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Poll: Are You Worried That Facebook Recognizes Your Face?

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Posted on Jun 9, 2011
Facebook

Regulators in the U.S. and Europe are concerned about a new Facebook feature that uses face-recognition software to “tag” users in their friends’ photos. Other services, notably Google’s Picasa and Apple’s iPhoto, already use this technology without objection (as far as we know).

Then again, not everybody has Facebook’s appalling privacy record.

Of course it’s much easier to have a machine identify your friends and we’d think people would want to know when someone is posting photos of them online.

Still, Facebook isn’t in it for the sake of convenience alone. As a lawyer for the Electronic Privacy Information Center says in the L.A. Times, the new feature “raises questions about what Facebook does with this user data once it collects it and who else is accessing that data after it’s collected.”  —PZS

Los Angeles Times:

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, based in Washington, D.C., said Wednesday that it plans to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission raising concerns over Facebook’s new “tag suggestions” feature which allow users to identify people across multiple photos at once using facial-recognition software.

“Obviously we’re not going to comment in detail until we file whatever were going to file,” said John Verdi, senior council at EPIC. “But, we think the facial recognition feature raises real questions about what sort of data Facebook is collecting from its users and from its users’ photographs.

“And it also raises questions about what Facebook does with this user data once it collects it and who else is accessing that data after it’s collected.”

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Anarcissie's avatar

By Anarcissie, June 11, 2011 at 1:42 pm Link to this comment

What makes people think the government abides by the law?

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ChaviztaKing's avatar

By ChaviztaKing, June 11, 2011 at 9:38 am Link to this comment

GO TO THIS LINK AND READ THE ARTICLE ON HOW THE SATANIC CAPITALIST JUSTICE SYSTEM AND US GOVERNMENT IS HARASSING JOHN EDWARDS JUST LIKE IT HARASSED AND DESTROYED MUMIA, JFK AND AL GORE. THE US GOVERNMENT IS REAL EVIL, IN USA IF YOU ARE MARXIST OR ANTI-TAX LIBERTARIAN THE US GOV. HIRES CIA SPOOKS TO CHASE YOU EVER WHERE YOU GO AROUND YOUR HOUSE, AND IT READS YOUR EMAIL AND INTERNET ACTIVITIES.  ITS AN ARTICLE ABOUT HOS US GOVERNMENT DESTROYED JOHN EDWARDS BECAUSE HE WAS A POPULIST REFORMIST AND AN ELECTORAL THREAT TO THE BI-PARTYCRACY DICTATORSHIP OF DEMOCRATS-REPUBLICANS

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28251.htm


.

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ChaviztaKing's avatar

By ChaviztaKing, June 11, 2011 at 9:09 am Link to this comment

Daye: Wow, that means that US government and NSA are probably observing the people who have pictures of Che Guevara, Karl Marx and socialist revolutionary thinkers and leaders in their pictures section of Facebook?

But however, we must not worried about symbolical stuff.  What I mean is that the US government is very clever and scientifical at trying to give people an illusion of democracy and an illusion of a very nice country to live in, without crimes and without any insecurity.

What I mean is that the US government has this psychologic Machiavellian tactic of letting people offend Obama, offend the US government, saying that JFK was killed by CIA, that the US government is a corrupt evil government, it lets people use drugs, go out to party, and even protest on local issues.

However what the fascists controllers of the US government and US ruling class won’t let you do is to be a leader of a big third political party with millions of followers as an electoral threat to the bi-partycracy zionist-capitalist dictatorship that we’ve had in America since 1776, a nation founded by corporate oligarchs, with an oligarchic fascist constitution and an oligarchic imperialist fascist political-economic system

In other words, the only thing that will get you in trouble in USA is to be an *electoral threat* to the zionist dictatorship of Democrats and Republicans

.

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ChaviztaKing's avatar

By ChaviztaKing, June 11, 2011 at 8:47 am Link to this comment

Dear friends, the problem of Facebook is that most users of Facebook, even many leftists and progressive liberal celebrities use Facebook as an attention seeking tool, as an elitist social club, to seek personal fame, glory and praise.  And not as a tool to spread knowledge as a weapon for a social awakening of the masses.

And it’s even neurotic how many Facebook users compete on who has the most amount of friends.  Who as Chris Hedges wrote some months ago, the friends that people have on their Facebook friend’s list are not real true friends at all, and are not people that you met.

This is a pathetic really, well the whole world is a pathetic mental hospital and most people suffer from irrationality and personal disorders.


.

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Anarcissie's avatar

By Anarcissie, June 11, 2011 at 8:04 am Link to this comment

I find Facebook as a whole appalling.  Not just the business, but its popularity, the lemming-like rush to abandon privacy on the part of so many.  Facial-recognition software is just a minor aspect of the larger ugly phenomenon—which is already coming back to haunt the foolish as employers, landlords, marketeers, cops, con men and other predators and parasites sift the material for what they need.

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By Sea Serpent, June 11, 2011 at 12:48 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

No, because I haven’t uploaded a photo of me to Facebook.

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By Throckmorton Oagadougou, June 10, 2011 at 6:15 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

I’ve hated everything about Facebook from day 1.  Please see http://youropenbook.org  for some background as to the primordial ooze out of which this outfit came!
I’ve been programming computers for decades, using the net since before there was the www.  I’ve always had a policy of not using my real name online (only recently occasionally excepting, having been forced to.)  Obviously, I’m deeply disgusted at what 4th-Amendment haters this generation of parents has raised!
Despicable enough how so many people can agree to Terms that involve massive tracking of their every relationship and bit of social browsing, to be massively databased (for later sale to entities unknown?)... but what really is torquing me off is all sorts of supposedly intelligent businesses and “public” entities like NPR stating that you should go to their F***book page as an exclusive destination for this or that extra or discussion.  You have to be a privacy-hating dorkwad with a Fbook account to even browse—do they realize this?  They must just stay constantly logged in and not notice, with an attitude.. “oh, it’s Big Corporations and The Government tracking me, so that’s just swell.. after all, Everyone’s doing it, right?”
Is there a stupid texting acronym for Keel Over Puking?
BTW, this very site is a sucker for conformity, as I notice my crucial Firefox add-on NOSCRIPT ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/ )  listing a slew of scripts truthdig is wanting me to allow to run, including a couple from facebook domains like *.fbcdn.net
ps. also crucial to avoid on the modern web— “Flash cookies” which arent actually cookies but more pernicious tracking of you done when you give into the proprietary black-box code that is Adobe Flash (support the open/free alternative, HTML5 alongside Theora http://playogg.org )  Read about it in the description of the BetterPrivacy Add-On for Firefox:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/
PEACE!

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By Paschal, June 10, 2011 at 12:38 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

I am a law abiding citizen, which like others, superficially, I should now worry about privacy concerns.  Yet invasion of privacy is specifically stated within our constitution, and is a rule of law…the right to individual privacy.  Even if I am a law abiding citizen (clean record - never even in court) I believe the use of facial recognition data raises concerns of what else they collect.  Something as simple as you saying you’re tired as a president they can consider you a potential threat, leading to a downward spiral of worse happenings.

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By Gmonst, June 10, 2011 at 7:55 am Link to this comment

I don’t really see the big deal.  Quite frankly I am rather surprised that politicians care about this issue. It seems like a paper-tiger to me, just an issue for them to grandstand a bit and pretend they care about your privacy.  For it to work you have to be using facebook and already have pictures of your face on there.  I agree it should be off first with an option to turn it on, instead of on by default. However, if you are already posting your face on the site I don’t really see how problematic it is to be tagged in your friends photos.  It sends you a notice that you have been tagged in a photo, and you can remove the tag if you would like.  The only real difference is it makes it quicker to tag friends.  Its not as if your friends won’t know its you in the photo and the software will tell them.  If nefarious forces want to use face recognition they won’t need facebooks friend tagging software to do it.  You can bet the Patriot Act spying includes massive face recognition data mining.  If politicians care about our privacy why don’t they worry about the warrantless spying by our own government.

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Blackspeare's avatar

By Blackspeare, June 10, 2011 at 6:44 am Link to this comment

For the honest and law-abiding among us facial recognition technology offers no problem.  And for Facebook to use such technology offers perhaps the ultimate in security and potentially makes one’s account hack-proof.  I can see where the computer camera must recognize the face before allowing access to the account.  Of course, if one is using a computer with no camera, then you would have to answer the personal questions to enter the site——like many banks do today should you miss hit a key.

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By question, June 9, 2011 at 2:20 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Apparently faces are the least likely body part to make it into social media…

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Daye's avatar

By Daye, June 9, 2011 at 1:25 pm Link to this comment

Facial images will aid the police when, for
whatever reason pleases them or any other
authority, it is decided that a citizen should be
visited in the night & removed. The NSA will be
especially pleased (though it has probably
already used such software for years), because
it will make one’s Thin Thread profile ever so
much more personal - why, right there, above a
Total Information Awareness (TIA) record of
one’s emails, telephone calls, physical & mailing
addresses, bank transactions (including all
credit card usages), employment history,
internet searches, list of all known contacts,
border crossings, access to local police
recordings of movements, etc., & so on & on,
will be a nice set of pictures of one’s face, of
one’s spouse & children, & of the family cars,
cats & dogs.

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