If it still sounds a little creepy to have Facebook looking through all your photos, especially as you take them, you are basically left with two options: You can turn off the send-to-your-friend notifications, and you can turn off Facebook's facial recognition feature.
Or, you know, ditch Facebook, since this is far from the total extent of their creepiness.
It's not really practical to do that. You're basically asking people to give up email or their phone at this point. That's how wired into Facebook most people are.
I normally don't post in the social network threads; but I've seen this argument enough times that I have a bunch of questions I'm legitimately curious about, since I'm clearly not the target audience:
(For context, I tried facebook in college, found myself hating a lot of aspects about it despite heavy use, cut myself off by the end of college and have been "clean" for a good few years now.)
1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them over email/gchat/texting/in person.
2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method? This hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very limited population strata. As a followup, do these people find any difficulties when connecting with non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those?
3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just the accepted dogma at this point. I don't mean to demean the group by suggesting that, I've certainly watched myself do the same in hindsight to other things (video games), but I do wonder if it's at least being considered.
Because Facebook has a searchable, discoverable database of real names. Many people skip or haven't gotten to the "write down each others' contact information" step but still want to talk to each other. Actually there is a deliberate, important progression in a relationship from using Facebook Messenger to exchanging cell phone numbers.
>2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method?
Yes. Some people have international friends or care about proper handling of long messages, delivery confirmation, read receipts, etc. excluding SMS. Some people have friends with Androids, excluding iMessage. Some people have friends with Outlook.com or Yahoo email addresses, which excludes GChat/Hangouts. People are too scattered around Whatsapp/Telegram/WeChat for any of them to be worth anything. Everyone has Facebook. The cognitive overhead of "Which of 8 different services do I use to talk to this particular friend?" is fucking annoying and people avoid it by just using Facebook.
Many people in my (millennial) generation touch their emails as little as possible. Email is for bosses, professors, receipts, and annoying mailing lists. People I know are as likely to write a social email as they are to walk to their local Western Union office and ask to send a telegram.
>3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know?
Yes. Facebook is the only option inclusive of everyone, even those with the cheapest, broken phones that are out of free space.
But .. the argument that this includes everyone is provably wrong. The GP doesn't have FB. I don't. Any social circles including him or me have to live with the fact that yes - you might have to use something different to contact us.
If you have only 1 or 2 of those in your network, isn't the big 'one IM service to rule them all' idea dead? If you already are at a point where it's "FB for most, except for mail/whatever for X", is it a big step to "everyone chooses what to use again"? The overhead is already there, no?
All I can say is: This works fine for me. I have neither FB nor WhatsApp (I stopped using the former a long time ago and never joined the latter). People can reach me just fine and ~probably~ get a faster response from me anyway. I really don't understand this whole concept. "Overhead" to contact someone? Let's be real here: Either you care about contacting someone or you don't. If you don't, then I'd just not name them a 'Friend'. If you do, the mental exercise to open a different app (like - mail) shouldn't even be worth mentioning?
Parent asked whether anyone actually uses Facebook as their sole communication medium. I'm saying yes, because there's little reason to bother with anything else when everyone has Facebook (and can already find each other on it). And for the most part that's true, in my experience. I've met exactly two people who don't have Facebook; neither of them want to be contacted electronically at all. Never met someone in a peer group who wanted to IM but was morally opposed to Facebook in particular.
> Either you care about contacting someone or you don't.
Cuts both ways. If Facebook is someone's primary communication system and you refuse to use it, then you don't particularly care about contacting them either.
>"Overhead" to contact someone?
Most groups of friends I'm aware of have running group chats. In an effort to be inclusive of people with Androids, many switched from iMessage to Facebook. But if you refused to use Facebook and an event was planned that way, yes, someone would have to make the effort to reach out to you individually. Overhead. Even if they really like you despite your self-righteous inconveniencing of everyone else, it's not obvious whose responsibility it should be to bridge between Facebook and your smoke signals, and they're likely to forget sometimes.
Whoa there. I'd say that was both a bit over the top, no?
I'll end my participation in this thread with this: Obviously anyone/everyone can choose to use FB - I never tried to talk a single person out of using it. I consider it utterly useless for me, personally, and am so far unconvinced by any 'you have to use it or miss out' arguments and certainly don't buy the 'you are inconveniencing your peers' line of thought.
I have several friends, including non-tech people, who avoid Facebook. It's become an en vogue thing to ditch Facebook and I've seen more people doing it. I have to remember the preferred communication medium for each individual friend, because I have people that do text/iMessage only, Hangouts only, or Facebook only. I wish there was one non-email fast-chatting way of talking to everyone, like a unifying app for all these services, but that feels a little like this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
In my personal experience, the biggest wedge is in planning events. With the caveat that this probably only applies strongly to people currently in their mid-twenties:
For a lot of social circles, facebook is the only service that almost everyone will regularly check and that lets you coordinate events. My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them, it's because they opted out of the platform.
The other big point of stickiness that I can think of is that facebook is many people's cloud. Years of photos are backed up there and only there. It's unfortunate that they've relinquished control of their files to a closed-platform third party, but that's the way it is.
> My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them...
Clearly it is, unless you make a conscious decision for every gathering to only include people via Facebook. Does no one ever stop and think "Hey, Jake is pretty cool but he doesn't use Facebook. Maybe someone should call him?" I'd guess that no one thinks like this, and that his omission comes from simply not thinking to invite people who aren't on Facebook.
I'd love it if you could explain that I'm wrong and that you are making this conscious decision to exclude them. The justification for this would be even more interesting.
This doesn't happen when you're throwing a get-together of 5-10 close friends.
It's more frequent for me with parties of 100+ invites.
The way I accidentally don't invite people is
1. I setup Facebook event.
2. I scroll through a list of my friends on Facebook.
3. As I scroll through I invite any friends I think would have a good time at the party and are in town.
4. Never realize I didn't to invite Jake.
5. During or day after party I wonder why Jake didn't come. Then remember that he doesn't have Facebook
I don't think most people sit down and try to remember every person they know. Then create a list of people to invite and then use Facebook to invite them. I think they go through Facebook and invite the ones they recognize similar to the way I do it. It's also hard to keep track of who is, and isn't using Facebook at any given time.
I am wildly speculating here but maybe all the friends are in the Facebook. All of them. Now they also know that if they leave FB, they are cut of from information about cool parties, because as it seems, nobody cares about people not in FB. So they are all kind of locked in.
The situation of course is already familiar in the business world and many companies try to mitigate this kind of risks by supporting open source for example, or open standards.
I'm throwing a party on Sunday. I don't throw parties very often. The last time I did was a little over a year ago. I created a Facebook event for parties as I usually do, and about half the people I invited didn't even see the invite (Facebook helpfully tells you who has and hasn't seen such things). So I had to chase down these people through other means (texting, hangouts, and yes, FB messenger). Last year when I did this, pretty much everyone saw the invite.
I'm not sure what changed. Perhaps it's notification fatigue, perhaps some quit or curtailed their use of Facebook. But it kind of sucks from my perspective, as there is no clear better alternative. I do not know the email addresses of all my friends, and people aren't necessarily responsive to email either.
Demographic here is late 20s-late 30s, in the Bay Area.
I'm the wrong person to answer this because I am not a social butterfly (though I'm not antisocial either by any stretch) so being up and up on everything my friends are doing is not important and consequently I only have about 40 friends in total on FB. Half of which, I could probably get rid of right now and not care.
1. People use it for event planning. I don't get texts asking where I am anymore or what i'm doing. Events are organized... Personally, I despise this because I love impromptu meetups, but that's just not how my friends do things anymore it seems.
2. For all non-business communication the answer is yes. Professional contact is still E-mail driven (or Slack/IRC for dev-friends). That said, LinkedIn is starting to pickup some of the professional communication in my circles.
3. I've been okay with the trade-offs, but that decision fits my social profile. I have to make an active effort now to get invited to things though which kind of sucks, but I suppose that's OK too since it allows me to be more selective about what I go to.
1. Messenger was the thing that ultimately locked me in (and most friends I suppose). It's just great software that everyone uses. Sure if I could get everyone to install telegram I totally would. But it's not happening. The way you phrased the question shows your not a big IMer.
2. Messenger + some Snapchat basically. I have only one friend that didn't make the switch to Facebook and keeps on using old IM software that used to be popular. Our friendship (wasn't a huge one) kind of died cause of it.
3. I don't think most people care. It's the way things are. Most also seem to be fairly aware of what's being exposed publicly and curate their behavior accordingly.
I have to note I basically only have friends online. I'm 22, I kind of consider myself an early adopter. Just 4-5 years ago it was pretty weird to most, nowadays its slowly entering the mainstream. Younger people seem especially adept.
My main circle of friends, clustered in our late-40s for the most part, use a variety of different online media. Facebook and email are primary, though I wouldn't say either is ahead of the other at this point. Texting is of course very common. Facebook Messenger has been our primary chat for the last couple years.
We're also on Twitter and Instagram, at least big chunks of us are. One connected subgroup of us with a common interest have been on a private google groups for a long while, and a private yahoo group for years before that. We set up slack for the group this week.
In other words, we're using whatever seems handiest at the moment for whatever it is we're doing. It's not a particularly tech-savvy group of people, though nearly all of my main circle is quite well-educated.
> Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method
Yes. Absolutely. People communicate via Facebook Messenger instead of SMS or the likes of WhatsApp. They organise social events using Facebook. Announce weddings and divorces, births of children, new jobs. Everything via Facebook. You're clearly not a Facebook user (or not a regular user) otherwise you would know the extent to which people are using it.
And most people really don't care about Facebook privacy issues to any significant degree. It's more convenient to use Facebook and have compromised privacy than not to use Facebook for many.
I don't use FB, but it turns out that people can form pretty strong bonds over incidental things. At least those bonds appear to be strong to the people on the outside, and that's all that really matters when you're talking about social stuff.
At this point in my life, the costs are negligible, but ten years ago those same cost would have been closer to 'devestaating'.
>At least those bonds appear to be strong to the people on the outside, and that's all that really matters when you're talking about survellience stuff.
My point is that while I'm perfectly eager to act in a way that affords a delusion that I'm somehow frustrating the surveillance state, the costs are still real and too much for many/most people.
I'm often the person making that argument, so only seems fair I take a crack at this.
> 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the
> point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I
> still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them
> over email/gchat/texting/in person.
There's a few factors, but let's start with "low interaction friendship". When I log in to Facebook, there's a post from a guy who lives in a different country to me, who I met on a bus 8 years ago, posting about his crusade to stop his vet offering homeopathy(!). I see an update once every two or three days from this guy, but we're not really close enough to send each other regular emails or messages. But last time we were in the same city, I sent him a message, and we had dinner, drinks, and went to a show. I listened to his latest album a few years back, and as a result, we had him play at our wedding. I have a lot of low-interaction friends like this, and they enrich my life incredibly. I would not have the mental energy or time to maintain lots of friendships like this by email.
I have a reasonably large extended family. We could start up a mailing list, but we're not all related to the same people. When I see them in person, I have been "keeping in touch" because I've been seeing their family photos, seeing daily updates from them, and interacting with them. Again, I don't have the time or energy to do this actively.
We have a party organized this weekend. There are 40 people on the invite list. A Facebook event has meant that we've invited a whole load of people who we might not have invited to a more intimate event, but also that we got suggestions for a bunch of people to invite - we went through our friends list, and often thought "haven't seen Joe in ages! I'd forgotten he was in town, let's invite him". Facebook has kept track of who's coming for us, and will gently nag our guests to reply either way. We don't have cellphone numbers of email addresses for many of these people.
Conversely, a couple we don't know very well has invited us to an event in a fortnight. We're not that close to them, but we can see on Facebook that a whole bunch of our mutual friends who we do really really like are going. As a result, we'll probably go.
Many of these things are possible without Facebook, they're just much much harder, and we probably wouldn't bother.
> 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively
> to facebook as their sole communication method? This
> hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very
> limited population strata. As a followup, do these
> people find any difficulties when connecting with
> non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those?
Yes. Facebook Messenger is the primary way I communicate socially with people. If I happen to have everyone's cellphone, I'll use WhatsApp, as it has a few more useful features, and not everyone has Messenger installed, but generally FB Messenger is how I communicate with people, as it's a constant, even when they move country, change numbers, change email, whatever. I ran in to some old high school friends at a university alumni event recently, who I hadn't seen in decades. I added one of them on Facebook, and he created a Messenger group with some other people we went to high school with, and we organized lunch. I could have gotten his email, and we could have done it that way, but I don't think he had contact details for some of the other people he invited, other than Facebook.
I have three ex colleagues who I'd love to be more in touch with, who aren't on Facebook. I try and see them when I am in the same city as them, but I often forget they're around, and because I'm not up to date with what's going on in their lives, we often have less to talk about.
> 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people
> you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy
> with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just
> the accepted dogma at this point.
Not as far as I know. People who aren't on Facebook are the big exception, and they tend to be the slightly kookier people.
The trade-offs seem hard to articulate. I don't feel like my social graph is particularly private. There are plenty of things that I do like to keep private, but Facebook knowing who my friends and family are isn't really one of them.
Its very practical to do that. I've been free of it for four years and despite most of my friends and family still being on it its trivial to talk to them when I need and want to. We got along for 200,000 years as a species without it. It's not necessary now.
I've been inching away from facebook for the last year or so. Nobody contacts me via it anymore, I could ditch it today and I wouldn't feel the pain.
Although, I don't know why I would ditch it. At least now I decide what they have in the profile on me. (afaik)
I don't run it on my phone. Only log in when I hear there is an event I need to organise, or a message i need to send to a long lost friend or something of that kind.
It's also really quite simple to live without meat, friends, using a cellphone, a soft mattress and so on. That doesn't mean you're not missing out, though.
I would suggest that speaks more about your social group than anything.
And by which I'm not saying that negatively. You perhaps have a group of friends who are not big social media users or that use Facebook and the like to organise almost every aspect of their social lives.
For me, I would say if I wasn't using Facebook I would be missing out. The biggest thing I would be missing out on would be keeping up to date and in contact with a multitude of friends and family back in the UK where I'm originally from (I live in Australia now).
Sure, there is always email but many friends and family don't use email very much any more and it would be me expecting them to change their habits to suit my preferences.
> I would be missing out on would be keeping up to date..
Know what? May be it does not matter. May be it is a "learned necessity". For example, you don't need to have facebook to keep up to date with all the family members. You just need to call your mom back home and have a chat with her once in a while. Wouldn't you think that would be much healthy way to do this that steals very little of your time and attention?
I hate to say it, but they used the same argument about paper letters. It's all nice and well, but it's not about the need, it's about the can. There simply needs be an ethical alternative, like Wikipedia was the alternative to closed-platform Encarta and co.
The lion's share of my friends, and their friends, and their friends, are not on and posting to Facebook almost at all. For most of them it's just an app to schedule events.
A lot of the now college students a generation younger than me are using it like Twitter if at all -- self-promotion for the ones that are like event promoters or self-styled social movers, and passive consumption of that traffic.
The only reason I'm on it at all is because I moved pretty far away from home, and folks in my parents' generation and/or geography in the last year or two seriously dug into it en masse. So, I post to remind Mom I'm still alive.
Messenger is a thing, WhatsApp and Instagram are things. But the core Facebook is hollowing out with the people I interact with, and they're quite the opposite from Luddites or technophobes.
Success for that company is a assured as their ability to acquire the next big social connection app. When they stop making good bets, we'll see how they're doing I guess.
True but at least in my case I hardly find any engagement. Facebook is more like the 'email-forwards' of the 90's, all I see now-a-days on my timeline are shares of funny videos.
"Yes! My friends' choices are completely my fault!"
To be honest, yes, indeed, when it is in your power to help to not to make the mistakes (or at least try). Say for example you see that your friend is drunk and wants to go driving. You have taken the keys but you still return them and your friend dies. I can say that this was also your fault then.
"I should never have allowed my friends to use their telephone in the way they want!"
I think that one should at least make a honest attempt to explain the situation to your friend. Say your friend has installed a hypothetical (but real and fully functional) "Meet the serial killer" app and is hyper super excited about it. Would you then at least somehow try to say that this is maybe really not a good idea? Or not?
I should in fact terminate my friendships with any hooligans who don't use my preferred choice of social network!"
You mean a Facebook friendship? Or could you maybe explain why you should terminate your friendship with your friend? Sounds silly to me, to be honest.
(To be honest, this sentiment doesn't make much sense to me)
I hate seeing this is a the top comment on every story on Facebook. I don't know about North America but here in India , Facebook is synonymous with the internet and getting rid of it altogether is like cutting yourself off from everyone else.
I have so many friends whom I couldn't reach if it weren't for Facebook. This is why I'm skeptical of people predicting peak Facebook. They've managed to entrench themselves to quite an extent in a way that few companies have done before.
If you can't fathom what "normals" get out of Facebook then you need to get out of your HN/Valley filter bubble.
Speaking from Germany, Facebook is not important in my circle of accquaintaces. On the other hand, a friend currently working in Denmark tells me that Facebook is the de-facto social operating system over there.
So it is not a HN / Valley exclusive thing to be ditching facebook, but there are probably regions/groups where the social cost of leaving is higher than the discussions here suggest.
I use Facebook on my phone by browsing their mobile website. I also use a separate browser (or browser profile) for Facebook both on mobile devices and desktop devices, to remove any linkage between my regular browsing and Facebook activities. Further, I run a connection blocker such as uBlock where applicable, to only allow access to first-party resources and 3rd-party resources only when whitelisted.
Facebook is useful but not on their terms rather than mine.
It is a choice. I choose to turn off facial recognition and continue to use my Facebook account. I find some values in using Facebook, just as I find both open source and closed source each exists with its own value.
> It is a choice. I choose to turn off facial recognition and continue to use my Facebook account
Facebook as a good history of making some "features" opt-out. Tomorrow it could enable "auto-sharing", you wouldn't even notice. So yes it is a choice, until it is not. The only real choice here is to use or not to use facebook.
Its way too much work to keep up with privacy changes, though. Imagine I didn't read HN. Would I actually notice the implications when they rolled the update out to my phone? I'm not sure. That's why I think I'll be uninstalling Facebook.
No I completely agree with you that this is an aggressive move on FB's part. The feature is great as a product idea, but from an actual usability standpoint the implementation is really bad because there are so many photos I don't think my friends would want to see and would probably embarrass them if those photos appear on public timeline. I think the idea was to reduce the chore of asking "hey who has the picture of me from yesterday's trip."
Only thing is, I still find some values of using Facebook, so to suck it up I am submitting myself to the product, and decides to work around.
Engineer on the feature here. This article is incorrect in describing how this feature becomes enabled. It does not turn on if "you've ever sent your friends a photo via Messenger." The feature only turns on if you see the promotion and click "Try It".
Facebook constantly reminds me of Johnny Knoxville on the golf course. [1]
"You said we could come on the golf course, you didn't say anything about air horns, though!"
That is to say, you get permission/consent for one ostensible purpose, and then abuse that consent for something that is technically okay by the letter of the law, but goes way beyond what the user would agree to if they knew why you were asking for permission.
I don't trust that you'll keep this opt-in, as I have no reason to believe it.
Could you please clarify if the face recognition is done on-device or if the photo (or some subset of data) is uploaded to Facebook's servers in order to analyse the photos?
Here's one possible way they could have implemented it:
All the recognition happens on the device. Faces are detected, poses are estimated and frontalized, and features are extracted on the iphone. Then, the feature vector is compared to a small gallery of your friends' features living on the telephone. No upload.
That's what I hope happens.
I don't really see much a problem with the above potential strategy, but then again, I wouldn't want my recognition model living on my friends' phones. (One could imagine an attack that tries to extract the images used to train the recognition model given just the model blob...are there any private images there? sounds like a juicy paper!)
Or maybe the features are extracted but sent to Facebook, which returns a recognition result. I consider this less trustworthy because Facebook would learn the identity of everyone in any picture I take, even if I choose not to send the full picture to facebook.
Or: perhaps faces are detected, but then cropped and the image fragment containing the face is sent to Facebook.
Or more Orweillian still, perhaps the entire image is simply sent to Facebook and the recognition happens there.
(edit: see my reply to your other comment. I think that one's a bit better-structured to address the points you mention)
I don't think it's out of the question. Here are some good reasons why Facebook might want to structure their pipeline like this.
- Cellular Bandwidth is still expensive. They don't want the reputation of raising your data bill by uploading all your photos. Maybe the GPU cycles really are cheaper. After all, Facebook already uses a lot of battery anyway; what does a few million more cycles per image matter?
- Messenger on iOS gets a new release every week. It's not very difficult to make code changes. Not quite as easy as a webapp, but updating recognition models is a pain anyways, so it won't happen too often.
- Uploading photos without the user's consent is going to make Facebook look very bad, especially in certain countries like Germany or other parts of the EU. They already don't have a lot of social "privacy trust capital" as it is; they might not want to waste even more "trust capital" on such a silly application.
Compare this to Apple, for example, who loudly claims that even they can't read your encrypted iMessages. They do this to win privacy karma points. Sure, this claim may not be true, but Facebook can't even consider this kind of marketing if photos are indeed being uploaded. On the other hand, if all the recognition happens on the device, Facebook could win some much-needed privacy karma points back by loudly saying so! Why wouldn't Facebook want to be able to say this? It's within their grasp, too!
I agree; I don't think they're doing this. But my argument is much weaker: I only claim that it's possible, or perhaps even reasonable and desirable, to build their service like this.
Others here have asked whether enabling this feature would mean that non-shared photos are uploaded to Facebook's server, when they haven't been shared and wouldn't otherwise be uploaded. Does it do that?
I have a social question here. I assume that I will not get an answer to this but I think it is still worth asking.
If you were developing this feature, that is in my opinion a very interesting problem from technical point of view, then what were your thoughts about the possible social and moral implications of such feature?
For example, to give you an idea, did you think that this may outrage people? Or they may at least find it intrusive?
If you had any such thoughts, then how did you mitigate them?
Also is there some kind of program in Facebook that addresses these kind of problems?
I could not throw a rock at you. I am just interested about your personal experience.
I interned at Facebook a few years ago, so I'll speculate with an ounce of information.
There's a lot of openness, including around issues like this, at the company. There's weekly all hands meetings, where a developer could directly ask Mark about his opinion on a feature like this. The user experience, including creepiness, was almost certainly discussed. They may have misjudged in this case, but that's fallibility, not because it was ignored.
Thank you for the clarification! There's some really cool tech behind this feature. Though I'm personally worried about the privacy of the implementation, I'm really impressed by the engineering that went into it.
There's nothing wrong with this feature by itself. Nothing! The elephant in the room here is consent. If the app simply popped up a little box on first launch of the new version to the effect of "Would you like to be automatically notified when your new pictures contain your friends?" with a little "About privacy" link at the bottom, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
To get informed consent you would have to communicate that this involves every picture taken being uploaded to Facebook servers (but not posted to your Facebook account) to be scanned for friends. Even that 'uploaded but not posted' distinction would be difficult to convey to a lay person.
I'm not sure hiding that in an "About privacy" section would get a reasonable level of informed consent either, very few would read it.
This is an issue that keeps coming up: useful features involve slurping a lot of personal data in order to do the processing remotely, that distinction is not understood by a large number of the users and explaining it fully is determined to be bad UX ("overly technical explanation") and bad marketing (makes the privacy implications obvious).
There's an interesting class of actions in there, which are fine in principle, but in practice cannot be reasonably expected to be understood, rendering consent impossible.
Are images uploaded to facebook though? Or are the face features extracted on the device? It's one thing to upload every picture in full to FB, but it's another to upload only a feature vector to Facebook.
What if the entire recognition pipeline happened completely on the device without any data being sent to Facebook?
Even if you have 1,000 friends, it might not a huuge deal to download a gallery of 1,000 models to compare to.
Of course, we can't be sure how this system works without the source.
Like you've ever met a developer who would risk the extreme likelihood of platform incompatibilities across a disparate menagerie of hardware platforms and mobile devices, instead of simply base64ing some images and JSONing them into a restful webservice, where they gain explicit control of the computation environment, and get to conveniently crawl the entire dataset in a high availabilty data center.
As if you've ever met anyone who would trade that, in favor of re-developing the same features 20 times for 20 different compiles, and risk the inability to deploy those builds to unreliable nodes, across throttled mobile contract pay-as-you-go bandwidth, to achieve a goal that doesn't align with the company's bottom line. As if you've ever seen any company anywhere do that... for privacy.
Most large app developers share common source code for all of their platforms, so I don't buy your argument about platform compatability. It's the same reason why the Facebook native app and Messenger are native apps rather than a simple UIWebView.
I also think that uploading tons of photos is going to be very hard on the "throttled pay-as-you-go bandwidth contracts" that you mention. It certainly sounds much more expensive than shipping a binary patch once in a while.
You bring up privacy, so let's explore this topic a little. I disagree that privacy inherently conflicts with a company's bottom line. Some Fortune-500 companies treat privacy as a desirable goal because it increases the perceived value of their business.
As one example, let's compare to Apple's public privacy statement[1]:
> We also refuse to add a "backdoor"
> into any of our products because
> that undermines the protections
> we’ve built in. And we can’t unlock
> your device for anyone because you
> hold the key — your unique password.
See also Tim Cook's statement[2]:
> Finally, I want to be absolutely
> clear that we have never worked
> with any government agency from
> any country to create a backdoor
> in any of our products or services.
> We have also never allowed access
> to our servers. And we never will.
Elsewhere:
> Apple has no way to decrypt iMessage
> and FaceTime data when it’s in transit
> between devices. So unlike other companies’
> messaging services, Apple doesn’t
> scan your communications, and we
> wouldn’t be able to comply with
> a wiretap order even if we wanted to.
This is what Apple wants you to believe: that they take privacy seriously enough to go out of their way to implement it. Facebook has never, ever tried to strike that chord. With their reputation, Facebook knows the public would never buy it.
The comparison isn't very far-fetched. Like Facebook, Apple also deals with biometrics. Rather than face recognition, they use fingerprint recognition. Do they upload fingerprints to Apple's servers? Or, despite your claims of impacting the bottom line, do they do the recognition on the device? Here's their official statement[3]:
> This [fingerprint representation]
> is stored in a Secure Enclave within
> your phone’s chip, and is never
> accessed by iOS or other apps,
> never stored on Apple servers,
> and never backed up to iCloud
> or anywhere else.
Maybe these claims are true. Maybe they aren't. However, you must admit that it makes good business sense for Apple to make these (strong) privacy claims. They're setting a very good precedent here -- one that I sincerely hope Facebook chooses to follow.
If Facebook wants to win these kinds of brownie points with their customers, maybe they could write a statement like this:
> Facebook knows that the photos you choose not
> to share are deeply personal to you. That's
> why we take special steps to keep them that
> way. If you choose not to share a photo in
> your camera roll, it will never be sent to
> Facebook.
But they can't even try to pull this off if people see encrypted blobs flying across the wire every time they click the shutter button.
So. From a privacy perspective, it makes good business sense to implement the recognition pipeline on the device. And Facebook knows they could win back some public trust by doing that. The delicious question is: Is the trade-off worth it? Do the costs you mention outweigh the perceived benefits I mention? I think there were certainly developers on the Photo Magic team who wished it could be this way. It might have even been a close decision. But we can only find out for sure once Photo Magic rolls out to everyone.
Fair enough, maybe the development team for this particular component is much larger than I'm imagining. Maybe I'm being naive about the head count at work behind the scenes on a project like this.
It's not really good news either way though. In my mind this would have been a smaller team, tasked with pulling the data over and then working on it to construct recognition scores, and passing a message back to prompt the user. This would have been a smallish team of 20 or 30, to do it quick and dirty.
For on-device processing, the project grows much more complicated, not just to develop, but also to test and prove end-to-end. So time and human resources are both more costly. And so too, come trade-offs. Network bandwidth, versus device battery/procesor/memory resources.
But all of this to push the envelope and solicit the user to expose more data to a for-profit service. Is it really something more convenient? Another nagging reminder, to do something the user doesn't need much prompting for?
The more weight thrown behind these sorts of projects the more curious the motives become.
Good point, I'm assuming things here and should have made that explicit.
It's pretty rare to have this kind of thing done on the device these days, but this example has a trade-off between the app using a lot of battery and using a lot of bandwidth so it's possible something else is going on.
You could probably get a good idea just by monitoring bandwidth usage while this feature is processing a new picture.
Perhaps I'm too used to the standard approach of "slurp everything because the users won't know or care and we can use that personal data to train models/sell/etc." and very biased against Facebook when it comes to privacy issues.
Is the face recognition done on the device, or on Facebook's servers? It's one thing to give the app permission to access your photos, it's another entirely to have it upload every single photo you take to Facebook's servers.
I don't work for Facebook or anything, but based on my own judgement I believe they upload the pictures on to their servers to then analyze with their super computing power, which our phones are not capable of yet, without of course analyzing all their existing data within our phones, which I doubt they would give an end user (probably too large of a data set). I've uninstalled the Facebook Apps since a while back, they request for permission to do really strange and intrusive things such as reading all of my SMS text messages, no thanks.
In the verification setting, here's how recognition (could perhaps!) work:
- Find the face in the image. This can easily run on a telephone no sweat. Viola and Jones practically solved this problem in 2001.
- Find the parts of the face (eyes, nose, mouth), and then warp the face so it looks like it's facing right at the camera. A recent paper at CVPR last year was called "Face alignment at 3000 FPS," so this is also no sweat at all anymore.
- Extract the face's features. This turns the pixels into a smaller vector representation (maybe a list of 1024 numbers perhaps). This is a bit tricky --- many current systems use convolutional neural networks to do this step, which typically take a lot of compute time. Maybe Facebook could shrink them down to a telephone.
- Compare that feature vector to your friends' vectors. In the verification setting, you know the "feature vectors" of your 500 friends, so you find the Euclidean distance between the image's vector and the 500 others. No sweat.
- To get a recognition result, just pick the closest vector. Or, if the closest friend is too far away, return "No Match".
There are many ways to build a good face recognizer. This is one of them.
This might or might not be what Facebook's doing. Last year, they published a paper called "DeepFace" which works essentially this way but with some extra tricks. (The paper is here, but the focus was on comparing to academic state-of-the-art on a strictly academic dataset. It's totally marketing / PhD recruiting bait. :P I'm sure their internal system they have now must be far better. https://research.facebook.com/publications/480567225376225/d... )
The AI and ML people at Facebook are darn smart. I would be impressed (but probably not surprised) if the wizards found some clever way to shrink the pipeline to fit on a phone without too much accuracy loss. So it's possible. I have no clue though.
Many Facebook users are in the third world / financial situations where data is very expensive and presumably engineers are designing for this. I cannot imagine they're stupid enough to run up these people's bandwidth bills with every single photo they take. Privacy concerns may be ignored, but "the latest Facebook update cost me $500 in data and I make $400/year" will not.
Am I the only one who is concerned that Facebook is going to eventually turn into a passive surveillance system for the government? I don't think it would be too difficult for Facebook to silently alert authorities when particular matches occur.
I don't agree that "microsoft already does this" - so don't take what I'm about to say to mean that. I mean only to show a piece of technology that more directly relates to the comments others have made.
That being said, Microsoft has developed a piece of technology called PhotoDNA[0], which is designed with the specific purpose of identifying child pornography. This is actively used on OneDrive and Bing, among other services - including Facebook. It's safe to say that OneDrive does not just delete the content if child pornography is detected - it reports to the authorities. Now, it's hard to argue that they don't have a right to do that, as long as the person is voluntarily using their services. That's where I draw a distinction here: Facebook could elect to turn on PhotoDNA on photos uploaded to their new service, and not properly educate their customers that stuff is being uploaded automatically. This does, essentially, constitute a passive surveillance system. Mind you, if it is used to establish that child pornography is found, you will have a hard time convincing most people that it is overstepping what Facebook should do. That's my concern - that this will be pushed as a "for the children" thing, and then extended to "to cut down on crime" later, once everyone stops caring about its existence.
That said, that's my concern. It's not necessarily what I think will happen. I have no reason as of yet to believe that it's the next step. I do not, however, want Facebook automatically uploading (or even scanning) my photos.
That article mentions both Microsoft and Google, and closes with "In addition, the software is used by Facebook and Twitter, among others." (referring to PhotoDNA to scan all your pictures in all your mails - only Google's and Microsoft's reaction to matches is described in the article though, I guess we can infer that Twitter and Facebook would do the same).
I fucking hate this company, but I'm drawn into it's gravitational pull like so many of us wanting to connect with long-distance family. There has to be technological way to stop these sons of bitches. What is it?
Yeah, all this, "I need Facebook" stuff feels foreign to me. Maybe I'm just a sociopath who doesn't care about his extended network, but I haven't used Facebook in years and I haven't missed it for one second of that time.
Ditto. I never installed the messenger app. I would use the facebook app for browsing, and logged into the web app for messages. But then I realized I can do all the stuff in one place, the web app. So I uninstalled the main app as well.
How does this work? If they aren't uploading the picture how are they doing facial recognition? Surely they aren't running their highly proprietary recognition software on users' phones. Maybe they're doing preliminary zealous face-finding and uploading those potential matches for further processing? If so that means that no photo you ever take on your device is private.
I meant least-privileges in a general sense. Disallow tagging of you without approval, upload as little as you like, show as few details as you like, and for the app, deny any permissions you're not interested in giving up the keys to the castle for.
And this is why "Photos" joined all the other permissions in off-land for the Facebook app. If the mobile web version wasn't horribly janky, I'd delete the app entirely.
Never tried the app, but I haven't noticed anything janky about http://m.facebook.com on my android phone. Perhaps they fixed it since you last looked?
It's what I use about half the time - the app doesn't have access to cellular data (because they seem to be playing silly buggers with pretending to be a music player / vpn / something) which means I use the mobile web version (on Mobile Safari) any time I'm not in the office / at home / in Starbucks.
So, let's assume that processing your photos on the device is far too processor extensive. That means that Facebook uploads every single photo you take to Facebook's servers.
That means that every single dick photo, or vagina/boobs photo that you have ever taken, is now with Facebook and readily available to the NSA under the FISA or Prism programs.
Basically the NSA has the biggest amateur porn collection in the world.
Creepy. I'm glad I've removed the facebook app everywhere I've had it installed, in favor of using the mobile site under safari. The mobile site can chat too, so that limitation is also gone.
Or, you know, ditch Facebook, since this is far from the total extent of their creepiness.