Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I don't think they're listening through the microphone, but I've been wondering to what extent they use your photos to determine how to market to you. For example, most of my photos on Facebook show me with either hair or a hat on; as I've gotten older I've actually developed male pattern baldness, and so one day I thought it would look best to just buzz off the rest. I had a picture taken of me and use it as my Facebook profile pic. Since then, I seem to get more and more ads in my feed for hair transplants. Maybe they classify your photos and sell that data?

If you think about it, there's a lot more guesses they can make from your photos than listening to a bunch of disjointed conversations. They really don't need to hear what you say.

View on HN

Have you checked out your FB ad preferences?

https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/edit/

(article with context: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3dk3y8/how-to-see...)

The Your Information > Your Categories tab might be the most revealing. It is for me as it includes categories that seem to be inferred, not explicitly stated, such as "US politics", "Frequent Travelers", "Expats (Vietnam)" (maybe because I have a Vietnamese surname), and "Technology early adopters", which I can only assume comes from accessing FB using iOS devices soon after their launch date.

That's pretty fascinating... I've been totally oblivious to this feature. Though it turns out I'm not very interesting. The classifications are pretty rudimentary, listing what devices I use, frequent travelers, computation and mathematics, and US Politics(liberal).

Mine are confusing. I saw references to a few things that could've been harvested from comments, some connected to companies that friends and family have used, and a lot of things that I think are celebrity gossip and such. Even the classifications that might make sense on their own were mixed in with enough noise that they almost seem like accidentally there.

Could that be confirmation bias as well? I have no idea how old you are, but quick knowledge graph result said "40% of men have noticeable hair loss by age 35, 65% by age 60, and 80% by age 80." FWIW, if I had a hair transplant product, knowing I could target guys aged ~35 and pique the interest of ~40% of them is a good start. If I cross that with another targeting option (perhaps you're 35 and single, and I assume that maybe getting worried that losing your hair will diminish you chances with women), and run a decent ad, perhaps you'll click. I'd obviously have the pixel code on my page and now you're on my retargeting list for ever more... I could do all that without any photo classification.

Edit: Dwelling on this a bit more, of course - it would make total sense to bucket people with receding hairline photos into lookalike audiences for people who'd engaged with transplant ads... Although I suppose that could be equally relevant for targeting like mentioned above. Right age, relationship status, income bracket... Who knows.

In a sense it's confirmation bias because it caused me to entertain the idea, but I don't believe they are actually classifying photos for advertising purposes. I don't discount the possibility, though. I'm 28 and, although I have been experiencing gradual hair loss. You're right that you could probably take my age and gender to make some guesses, but I'd imagine that using computer vision would allow ads to not be wasted on 60% of men who aren't losing their hair. Having used Amazon Rekognition, which can classify a person based on if they have a beard or not, I think Facebook could do so with reasonable accuracy. Beyond baldness, I imagine detecting the brands of clothes people wear could tell a lot about what fashion lines to advertise to someone.

It could also be a result of you looking at pages (not just on FB) related to male-pattern baldness before making the somewhat pivotal decision to just shave it all off, which would fit in the window of time that you perceive that you started to see more hair-related ads.

But yes, tagging characteristics of people based on photos seems pretty straightforward given the state of their image processing. I would guess that it'd also be used to target eyeglasses to users who wear glasses in their photos.

It wouldn't surprise me one bit. I have an extension that displays the tags that FB assigns to each photo. It detects emotions, environmental features, on and on. Not very hard to strategize with all that information and combining whatever else they know about you (what you "like", etc).

Not sure about Facebook, but Google don't yet look at my photo stream as much as I would expect. Recently I saw an ad for cat food even though I don't have a cat (and Google has all my photos going back 3 years).

They day I truly became old, was the day I stopped receiving ads for partying and travel, and started receiving spam about mortgages, loans, wrinkle-cures and pension schemes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com