You Can Now Tell Facebook to Delete Its Internal Record of Your Face

https://onezero.medium.com/you-can-now-tell-facebook-to-delete-its-internal-record-of-your-face-d1def7f992c1

by Garbage • 7 years ago

296 165 7 years ago

onezero.medium.com

dastx• 7 years ago

"We've got all the data we need, you may now opt out" ¯\(°_o)/¯

fromthestart2• 7 years ago

It’s an assurance that Facebook isn’t actually retaining data that it could use again someday to recognize your face.

Given fb's history of lying, it's only an assurance that they won't overtly use such data. No guarantee that they're not still storing it on a server somewhere, and good luck proving as much.

Also, what does this mean for people without accounts that are being tracked? I wonder if facial data is collected on them too, after being labeled by friends.

dymk2• 7 years ago

Where has Facebook been caught lying?

They've surely done many things you don't like, but they've not lied about doing those things.

fromthestart2• 7 years ago

For starters:

techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/study-calls-out-dark-patterns-in-facebook-and-google-that-push-users-towards-less-privacy/

www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/facebook-accused-of-misleading-advertisers-then-trying-to-hide-it/

theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/20/facebook-violating-privacy-mark-zuckerberg

FB's entire business model is fundamentally in conflict with any semblance of privacy. Why anyone believes anything that comes out of Zuckerberg's mouth is beyond me. FB is built around exploitation of user ignorance, apathy, and unwarranted trust.

Make no mistake, no matter how much these dangerously charismatic CEOs speak about positive changes to society, modern large tech companies are 100% self serving and always engaged in carefully prepared corporate doublespeak. They don't give any kind of a shit about your privacy when it is directly tied to the bulk of their revenue. What motivation does fb actually have to delete facial recognition data like they claim, as opposed to just quietly storing it somewhere on the back end? There's no legal requirement and if they get caught, the only people who would care are the kind who by and large have already moved off FB. Meanwhile the upside is huge for future facial recognition applications - this is a massive goldmine of very sensitive personal data.

jakear• 7 years ago

From stallman.org: Facebook made deals for phone and computer manufacturers including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Samsung to access data about its useds and their friends as well. These deals seem to still be operative. [1]

When Zuckerberg testified to Congress, he said Facebook had stopped doing this years ago [2]. Apparently he lied.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/03/technology/fa...

2: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/06/04/sure-looks-zuck...

konart• 7 years ago

Of course I can. The question is - will they actually delete it everywhere inside their data storages or will they just send me a 200 response code.

reaperducer• 7 years ago

And what exactly does "delete" mean? It's removed from production, or it's also scoured from backups?

jimclegg• 7 years ago

After I give them the data required to prove I'm authorized to delete the template, what happens to that data?

Trusting Facebook... rather jump down a well.

DannyB22• 7 years ago

It is deleted, then added to a list of deleted faces.

Just so they can be sure not to re-add it later.

Yeah. That's it! And they're sticking with that story.

nocsi• 7 years ago

Their definition of "delete" is to dissociate your identity from the data pieces. There's no true way to splice out a person from their database otherwise

wnmurphy• 7 years ago

My guess: delete flag set in db, data remains but is ignored.

tomatotomato37• 7 years ago

Is it even feasible to scour all their backups? And I don't mean the hot backups, I mean the annual data dumps stored on tapes in a data archive built in a cold war nuclear bunker somewhere in the Rockies.

sixothree• 7 years ago

Are they really using the word "delete"? I know this is pretty much forbidden in Google world.

__m• 7 years ago

yeah and what about future images, will they be associated with a shadow profile?

godelski2• 7 years ago

Is it deleted from the models? Clearly they aren't doing that. Do they fine tune their models so they can no longer identify you from your photo? I'd also doubt that. More clarification on deletion is needed.

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

Yeah, if it's already been shared with commercial partners, or especially, if it's already been shared with government agencies, the cat is out of the bag. Not really sure what can be done to regain control of that data?

But, hey, at least FB will "delete" it!

So, yeah, I guess there's that? :(

LiamPa• 7 years ago

*202 never to be executed

t3f• 7 years ago

When you opt out of facial recognition on Facebook, the company will delete your template, meaning it will have no original reference point for your face and therefore cannot find your face at all.

The details are pretty sparse. It would be nice if they clarified how they manage black-listing your template ID somewhere but still disconnect it from your profile. If you opt-ed back in at some point, they need to know to remove you from that black-list, which might imply there's still some sort of connection from your profile to a template ID or maybe the generic template still exists but they're disallowed to associate it to a profile and it's in some shadow table?

tsumnia3• 7 years ago

Plus, just as another layer of "I don't trust this". I have to re-unsubscribe from AT&T's job search newsletter every few months because of what I assume is a new wave of recruitment emails being sent from an older mailing list. Doesn't matter how many times I unsubscribe, that backup will always have my information on it and that service only refers to that backup.

My only assumption is that Facebook is too big to properly manage that piece of specific knowledge and will delete it, but I'll still be there somewhere. Or I'll magically opt back in because of something like Messenger or whatever. Considering the news about Google circumventing their own GDPR restrictions, I just assume these companies aren't following through with any of their promises.

jefftk2• 7 years ago

I have to re-unsubscribe from AT&T's job search newsletter every few months because of what I assume is a new wave of recruitment emails being sent from an older mailing list. Doesn't matter how many times I unsubscribe, that backup will always have my information on it and that service only refers to that backup.

That sounds like a violation of the CAN-SPAM act, and you could consider suing them.

amflare• 7 years ago

Okay, but how will they know if the face they found is yours, and thus should not be found?

dymk2• 7 years ago

This is actually an exception that GDPR makes for storing data - companies can keep around some sort of record to "tombstone" users.

Sort of. GDPR is so woefully under-specified in some places, and general in others, it's really entirely up to the will of the regulators what would count as a violation.

e12e• 7 years ago

I wonder about this too. They say they delete the template (the statistical model they know is your face). Ok.

So now I register a new fb profile, using a picture of you, opting in to facial recognition. Now what?

They can't match the picture against your profile, because they've deleted the template?

munherty• 7 years ago

What do they mean by "delete" ? Is this only FB? What about its 279387429 other connectors

gnu8• 7 years ago

I shouldn’t have to tell Facebook to delete something it should never have had to begin with. How are we going to force Facebook to stop doing terrible things forever?

wlesieutre2• 7 years ago

The article makes it sound like an ominous surveillance feature with not justifiable product reasons, so I should point out that this powers beneficial features like face recognition for image accessibility. Thanks to face recognition, blind people can know who's in a photo.

https://www.facebook.com/accessibility/videos/new-face-face-...

Remove yourself if you want to, but people should be aware there's also a useful side of this.

JohnFen2• 7 years ago

That there exists useful product reasons is beside the point. The point is that people who don't want their data to be involved should not have their data be involved.

adamisom• 7 years ago

So, just to be clear.. when a person signs up for.. wait for it... Facebook... they shouldn’t expect that Facebook has an image of their... face?

ilikehurdles• 7 years ago

What do I have to do to get facebook to delete this after I already deleted my account 3 years ago?

wronglebowski• 7 years ago

Seconded, I'm in the same boat. I realize attempting to wipe my data from all the various sources it may be in across the web is futile but I'd still like to try.

windexh8er• 7 years ago

Until Facebook states they won't store/analyze faces they can't recognize then everyone who has never had an account or deleted their account are at a disadvantage.

I've always wondered if COPPA could be used against Facebook with regard to this. Theoretical situation: I'm a parent and I find an image of my child (under 13 years of age). Facebook never notified me of they were storing my child's image. Facebook would argue they didn't know. But Facebook already scanned the image and likely guessed the child's age - and knew they were under 13. In that situation Facebook should be required to remove the image based on the fact they cannot notify the guardian. I realize this would have severe repercussions to their operational model, but that's also the point. Or... If I find an image Facebook didn't notify me about - then I'll take that $42,000 per image.

Seems fair.

toss1• 7 years ago

FB is known to build profiles of pretty much everyone it encounters, even vicariously, ostensibly to be able to populate a new account with engaging info once they actually join.

Can I tell them to delete the records of my face that they keep even though I don't have an account?

And, of course, in all instances. will they actually expunge it from all locations in their data-universe?

DannyB22• 7 years ago

Shouldn't it be that I have to tell Facebook what they are allowed to keep?

Especially since I have never had and never will have a FB account.

ineedasername4• 7 years ago

That's what you think. Your shadow profile is probably there, waiting for you should you ever claim it.

flippyhead• 7 years ago

Sorry, but... So I don't have to go hunting for it (and get stuck in facebook land reading updates!) can some one provide a link to the place where this setting resides? Thank you!

Chirael• 7 years ago

Yes please. I hate articles like this that tell you what Facebook will now allow you to do... but don't give you the actual link where you could do it yourself _right now_. Makes me think these articles are actually Facebook PR which wants to control the narrative on the feature and deliberately not make it easy to find where to do it.

gouggoug• 7 years ago

Interestingly, I just went into my account and I was already opted-out. Is this the case for everybody? If so, that's a very surprising move coming from FB.

rootw0rm• 7 years ago

okay....so how do you opt-out?

plg• 7 years ago

Can I opt out if I'm not a Facebook user? i.e. opt out of having them store records of my face?

PS don't tell me they don't have records of my face

laythea• 7 years ago

Surely after their AI neural net thingamybob has absorbed your face, FB doesn't care about deleting your face, as their model has already benefited from it?

ooklala• 7 years ago

Didn’t this happen over a year ago? (in the EU at least)

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-facial-recognition-...

ldayley• 7 years ago

How does a person without a facebook account accomplish this though? Even without an account it’s likely that fb has several dozens of photos of me via other people’s posts.

b_tterc_p• 7 years ago

Despite the headline I don’t see anything about deleting data. Just that it won’t try to recognize you.

That being said, I went on my profile to check and it was already set to No (don’t do facial recognition). Is this the default? Or is this actually an old thing that I disabled a long time ago.

RyanAF7• 7 years ago

uh oh...here comes the facial data leak

parliament32• 7 years ago

This help page[1] claims you can go to Settings > Facial Recognition, but I don't have that option under Settings...

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/www/187272841323203

andrewgioia• 7 years ago

Can anyone figure out how to actually turn this off? After bouncing around in Facebook's help docs I found the steps[1] but don't see the option.

Click the down arrow at the top right, then Settings. There _should_ be a "Face Recognition" item in the left but not for me.

This is so frustrating and part of me thinks they just disable this for a bit so 90% of people forget.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/187272841323203

ragerino• 7 years ago

I checked it in the Android app, and I was able to find it and it was already deactivated. I remember doing this a while ago. But it was burried in Facebooks settings. Here is how you can do it on Android.

1. Click on the menu icon (three horizontal lines) in the top toolbar. 2. Scroll down, expand "Settings & Privacy" if not expanded, and click "Settings". Don't fall for those privacy shortcuts. Facebook will hide a lot of settings from you. 3. Scroll down and you should see the " Face Recognition" entry in the Privacy category.

Hope this helps.

PS: I personally find it lame, that Facebook needs to make it as much confusing as possible to find those settings.

blackflame7000• 7 years ago

And they totally will from most of their archives wink wink. Who is really capable of verifying this actually happens that doesn't also have a vested interest in Facebook?

MilnerRoute4• 7 years ago

I can't find the setting to disable this. The EFF says they "have questions" about how Facebook is implementing this.

"Throughout Facebook’s deliberately vague announcement, it takes great pains to note that the change applies only to new Facebook users and people who currently have the “tag suggestions” setting. However, Facebook migrated many, if not most, existing users from “tag suggestions” to “face recognition” in December 2017 (see here for Facebook’s explanation of the difference between tag suggestions and face recognition). That means this safeguard does not apply to the billions of current Facebook users who have already been moved."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/facebook-changing-its-...

noer2• 7 years ago

The URL when I found it was: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec

If that URL doesn't work I went to Settings and there's a tab for "Facial Recognition" on the left rail. Between "Language and Regions" and "Notifications"

MilnerRoute4• 7 years ago

I really appreciate you posting this.

Just to confirm my experience: when I click on that link, I see "General Account Settings" (like name, username, contact... Everything that's available from the first left-hand menu choice.) And no where in that left-hand menu is there any choice about Face Recognition.

I do have a left-hand menu choice about "Timeline and Tagging" -- but there's still nothing there about face recognition.

ufmace2• 7 years ago

I don't know if this is supposed to be new, I found it and it was already set to "no". I think I turned it off on one of my privacy kicks a year or two ago, not sure exactly.

Zelphyr• 7 years ago

This is great for the new users it appears to apply to. But what about people like me? I haven't had a Facebook account in seven years. Yet, I'm not delusional to believe they don't still have my data (yes, I "deleted" it) along with my picture. So every time my wife posts a picture with me in it to Facebook, they know where I am.

JohnFen2• 7 years ago

...and Facebook will tell you it's deleted. But why should anyone believe them?

lwansbrough• 7 years ago

How do I do this if I’ve already deleted my Facebook profile? I know Facebook is still holding some data on me because the “that account doesn’t exist” page it shows when I type in my former account email is subtly different than the page when I type in an email I know doesn’t exist.

DevKoala2• 7 years ago

I am in the same boat.

teamspirit• 7 years ago

Exactly my problem too. It almost feels like I have to have a Facebook account just to opt out of Facebook's tracking. Furthermore, and as others have stated, what about all the time my face may appear in other's photos?

pesenti16• 7 years ago

If you are not or no longer are a Facebook user or you do not have the Face Recognition on, we will not create or store a face template to recognize you.

Source/Disclaimer: I work at FB and this feature is managed by my team.

mellowdream• 7 years ago

I deleted my FB account a few days ago, and reactivated it today (within the 30-day permanent deletion cancel period) to see if I could delete FB's record of my face data. Like some others in this thread, I couldn't see any option to do so.

Do I need to wait for this option to be rolled out to my account (and how long will that take)? Can I delete my account anyway without this option having shown up? (While ensuring FB doesn't have records of my face?)

bpchaps• 7 years ago

Does this count for backups, too?

ubercow13• 7 years ago

Is this feature related to the face verification Facebook sometimes does on new or old accounts? (where they ask you to submit a picture of your face to verify your account is real)

Recently I created a new account after not having one for a while and failed the face verification thing. I wonder how that can even be possible if not that they have an idea what my face looks like already and it wasn’t the same as the one I gave.

e_proxus• 7 years ago

What about having a disabled account (the option where you can continue to use Messenger)? With a disabled account you can't log-in to check the settings because Facebook will automatically enable the account again.

znpy2• 7 years ago

But will you delete a face template when a user deactivates his/her account ?

d102• 7 years ago

I'll speculate that facebook will never "delete its internal record of your face" as the title states. They're using misleading words to make this sound like a significant concession, when it isn't.

Suppose Alice appears in photos with Bob. And that Carol appears in other photos with the same Bob. Facebook can infer the Alice..Bob..Carol relationships.

If Bob "opts-out", facebook will still know that Alice appears in photos with unnamed person, and also that Carol appears with same unnamed person. So they'll infer the Alice..unnamed person..Carol relationships.

If, hypothetically, facebook offered Bob the option "do not use my face in your algorithms." Then maybe they wouldn't link Alice and Carol. But all facebook is offering here is "don't associate my face to my account".

This cleverly gives facebook some cover. Bob might ask facebook, "don't use my face to surveil my friends", but facebook can say "how could we possibly do that? We don't associate your face with your account, so we can't associate your face with your preference, even if we wanted to."

rhacker4• 7 years ago

We'll end up with a website called "Do Not UseMyFace" and you'll take a picture of your face and upload it to the FCC in an effort to stop RoboFacing.

sverige• 7 years ago

Which will ensure that not only Facebook but also every other social media outlet will now have your face tied to your identity.

blancNoir• 7 years ago

From the article:

"When you opt out of facial recognition on Facebook, the company will delete your template, meaning it will have no original reference point for your face and therefore cannot find your face at all."

...

When people turn off their face recognition setting, we can no longer create a face template for them for any purpose, including A.I. research,” the spokesperson told OneZero.

rhacker4• 7 years ago

I think d10 is saying that, by deleting your face template, they will still have "unnamed person 7749" in 45 different photos, which happen to be YOU, which they won't every say again, but you're still in there, linked up to all those people... possibly creating new relationships between people that don't have the same friends but went to the same wedding, all because you're in both sets of photos.

llarsson• 7 years ago

Sounds like they'd have to have my face on file so that they'd be able to identify "oh yeah, this is one who has opted out".

How else would it work?

pesenti16• 7 years ago

That’s not accurate. If you are not a user or don’t have the FaceRec setting on, we will not create a Face Template and won’t be able to recognize you in pictures.

Source/Disclaimer: I work at FB and this feature is managed by my team.

throwaway8879• 7 years ago

Unfortunately, I am unable to trust your words at this moment in time. I'm sure many others will agree.

toofy• 7 years ago

While I desperately want to trust you on a human to human interaction, and I genuinely do want to trust you, we’ve been misled with disingenuous language by companies at FB’s scale so many times for years, I’m finding it difficult to trust FB at all—it isn’t you, at all, it’s Facebook’s and similar companies intentional fogging of language which leads do this distrust.

And while I do want to trust you, I can’t trust that the company/industry itself wouldn’t figure out a way to exploit it at a later date :(

It really does make me sad that I can’t trust what you’re saying, i think a fundamental part of humanity is wanting that level of trust, and it’s been intentionally exploited.

echelon• 7 years ago

I work at FB and this feature is managed by my team.

How do you feel working at Facebook? Do you feel pressure from your peers on the outside about the moral compass of the company?

Maybe you can't answer these things if you aren't using a throwaway account, but I'm very interested in hearing how Facebook employees perceive the company themselves, as well as how they're treated by company outsiders.

My impression is that a lot of engineers are opposed to how Facebook operates and that this reputation must make recruiting and retention difficult.

goatinaboat• 7 years ago

Let me guess: it defaults to on?

alxlaz• 7 years ago

This doesn't sound like the use case that the parent comment was describing. Parent comment was about what is inferred if you are a user and no longer have FaceRec setting on, but used to have it on at one point, and opted out. That's why the speculation was that "facebook will never "delete its internal record of your face" as the title states."

Edit: not to be snarky, because I'm pretty sure that wasn't your intention, but it sounded like you were doing exactly this:

This cleverly gives facebook some cover. Bob might ask facebook, "don't use my face to surveil my friends", but facebook can say "how could we possibly do that? We don't associate your face with your account, so we can't associate your face with your preference, even if we wanted to."

Everyone understands how opting out works and what it means (I mean, some of your bosses pretend they don't, but even they do). Of course you can't create a template when the setting that disables template creation is on. The question is what do you do with data that you inferred in the past, and what kind of privacy can be expected if you opt out of a feature after it's been used. That's particularly important given this industry's history of opting in for you.

znpy2• 7 years ago

question: how can I ask facebook to disable facerec for me, as an ex user who disabled his facebook account ?

sabana• 7 years ago

You have deeply questionable morals

nf8nnfufuu3• 7 years ago

What happens to unknown faces in photographs, you just discard them? What if I have 1000s of photo of aunt Emma, but aunt Emma is not on Facebook. When she eventually joins, and turns Face recognition on, will you rescan all my old photos to identify her? Or will Face recognition only work for new photos?

learnstats2• 7 years ago

There are gaps in your use of language here which is exactly what the parent is talking about. Facebook could turn around later and say "we never said anything about a Face Stencil".

comboy• 7 years ago

But on each picture you automatically recognize when there is some face. And you need to be able to learn new faces. So doesn't it make necessary for somewhere in the system to be your face model in order for system to decide to ignore it? Not my field so I'm clueless but I would assume that without such hidden model it would be more likely to match the next most similar person? (I'm guessing social network is also taken into account to make such mistakes less likely?)

vinniejames• 7 years ago

The point is your algorithm will still need to detect "a" person in order to confirm it's not a person who has opted in and should be scanned

noobdood• 7 years ago

"You can now tell Facebook to " $*

Slowly, with me, now:

Hah. Hah. Hah.

eugeniub• 7 years ago

This is getting tiring. I have to submit a form to tell Facebook to delete data about my face. Submit a form to opt out of binding arbitration for each credit card. Submit a form to avoid being tracked. This whole mess puts a huge onus on the average internet user, and acts like it's the user's own fault if they're every movement and action is being tracked by a hundred entities at once.

ineedasername4• 7 years ago

Yeah, i get that there might be some people who only want to delete a few particular things, but there should be blanket options for entire categories of data, and any tracking/marketing data about you that you yourself did not provide to them.

mjevans• 7 years ago

I've never had, and intend to never have, an account with Facebook or any of their services.

Can we please have sane legal defaults like Facebook ONLY having data profiles for those who have agreed to the creation of such profiles?

smt88• 7 years ago

Sane legal defaults are great and necessary, but not enough. Google has iffy GDPR compliance to begin with and has now been caught circumventing it.

Nothing will be effective short of jailtime for the execs responsible for flouting laws and public trust (not for making a mistake, but actually engineering workarounds).

ufmace2• 7 years ago

Thing about that, Facebook is known to construct "shadow profiles" of people who don't have normal profiles, just to correlate all of the data they happen to gather on you from having their tendrils on half the sites on the internet. It might be better off to create a profile with your info just to turn off as many things as you can, and not interact with anybody on it.

ConcernedCoder• 7 years ago

...yeah but how will you ever get them to delete all the forms you've submitted?

journalctl2• 7 years ago

It’s forms all the way down!

ssss11• 7 years ago

You’re absolutely right - it should all be opt-in. The issue it would seem is that it would no longer be profitable for these companies. I’m also tired of company profits over citizens privacy.

ianai• 7 years ago

It should be societies preference to create the individual property rights for the individual. If a company is profiting off peoples likeness then peoples likenesses are a personal property. Blows my mind that a capitalist society doesn’t get this instinctively and demand it.

journalctl2• 7 years ago

And then at the end, they don’t even really abide by those forms anyway. It’s like getting Shell to stop selling oil or Merck to stop selling drugs: Facebook isn’t going to stop doing what its entire raison d’être is until we use the iron force of law to make it so.

pesenti16• 7 years ago

The feature is now opt-in. It is turned off for all new users and for those who only had the "tag suggestion" setting on.

Disclaimer: I work at Facebook and this feature is managed by my team.

mikro2nd• 7 years ago

More correctly, that's a 'Disclosure', not a 'Disclaimer'.

ineedasername4• 7 years ago

In other words, they've trained their models enough that they can now be ethical about this one particular piece of data.

DevKoala2• 7 years ago

I deleted my Facebook account months ago. Does that mean all of the other records were deleted?

orf• 7 years ago

Of course they don’t delete it, which is why they know not to automatically tag you.

YeahSureWhyNot• 7 years ago

yeah? Zuckerberg promised? suuure

meddlepal• 7 years ago

How do you do this if you no longer have a Facebook account? I am sure they have my data but I deleted my account several years ago and I don't plan to reactivate it.

Rafuino• 7 years ago

I've had this setting disabled for I want to say over a year now. Was I part of some early pilot or something? I followed the instructions here (https://www.facebook.com/help/www/187272841323203) and it was already set to "No". What the heck?

pesenti16• 7 years ago

More info: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/09/update-face-recognition...

The feature is now opt-in. It is turned off for all new users and for those who only had the "tag suggestion" setting on.

Disclaimer: I work at Facebook and this feature is managed by my team.

joeblau• 7 years ago

I deleted my facebook account years ago — how do I delete myself?

pesenti16• 7 years ago

If you are not a Facebook user or you do not have the Face Recognition on, we will not create or store a face template to recognize you.

lightedman• 7 years ago

When are you going to fix the 2FA account issue I noted last year? I'm beyond responsible disclosure times, y'all have been totally silent (which has had the consequence of me being unable to access my account for a year) and I think I'd like to be going public with it really soon.

rswail• 7 years ago

I appreciate you coming here and commenting.

One question, do you construct "templates" for faces that are unmatched by existing templates that are correlated?

This would allow a shadow face recognition profile to be generated that could be later matched to a known image.

I've had face recognition turned off anyway, and I'm not particularly concerned about it, I'm interested though in how internally FB manages "unknown" images, shadow profiles etc.

pesenti16• 7 years ago

No we don't. I answered in more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20903110.

ThrustVectoring• 7 years ago

It'll be extremely difficult for the face-identification algorithm to not run on your face without remembering what your face looks like. Their algorithm is probably a two-step process: find where all the faces are in the photograph, and then attempt to match the found faces to user profiles. It's extremely probable that every failure-to-match gets logged somewhere, and probably annotated with extra data. Will Facebook wind up deleting your facial recognition data only to recreate it without the tie to your profile? It seems extremely likely, unless they keep some list of "deleted faces" and tell the match-to-profile algorithm to discard any results from that list. And that seems very different from actually deleting your face record.

andrerm• 7 years ago

This is misleading to the point it's almost propaganda. From Facebooks announcement [1]

... if you’re in a photo and are part of the audience for that post, we’ll notify you, even if you haven’t been tagged. You’re in control of your image on Facebook and can make choices such as whether to tag yourself, leave yourself untagged, or reach out to the person who posted the photo if you have concerns about it.

[1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/managing-your-identity-...

clebio• 7 years ago

What the even what. This is double speak.

squarefoot• 7 years ago

I still can't use it and won't be able to, probably forever.

I'm not on Facebook and I don't have plans to become part of that thing for the next two centuries or so, but a lot of people I happen to share the same geographical coordinates do. They take and upload photos at events thinking everyone wants to appear in their videos. Now imagine -as someone who strives every single day to stay away from that platform and all associated things- playing an instrument at a dinner and realizing there are no less than half the people there pointing a cellphone at you. How in the Universe can I ask people I don't ever recall the name not to shoot videos of me, or at least not put them on Facebook because once they do I can't ask Facebook to delete them because I don't have a Facebook account?

The real problem here is that I am already somewhere on Facebook since forever although I firmly refuse to be part of it, and I have no way of telling them to delete all my data, short of making an account, which would negate everything I am struggling for. This is crazy.

A while ago I proposed somewhere (probably here, can't recall for sure) a barcode which if shown (worn?) tells the system used to shoot the video that the associated human doesn't want to appear, so that the whole person is deleted from the scene. Now that the random-faces technology has progressed, I would add some AI that swaps that person with a fake one so that the photo won't be ruined by an empty area.

In the meantime we could create human readable symbols telling if and how we want our image to be used and instruct people how to use them, then one day hopefully if someone posts a photo of me while wearing a patch/shirt/whatever with a crossed camera, I can force that person to delete the photo or sue the platform that keeps it online. Of course there should be exceptions for well known public figures and/or public officers during service (read: the heck I'm not uploading a photo of say police abuse even if the cop wears a 5 meters wide photo of a crossed camera!).

cameronbrown• 7 years ago

What infuriates me is when parents do this to other people's children without asking. It's now just a given you'll be uploaded onto some giant corporations systems from birth to death.

throwawaywego• 7 years ago

Give me physical opt-out. A "robots.txt"/do-not-track for computer surveillance spiders. Let me wear a necklace or QR code on my shoulder, and any commercial face tracking software, is required to create a big black blindspot where my facial micro-expressions used to be.

johnday• 7 years ago

The implication that everyone is forced to do something, forever, in order to not have their privacy violated, is a little silly. Explicit opt-ins should be the only legal method.

stordoff• 7 years ago

And then the minute it even isn't slightly visible, Facebook et al will likely take that as you consenting.

patient_zero• 7 years ago

I can "tell" them. What a farce.

Until the title reads "New Law Criminalizes Sale of Private Data Without Consent", this crazy train will never stop.

Taniwha• 7 years ago

So how do I do this if I'm not a facebook user? you can't even contact facebook by email to tell them to stop sending spam because they've allowed another user to sign up using your email address - they have no outward facing public email address

apricot• 7 years ago

I mean you could always tell Facebook to do whatever.

falcongod082• 7 years ago

You can now tell the Queen of England to make you a Knight!

candeira• 7 years ago

I read this as "You can now 100% confirm to Facebook that, indeed, that is your face".

markdown• 7 years ago

Is this for the people who haven't already legally prevented FB from using your face? I fixed this years ago by copypasting a legal message on my FB account refusing FB this permission. They have no right to use my photo for any means whatsoever without my express written permission.

nextstep• 7 years ago

How can I, someone without a Facebook profile, ask Facebook to delete my internal profile?

You Can Now Tell Facebook to Delete Its Internal Record of Your Face

Related Stories