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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
"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.
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.
So you're saying this was the one step too far for you? They weren't creeps already?
"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
I hear Trump is going to put up a picture of God as a family photo.
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 doubt he would even recognize Her.
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).
Now I feel even better I have never had a Facebook account of any kind.
I feel even better in that I once opened an account (in order to communicate with someone at the time) with entirely false information. The only thing they might have had right was my IP address but that has changed twice since then.
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
You can still use Messenger on the desktop without having an active Fecebook account.
I agree with you, but your comment comes off like one from "the dude who doesn't own a television and won't shut up about it."
(disclaimer- I don't own a television that's been plugged in in more than 6 months. )
Let me be the first to say "FUCK FACEBOOK!"