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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday January 10 2017, @01:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-are-the-product dept.

Every time you upload a photo to Facebook, its deep-learning algorithms go to work, trying to ID things both incredibly specific (which of your friends is in this photo?) and general (is this photo outdoors or indoors?). But that information is largely hidden from users — until now.

Software engineer Adam Geitgey put together the snappily named Chrome extension "Show Facebook Computer Vision Tags," which allows anyone to see what general information Facebook extracts from every photo that's been uploaded. Install the extension and head over to Facebook, and you can start immediately seeing which objects Facebook can ID within pretty much any photo.

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/01/see-what-facebook-thinks-is-in-your-photos.html


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  • (Score: 2) by bart9h on Tuesday January 10 2017, @02:12PM

    by bart9h (767) on Tuesday January 10 2017, @02:12PM (#452041)

    The text appears when the photo doesn't load. I saw it accidentally other day, and was quite amused.

    The extension probably just prevents the photo from loading.

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @06:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @06:40PM (#452172)

      I can't decide what's sadder about your confession: you just now noticed alt-text exists, or you never ever view page source.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 10 2017, @02:58PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 10 2017, @02:58PM (#452065)

    is largely aided by machine learning

    There's the story you tell the journalist, and then there's the way its actually done where the devs replace data centers full of terabytes and gigahertz of neural networks with a very small simple little amazon mechanical turk API.

    I mean you could do it the hard way, but it seems simpler to say turk it and move on to the next challenge. Such as finding a way to monetize it. So you found a pix of a dude wearing the viewmaster google cardboard headset, which I also own and wore for like 30 minutes a couple months ago. You monetize that by ... selling blackmail photos in 20 years?

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @03:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @03:07PM (#452069)

      But mechanical turk is based on neural networks. Quite literally neural networks, indeed.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @03:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @03:09PM (#452071)

      I think much of this mechanical turk stuff was really done by my girlfriend's mother and father, who believe they have nothing to hide and will expose everyone via tagging even if told they don't want to participate in the tracking scheme.

      They loved personalized ads because it is less junk to sift through, want to catch the terrorists and believe Alexa is a great way to keep tabs on criminals in the future, if it can get built into every appliance and connected to every network.

      They happily add meta data to photos because they believe it is their duty, and expect others to do the same in exchange for this marvelous free software because otherwise we're freeloading welfare dirtbags that think we can get something for free.

      I hate what family discussions have turned into...

      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday January 10 2017, @05:38PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday January 10 2017, @05:38PM (#452143)

        > and believe Alexa is a great way to keep tabs on criminals in the future, if it can get built into every appliance and connected to every network.

        Orwell was wrong: We're not getting one government Big Brother. We're getting half a dozen private ones.
        Until the bonuses beat the CEOs' egos and they finally merge into a single OCP + Big Brother.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @06:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @06:29PM (#452167)

      Facebook gets 300 million new photos each day. [zephoria.com] (Let's not even talk about instagram)

      Even if a turk could do 300 photos per day - and that's a major stretch given all the overhead and how mind-numbing the work is - it would require 1 million full time turks working 365 days per year.

      The entire turk marketplace has only about 500,000 registered turks, [pewinternet.org] including the ones who just work once a month.

      So not only would facebook need to at least double Amazon's entire population, they would also have to figure out how to keep a million people from blabbing.

      So, yet again VLM is revealed as someone whose fantasies bear no relation to the real world.
      Be sure to reward him with upmods for his insightful and informative post, though!

      ᵀʰᶦˢ ᵈᵉᵇᵘᶰᵏᶦᶰᵍ ᵇʳᵒᵘᵍʰᵗ ᵗᵒ ʸᵒᵘ ᵇʸ ᶠᵃᵏᵉ ᴺᵉʷˢ⋅

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @04:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @04:08PM (#452108)
    See through the eyes of a bending unit [youtube.com].

    I think is on-topic: Fry looks like an unsuspecting Facebook user to me.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @04:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @04:16PM (#452113)

    The author has a github account with the source available and it is also in the firefox add on repositories:
    https://github.com/ageitgey/show-facebook-computer-vision-tags [github.com]
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/show-computer-vision-tags/ [mozilla.org]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @06:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @06:08PM (#452156)

      You just know the people that need to see it will be exclusive users of edge or safari browsers.

  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday January 10 2017, @07:05PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday January 10 2017, @07:05PM (#452184) Journal

    No, that's not a black hole.