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Facebook Filed a Patent To Predict Your Household's Demographics Based On Family Photos (buzzfeednews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Facebook has submitted a patent application for technology that would predict who your family and other household members are, based on images and captions posted to Facebook, as well as your device information, like shared IP addresses. The application, titled "Predicting household demographics based on image data," was originally filed May 10, 2017, and made public today. The system Facebook proposes in its patent application would use facial recognition and learning models trained to understand text to help Facebook better understand whom you live with and interact with most. The technology described in the patent looks for clues in your profile pictures on Facebook and Instagram, as well as photos of you that you or your friends post.
It would note the people identified in a photo, and how frequently the people are included in your pictures. Then, it would assess information from comments on the photos, captions, or tags (#family, #mom, #kids) -- anything that indicates whether someone is a husband, daughter, cousin, etc. -- to predict what your family/household actually looks like. According to the patent application, Facebook's prediction models would also analyze "messaging history, past tagging history, [and] web browsing history" to see if multiple people share IP addresses (a unique identifier for every internet network). A Facebook spokesperson said in response to the story, "We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans."
It would note the people identified in a photo, and how frequently the people are included in your pictures. Then, it would assess information from comments on the photos, captions, or tags (#family, #mom, #kids) -- anything that indicates whether someone is a husband, daughter, cousin, etc. -- to predict what your family/household actually looks like. According to the patent application, Facebook's prediction models would also analyze "messaging history, past tagging history, [and] web browsing history" to see if multiple people share IP addresses (a unique identifier for every internet network). A Facebook spokesperson said in response to the story, "We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans."
When image recognition gets really good, you can get even more info than is laid out here - you can probably nearly 100% recognition of any brands worn or displayed prominently.
You could probably guess really well how much a family makes by knowing the brands of clothes they generally wear, and what kinds of cars they drive...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just had a second thought - apply that to photos everywhere in general. Now you don't just know the demographics of a family, but of every neighborhood in every city on Earth thanks to geotagged photos from all over the place. You can see what parts of town are driving 2011 Honda Civics and where are the brand new Mercedes. Even if you yourself never post a single photo on Facebook and avoid being tagged, just your address alone will fit into some neat demographic slot that will say everything about you you did not want to reveal.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All facebook employees are now creeps
Hahaha. âoeWeâ(TM)ve actually been doing this for years.â should have been the comment.
"We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans."
That sounds suspiciously like proudly admitting to being a patent troll.
They seem to love this stuff.
CAPTCHA: phoning
This just sounds like a lot of data analysis (text and images) and some domain knowledge. A team of data analysts with skills common in the field should be able to do this.
It's time to start actively creating misinformation on one's social media presence. Since we can't protect our personal information from these Big Brother wannabe's, we have to at least degrade its reliability, and therefore its value.
I wonder how long will it be before those idiots who proudly proclaim "If you use Facebook, you deserve what you get" have their noses rubbed in the fact that owning a cell phone and being friends with anybody who does have a Facebook profile is enough to hand them quite a lot of personal information.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Since FB gonna predict your demographic hierarchy based on the pictures hanging on your family photos, it's time to put pictures of the Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, Prince William, Prince Harry, and royal families from other wealthy countries, as your 'family photos'.
The Rich Kids of Instagram have prior art!
http://therkoi.com/
"We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans."
This is absolutely correct for many tech corporations. If you can preempt an innovation that would benefit someone else, you are a step ahead; even if you never use the patent. The most important feature of patents is not that you can make new and better products; it is that you can prevent others from doing that [unless they are willing to pay you for the right].
Of course Fb could use this idea to generate profit. That doesn't change the correctness of the above statement.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Until friday, each of you come up with an idea, patentable, so nobody can ph us, that makes our use of those dumb ph's data legal. No answer is stupid. Lizardman
THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES FOR YOUR LIES NAZI FAGGOT KEN DOLL
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES FOR YOUR LIES NAZI FAGGOT KEN DOLL
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING
Fuck Facebook.
Now I feel even better I have never had a Facebook account of any kind.
anyone with working eyeballs has committed a violation of this future patent.
If Facebook is gathering demographic data based on family photos then I suspect the algorithm will be taking into account skin color and all the factors that correlate with it. Income and skin tone correlate but just because they correlate does not mean any individual will fit. Generally speaking the darker the skin the lower the income. Now, stating that correlation, even with the disclaimer I gave before it, I'm sure someone is going to scream at me about how their black neighbors live in a nice house and drive expensive cars. That's because even if there is a trend does not mean the individual matches exactly. Chinese people on average tend to be shorter than Americans. Just because Yao Ming is over 7 feet tall does not disprove this trend.
Someone is going to get "tagged" as low income because they fit the general parameters of a low income household and then get all upset when they find out about this. Certainly race will play to this, and this will inevitably be a public relations nightmare for Facebook. That is unless they artificially handicap their algorithm from the start anticipating this. Given the large amount of data that comes from skin tone this cannot be ruled out. Genetics plays a large part in how we act and part of that is our skin tone. Facial features are also genetic, which correlate to gender, so expect accusations of sexism as well.
I saw this first hand. My dad was quite upset when he called from his million dollar home about the poor cell phone reception he's been getting. The customer service representative suggested that the poor reception might be from the metal roof on his mobile home. You see he lived his life paying everything in cash or with store credit. Not many stores will let people leave with goods in hand and no cash or credit card but in a small town with a bunch of big spenders the stores did better not questioning the ability of the customers to pay later. He never had a credit card because he never needed one. When he got a cell phone they had no credit history and so he had to get a pre-paid plan, like poor people generally do. The CSR with the cell phone company saw a customer with a pre-paid cell phone and poor reception. The leap in thought for the CSR was that my dad lived in a mobile home, not a brick house out in the country.
My dad wasn't going to post on the internet for all to see about how he felt insulted by some cell phone company CSR. Think about the average Facebook user though. If there's a perceived insult because of a computer algorithm then there will be people that hear about it.
Since Facebook is in the business of creating profiles of people to sell them products that they will likely buy based on their interests, I find it hard to believe they would not implement this type of technology.
I've kept my Facebook account around for nonsense reasons despite the fact that I never use it and in the last couple of years have only logged in to see if it had been hacked in whatever the contemporaneous security incident was. This story pushed me to delete my account permanently.
You should do the same: https://deletefacebook.com
I hate to be pedantic, but should it not be "a typically seldom-updated identifier usually assigned to a whole household or to a portable device when connected to a cellular / mobile network" - the first part is also only true when using IPv4 with NAT and not anymore when using IPv6 which assigns a unique IP to each piece of connected hardware.
Now you don't just know the demographics of a family, but of every neighborhood in every city on Earth
Not true. First you only know about neighbourhoods which have a significant number of Facebook users and secondly you only know about those demographics that use Facebook. Those at both ends of the IT spectrum will probably not show up much at all i.e. those with not enough IT knowledge to use it and those with enough IT knowledge to know better than to use it given its horrendous implications for privacy (of which this patent is an excellent example).
This may be a good blueprint for a law that forbids such methods.
There are those of us who saw Facebook, and indeed all "social media" (yes, including Myspace) as a bad idea and never created such "free" accounts were repeatedly called backwards, regressive, luddite, etc. We simply saw the dangers of open-ended click-through contracts that gave all the rights to the company and were "free". When something costs money to provide, yet is provided at no charge to the supposed customer, the person getting the free thing is not, in fact, the customer; he or she is the product which places itself on the virtual store shelf for free. The customer of the business is the person paying money to the business - in this case every data miner, mass-marketer, politician, or other entity to who Facebook and friends will sell all your data with no scruples whatsoever.
We who never joined the madness are now experienceing a bit of long-overdue schadenfreude as those of you who insisted you were smart to be on social media are only now becoming aware of a tiny fraction of the damage this has done to your lives and will go on doing to you for the rest of your lives because the contracts you happily clicked through gave everything away to these companies forever
It may be too late for you, but at this point you can raise your kids or grandkids to be wiser. Do them a big favor: post NOTHING about them on the internet; don't destroy their privacy before they are even old enough to provide fully-informed consent.
One day soon someone will realise that this info is not worth what it is purported to. It is only worth "billions" (we are assured) because Facebook (and their like) can find buyers who will pay billions for it, and they buy it because they can find further buyers who will pay billions for it, and so on until in the end the info is provided as a service or retailed to smaller businesses who collectively pay even more billions for it.
But whether it brings value to those end users anywhere near what they pay for it is another matter. No-one can really tell, it is just assumed.
This info is really the stuff of a pyramid scheme, looking for some mug at the bottom to buy it.
I suppose Facebook will track us even after death
All technologies have good and bad aspects.
This might reunite families split apart decades ago.
If it could be a way for govts or criminal organizations to uncover "leverage" to get people to do nasty things by threatening their families.
It is our choice.
"... for technology we never implement ...."
And therein lies the problem with the patent system.
Realistically, it's the only practical way to keep in touch with extended family and old friends without actually having to see or talk to them. What's the most viable alternative?
becomes facebook. Orwell would be so proud of Mark.
You can still use Messenger on the desktop without having an active Fecebook account.
See subject & gweihir put the icing on that cake for me right here https://it.slashdot.org/commen... chump!
LMAO - you are FAILING: It's ALL YOUR KIND ("lowest of the LOW" online & in life - the not-men, the bitchboys) KNOW how to do!
* ESPECIALLY HERE (love it) https://science.slashdot.org/c...
(You're a PUNY LITTLE WORM that has to HIDE behind UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts STALKING ME, or by IMPERSONATING me (PROVING you WISH you were me, lol) & you've FAILED @ every turn vs. me - face facts: YOU ALWAYS WILL!)
APK
P.S.=> You LOSE, loser - the only thing you're good @ IS losing, lmao... apk
uhm, regular emails? Honestly, if you don't email them every few months, they really aren't in your sphere of "extended family and old friends".. they are strangers
Is this Facebook or the IRS?
Barbie: No means NO.
Barbie: No means NO. No.
That will allow you to now donate your foreskin directly to israel with the united way paying for 2nd day air mail
This is where it leads.
I'd like to thank all of you facebook lusers who lack a sense of privacy and security.
Firstly, i don't use facebook, but assuming for a minute that I do, and I upload pictures of my family and leave some post like "me and my wife and kids are going out today"... well, where is the "predictive" part? I've just told them everything, there's literally nothing to predict.
Let me be the first to say "FUCK FACEBOOK!"
I have a TV, watch BluRays, listen to MP3s, and am on the web alot for business and research etc. I'm quite opposed to luddite actions and attitudes.
What I am opposed to is foolishness and short-sightedness.
"social media" is the very opposite of its name: people on "social media" actually spend a hell of a lot less time actually socially engaged with other live persons they truly know. They tell themselves that a stranger halfway around the plane who reads a bit about them and gawks at their pictures is a "friend" who "likes" them.
The "social media" thing is really just a marketing breakthrough. These guys with these companies are really just massive data aggregators, processors, and vendors who have duped their victims into happily providing the product (their personal data and the data of their friends and relatives) to the companies FOR FREE! Even an oil tycoon has a harder business as he wrestles something of value from the Earth before having to transport it and refine it and then get it to market. The social media boys just need some servers and a bit of code and then their resource runs to them and insists on being sold.
do you confuse hospitals with crematoriums? arsonists with firefighters? forests with deserts?
Why do you confuse an insane stupidity like Facebook with a practical means of financial transactions like a credit card?
What makes you confuse having a drivers license or a bank account with foolishly making all your personal data sellable to anybody who wanst to buy it?
It's become quite apparent that younger people in Western Civilization are no longer being taught to think logically.