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posted by takyon on Monday January 07 2019, @11:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-a-speck dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by pvanhoof on Monday January 07 2019, @06:08PM (2 children)

    by pvanhoof (4638) on Monday January 07 2019, @06:08PM (#783272) Homepage

    Sure, and this information can also be used for good. If you for example have tracker on your GNOME desktop, tracker's metadata extraction will turn all that data into desktop searchable data. Meaning that you can find your files with it using SPARQL queries.

    And if you don't like that, you can turn it off.

    Basically you can form queries like: give me all pictures that I made with my iPhone while I was in Paris.

    https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/tracker-miners/blob/master/src/tracker-extract/tracker-extract-png.c#L516 [gnome.org]

    There is nothing 'strange' about the fact that metadata is contained in files. It can be quite useful. There is little scary about it.

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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday January 07 2019, @06:57PM (1 child)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Monday January 07 2019, @06:57PM (#783295) Journal

    There is nothing 'strange' about the fact that metadata is contained in files.

    That's correct.

    It can be quite useful.

    Also correct.

    There is little scary about it.

    That depends entirely on the use case. If you don't understand that, you should start being scared immediately.

    --
    Some drink from the fountain of knowledge. Others gargle.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday January 07 2019, @07:34PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday January 07 2019, @07:34PM (#783317) Journal

      There is little scary about it.

      That depends entirely on the use case.

      Metadata that is well-documented, easy to read and easy to change and/or remove is not very scary. It is, of course, something you have to take into account when handling those images.

      It gets scary if you don't know the existence of data, you can't easily check it, or you can't easily remove it.

      Note that for most holiday photos the GPS coordinates/camera direction don't reveal anything that isn't revealed also in the image itself. If you photographed the White House, it is quite obvious that you weren't in New York.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.