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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."
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
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.
That sounds suspiciously like proudly admitting to being a patent troll.
It is actual a form of oligarchy. All the big tech firms build patent portfolios, and then sign cross licensing agreements. So they are free to innovate. But individuals and small companies are locked out, and are likely to step on a legal landmine no matter what they do.
In America, the proportion of wealth going to labor has been falling, and the proportion going to owners of capital has been climbing. A naive person might think this means it is smart to invest in factories and equipment. But this is wrong. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft all have very few hard assets. The "capital" that is richly rewarded by our economic system is mostly intellectual property.