Facebook turned on face recognition silently (opens in new tab)

> After the faces are located, they’re matched against a set of candidates (which I would guess is an enumeration if all your Nth order friends [who don’t opt out of this], to reduce computational complexity.

Face recognition is usually done by first transforming the face into vector space and than looking for the closest vector from known, e.g. openface[1] (which is based on google 2015 paper "FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering"). Facebook itself opensourced[2] a library for efficient search of nearest neighbors in such spaces.

It doesn't seem likely that generating set of Nth order friends (which grow very quickly with N) would be better than just having a global set or a split of global set by some characteristics (e.g. gender, race).

[1] https://cmusatyalab.github.io/openface/ [2] https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss

Anecdotal, but years ago I uploaded a picture of a friend. He's a bit of a hermit, and doesn't have social media accounts. The picture scrolled by several times that week, and Facebook asked me to tag who this was. (This was perhaps... 2010?) I uploaded perhaps twenty or so photos, but that was the only one they asked about.

I haven't seen this for a while, but I used to get my friends pictures scrolling by. (Not even my own!) "Tag Becky in this photo? Yes/No". Clicking yes confirms what Facebook already knows. Clicking No tells them... what? That they were right, and it is Becky, but I don't want to tag her? What does not responding to the prompt mean?

If you have a book you certainly own all the information in it, but if you are never allowed to open the book and read its content (your brother wrote it but was then terribly embarrased about it and made you swear nobody would be allowed to read it) then how can you put the information to use?

We've been uploading photos with location data for years.

Any social site knows your whereabouts. Seriously, they even tag you without asking :)

Good point, but the setting might change how that information is used, by Facebook or its users or advertisers (or subpoenas, etc).

I find that a little bit sad. Both of my parents have passed away (fairly young), and they were somewhat camera-shy when they were alive (not for the same reasons you are, but the result is the same). I have barely a handful of photos of them, and that's often a source of disappointment and sadness for me.

I get that rampant data collection is unacceptable, and companies are terribly poor stewards of our personal data, but at the end of the day I have precious little in a visual sense with which to remember my parents.

I think it's entirely reasonable to request that your friends not post pictures of you on social media, though, and get pissed at them when they ignore your wishes.

I'm getting severe anxiety from having a camera pointed at me since this all Facebook stuff started and people posted pictures online. Needless to say, I don't have an account there.

I also take off the moment I see a camera unless the shooter in advance ask me if it's ok and they agree to not put it online. Unfortunately I can't do anything about CCTV but that's not posted online at least.

It's to the point where I avoid social settings with a lot of unknown people and generally stay with my wife and kids. Not that that is a bad think, I'm quite happy to be with them :)

Out of curiosity, aside from emotional distress, what harm are you afraid of?

Same here. For a while when going out with friends and someone wanted to take a group photo I asked if it was being uploaded to Facebook, and in that case I would get out of the camera sight, but then I realized any photo will end up on FB anyway because most people don't give a damn about their and others privacy, so today I don't allow anyone to take photos of myself in any situation, and ask them not to tag me at any cost should I appear in any photo by mistake. That way I'll probably just delay a bit the day my photo will appear with full name and personal details: I can't smash all phones of the people taking selfies in a pub or on the beach with no consideration for whoever is sitting/walking/bathing 5 meters from them. Yes, that is extreme, just as FB complete lack of respect for privacy.

If I had the right connections I'd push for some countermeasures to be added to the phone OSes, such as for example a barcode that disables the camera or covers the wearer's face through image recognition if taken from a short distance: just wear a shirt/badge with that barcode and your privacy is guaranteed: either they move away or point the camera elsewhere.

I have the same reaction/aversion to having my photo taken, for the same reason, but I’ve largely thrown in the towel on this one. The sheer number of cameras out there I have no control of or even knowledge of, plus the constant struggle of having to explain to everyone with a camera phone why I don’t want them to post my picture, plus the growing number of services that upload to the cloud by default... this is an unwinnable battle.

I’ve decided I don’t care if Facebook has my picture. It’s not like they can do anything to me. I don’t use their service, and nothing that goes on on Facebook affects my life.

I'm with you. But I'd also be worried about coming off as the angriest (or most paranoid) guy on earth. I probably already hold the title in my family.

What would be neat is a polite discreet social signal that politely discreetly signaled this to people with a camera. If you did it right, you might also get rich in a Pet Rock sort of way.

If you've traveled through any US airport in the last 5 years, you're in the FAA traveler's FR database.

This is a good approach. However this way some positions of power will be left forever locked to you as popularity moves the world (but that exclusion might be a good thing as well if you want to keep sanity/illusion of privacy). Just there are trade-offs.

Everyone living in a city is in thousands of other people's photos

That’s an interesting point. Not on Facebook but they know who I am and who I know already (they sent me an invite to join years ago with a list of about 10 people I might know. I knew 9 of them...

How do they discern the difference between someone without an account (ie: a new face), a poor result from the network, and someone who's opted out? Unless the default for everyone is "opt-out", which I highly doubt.

That was meant to be a rhetorical question. ;) But I'm glad you see this too!

Can't find it in my Facebook settings - can you give us a pointer where to find these settings in Facebooks cesspool of anti-patterns they like to promote as the "settings" page...

Facebook is notorious for doing A/B testing and feature flipping. It's very possible they are testing defaulting to on vs defaulting to off and measuring how many people turn it off and how many turn it on after the notification.

Mine was off by default, and I'm in the US. I think it was based on the older face recognition setting which I disabled when it first came out.

Mine was off in the US

I saw it in the app. So this is not accurate.

I got it from mbasic.facebook.com

I can click the little arrow, go to settings, and there's a "Face Recognition" entry in the sidebar, between "Language" and "Notifications".

This is on the desktop website. Sounds like it's hidden deeper if you visit from a phone?

I got this notification in my news feed last night and now I can't find the option to shut it off on desktop or mobile. No idea what is going on.

Can you post the URL to it?

can't find it on desktop

Yeah, if you think Facebook would EVER honour a system like that then I have many, many bridges in stock for you :)

To most people, flicking a bit from 0 to 1 is enough to convince them your data is "deleted", however, in the database, what people never see, is that it the column name is actually "hidden".

:)

It's not just creepy data gathering. It's specific, targeted emotional manipulation. Facebook runs "experiments" on its users to intentionally make them feel sad or depressed. They publish these works, proud of their accomplishments, and tell us that we agreed to be emotionally manipulated into a dark depression because we agreed to the Terms of Service when we signed up. Facebook believes you gave them your informed consent to fuck with your emotions because they believe you read their TOS and they believe it is morally okay to do stuff like this.

No, it's not worth those warm fuzzy feelings you get, because half the time it won't be warm and fuzzy but actually, it will be a depression that Facebook intentionally put you into, just to see if it could.

Facebook is not worth it. Email lets you stay in touch just fine.

Plus if you opt out you're only opting out of the social aspects of this recognition, not the revenue models behind it.

And people will have the FBI going through their mail because an algorithm written by someone who lived by "move fast and break things" flagged them as a commie (or whatever the equivalent is 30yr from now) over some combination of things they posted in high school.

If you spread incompetence around just right the end result is approximately the same as malice.

Well, either Facebook doesn't have training data for the opt-out users, or they do, and they use it to ensure that those users aren't publicly tagged (my paranoia says that they're still tagged internally, regardless of the option that's selected).

Either way, it would only need to identify those users who have actually opted in.

The feature is "opt-out" in the sense that they based the default on some other privacy setting. It was disabled by default, for me. But I've been fairly diligent over the years, going through and disabling the things that I didn't want.

I'd forgotten that one. Thank you.