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Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens
In 2014, Facebook filed a patent application for a technique that employs smartphone data to figure out if two people might know each other. The author, an engineering manager at Facebook named Ben Chen, wrote that it was not merely possible to detect that two smartphones were in the same place at the same time, but that by comparing the accelerometer and gyroscope readings of each phone, the data could identify when people were facing each other or walking together. That way, Facebook could suggest you friend the person you were talking to at a bar last night, and not all the other people there that you chose not to talk to. Facebook says it hasn't put this technique into practice.
[...] Patents filed by Facebook that mention People You May Know show some ingenious methods that Facebook has devised for figuring out that seeming strangers on the network might know each other. One filed in 2015 describes a technique that would connect two people through the camera metadata associated with the photos they uploaded. It might assume two people knew each other if the images they uploaded looked like they were titled in the same series of photos—IMG_4605739.jpg and IMG_4605742, for example—or if lens scratches or dust were detectable in the same spots on the photos, revealing the photos were taken by the same camera.
[...] The technological analysis in some of the patents is pretty astounding, but it could well be wishful thinking on Facebook's part.
Vera Ranieri, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on intellectual property, hasn't reviewed these specific patents but said generally that the U.S. Patent Office doesn't ensure that a technology actually works before granting a patent.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 07 2019, @11:52AM (2 children)
I really don't think that dude knows what he is talking about. Just because he speaks in the crude vulgar language we hear on the streets and on construction sites, you figure he knows what he's talking about? "American vernacular"??? WTF?
I've never heard of anyone rescinding a free license. BSD, or GPL, or any other. The ONLY free license I've ever heard of that was rescinded was public domain. Don't remember exactly what it was, not bothering to look it up, but something or other entered the public domain, then bribes were paid to put a copyright on it again.
If you're banking on some street nigga making case law for you, I expect you'll be terribly disappointed. Probably just some hired actor - and probably some white dude at that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @07:56AM
A gratuitous license, without an attached interest, is revocable.
Did you pay for a license for X intellectual property?
No?
Then the permission to use that IP can be rescinded, since you have no secured any interest in it against the owner.
It's just how it is.
It hasn't been done often because no one went after the programmers.
But now they are with the speech codes.
There have been lengthy discussions on this, including published papers specifically about the GPLv2.
It's a gratuitous license.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @08:00AM
>If you're banking on some street nigga making case law for you, I expect you'll be terribly disappointed. Probably just some hired actor - and probably some white dude at that.
You people simply do not accept it when lawyers explain to you that gratuitous licenses are revocable by the grantor.
You just DO NOT accept it.
So we have a "street nigga" explain it to you in your own language.
And that's just not good enough either...