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Facebook Apologizes For 'Year In Review' Photos

Posted by timothy on from the how-was-the-parade-otherwise? dept.

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."

6 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Millions used this... one complained. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Millions used this... one complained. by McGruber · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "When parents die they're buried in the ground, but when a child dies you bury the child in your heart" - korean proverb

    2. Re:Millions used this... one complained. by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I didn't complain but I found some of the pictures it unearthed to be painful reminders, the early part of the year was lousy for me individually which evolved to be generally fantastic. Nevertheless, I think it's legit to complain and remind them that we upload pictures for a number of reasons, and the emotions attached to them change a lot over a year. Complaining in the form of feedback is perfectly acceptable. It's the incessant lawsuits and mass media editorials that wear on our nerves.

      I think the reasonable solution is to make this an optional feature that they advertise for instead of just dump on your page. Even allow you to choose the photos to show and save for posterity.

  2. awkward 'year in review' by james_shoemaker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:People Are Such Babies by Alan+Shutko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  4. My wife's had our son in the hospital by swb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...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.