Facebook harvested 3.5B Instagram images without warning their owners | Hacker News Reader

Facebook harvested 3.5B Instagram images without warning their owners

news.com.au

29 pointsneerajkrdh9 comments

I purposely created a Instagram profile not attached to any email I own (sharklasers.com) The only link between that profile and my real Facebook profile was the mobile device I use to access them. Soon after creating the account people that I am friends with on Facebook started following me and my posts. I never once connected anything personal to this Instagram profile. I'm not sure how I appeared anywhere in their feeds. I can only discern that somehow Facebook inc is able to read the Instagram data on my phone or vice versa. Instagram read my Facebook data, gathers which of my Facebook friends use IG, and begins showing me in the people they may know feed.

everything from your IMEI to phone number to IP and all possible uniquely identifiable elements are sent to IG at the time of registration from your device. If you have like Xprivacy you can see the app go through requests for a variety of data + constantly phones home (like all apps).

FB wants to make sure your new profie is engaged and active, so they'll use this data to nudge you into standard on-boarding processes.

> To speed up its development — by “100 times”, he said — Facebook harvested any images shared on Instagram with hashtags, and fed the photographs into its own system over 22 days.

"Its own system"? As in, Facebook/Instagram's own system? When users upload their photos, in what system do they expect the photos to reside?

The article doesn’t say when Facebook used Instagram’s photos. There was a time when Instagram was not integrated into Facebook’s infrastructure.

I don’t know how deeply Instagram is integrated today but they appear to at least use Facebook’s storage and CDN. So if this research(?) was done lately, “fed […] into its own system” could refer to Facebook’s spam detection system as opposed to Instagram’s spam detection system.

I don't think much of this article. It says they used "publicly available, hashtagged images" - surely anybody could "harvest" these for any kind of non-public use? There's no indication they're being reproduced.

Likely true - though presumably IG (like FB) takes a dim view of people scraping data in huge amounts. And of course the question will be what metadata beyond the hashtagging they were also privy to...

Lol. I get the vibe you want to be mad at them at this point.

It doesn't say when this happened, so since Facebook owns Instagram I don't see anything wrong with using publicly available photos to train a ML mod.

Kinda clickbait title.

"Facebook trains AI with pictures from Instagram" would have been better.

Also, "Facebook technology could now recognise the content of images with 85.4 per cent accuracy, compared to Google’s 79.2 per cent" kudos for that!

How can you harvest data from your own datacenter?

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