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Facebook Apologizes For 'Year In Review' Photos
Facebook this year showed users a compilation of photos drawn from their own gallery of uploaded images, but the automatic nature of the collation and display of those photos inspired the need for an apology on Facebook's part to at least one reader who was upset by the compiled pictures. That may sound silly, but even innocent data-mashing can touch real nerves.
"Eric Meyer, a web design consultant and writer, is one of those people. Earlier this year, he lost his daughter to brain cancer on her sixth birthday. For that reason, Meyer wrote in a blog post, he had actively avoided looking at previews of his own automatically generated summary post.
But Facebook put a personalized prompt advertising the feature in his newsfeed, he wrote, prominently featuring the face of his dead daughter -- surrounded by what appears to be clip art figures having a party."
Is this seriously how we want our lives run?
Or do we want Facebook even deeper into our personal tish so their algorithm can "get it right" next time?
Mine showed a photo that someone (or maybe even Facebook's automatic tagging thingie) had tagged me in, even though I was not in it. I'd just posted the thing without previewing it because I figured what the hell.
Anyway, that photo was one that some girl had taken at a party I was not even at, where she was dressed pretty provocatively and making a lustful gesture. I don't even remember having seen the notification that I was tagged. In any case, my wife saw this and went into orbit, thinking I had been cheating on her and was boasting about it on facebook. Now I've been sued for divorce and have lawyers demanding I turn over my hard drives. Add to that, all of my Facebook friends saw it and were like "what the hell?" It has been a total embarrassment and has basically ruined my life.
Thanks a lot, Mr. Fuckerberg.
Facebook keeps showing me one of those also, for mine they picked a photo I took of a flood at our lake home. Images of our docks under water, tree limbs floating by, with a happy party border. I laugh each time I see it, but I can see not wanting some photos being revived onto my feed.
Don't worry only old people use Facebook anymore. Young kids don't want to be on the same social networks as their parents and so use other things.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
This is how adults resolve things. There were no lawsuits. There were no mass protests. There was a guy who said "Yeah, that picture the algorithm picked? It hurt." And Facebook said "Wow, we can see that would hurt, and we're sorry it did. We will try to do better."
WTF is wrong with this exchange?
You conveniently choose to leave out the reality of the closed circuit video of Brown physically attacking the convenience store owner. That was the reason the cop was called to the scene.
You seem to be engaging in some erroneous statements. For one thing, the story from the Ferguson PD has been that the officer knew nothing of that event, and that Michael Brown wasn't in or near that convenience store, that it was another officer investigating that crime, which was not near where Michael Brown was shot.
http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2014/08/15/ferguson-chief-officer-didnt-know-about-robbery/14124259/
In any case, theft of a few dollars worth of tobacco products doesn't constitute a crime that warrants execution in any state.
The only person who should be curating personal photos in Facebook is the profile owner.
You mean the person who clicked through the ToS that grant Facebook a perpetual, commercial, sublicenceable, license to use the photos however they wish? Including (as they've done in the last) licensing them to third parties to use in adverts?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What on earth are you talking about?
I was talking about specific problem - resisting arrest as a way to protest police action. It's stupid in both potential cases:
1. You're guilty. You just add resisting arrest to the case, making it worse for you in the court.
2. You're innocent. You could have walked, but now you're going to get criminal record for resisting arrest.
You lose in both cases.
...hooked up to an EEG machine.
The backstory is that I had gone to roust him out of bed because he's chronically late but found him in the bathroom, unconscious and not breathing. Somehow he had passed out, fell, and landed on a trash bin and the bin liner had blocked his airway.
He spent four days in the ICU, the first day in a propofol-induced coma with an EEG connected. It was a horrifying experience and my wife posted the image two days later basically as a way of letting people know what had happened and why we had gone silent to everyone for a few days.
She was annoyed by the image of him presented as "what a great year" but I don't think much more than annoyed.
I think the entire feature is lame and I've marked all of them (my own suggested one and every other I've been presented) as "I don't want to see this". Trying to block my own suggested one in the Facebook IOS app consistently crashed the app.
My takeaway on this is that Facebook's image analytics suck. As good as they seem to be at identifying faces for tagging you might think they would be able to train their system to identify smiling faces so that when they suggested images they would tend to show ones more likely to be positive and reject others.