Read the entire post and realize that Facebook has been using Face.com's tech for facial tagging already.

Though honestly, the domain is valuable too. Lots of people probably type in "face" expecting it to autocomplete, and it doesn't always.

Sure, but anyone who does that is already a Facebook user.

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