Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
> Though very uncanny, this is rather easy to extrapolate even using the basic facets FB has available. But the most overlooked is photos. They are offline beacons and are to offline tracking what websites are to online tracking. For example you and a group of 10 other people took photos at the same location which FB sees as a small gathering of intimate friends. It will need to qualify the location is not a public restaurant to be sure its an intimate gathering. The chances of you connecting with that person are then really high. And if you are and the other person are in each others photos, then it's almost a certainty you will end up connecting on FB should FB recommend the connection. The more connected FB's network is, the more it can extrapolate based on commonalities from the first degree graph of your network. It's also the reason why Google is betting so heavy on photos and offering free unlimited storage -- remember, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Google wants to build a social network graph based on location and facial recognition to draw on proximity. With AI this will get even more uncanny. For example a wedding will have a certain photography profile (number of pics taken, the time of day, the location and venue based on Google Maps or past photographing histroy, the lighting in the photos, etc). Once you throw AI into the mix you realize Google doesn't need to draw out any conclusions. It can throw all these parameters into the AI engine and draw up proximity. In this case, Google or FB will not be able to tell you how they drew the connection, because even they won't know. All you can assume is the AI engine will take dozens of parameters today and hundreds tomorrow. Google's deep investment in AI infrastructure is a bigger testament to this.
Sure there are ways to implement systems like this where you can't understand what they are doing. Just like you can launch websites and webservices without any metrics, monitors, or logging.
But why would you?
It requires more work, and it makes the underlying architecture more complicated but any sensible organization with a good engineering excellence fundamentals would ensure they can introspect and debug the outputs of any production algorithm.
Cradle to grave data collection!
Clearly Google knew who I was and only chose to expose this tag info once they knew I had a connection to the person whose photo it was. It'd be amazing, and so so creepy, to see a photo of a crowd with the identification engine run unrestricted. They have the info already.
More evidence we need far more privacy controls in mobile operating systems.
edit: Huh, turns out you can add a toggle. I can't believe I never noticed that, thanks!
In my case it's a longstanding habit from when I was told that GPS could drain battery faster :p (maybe it still? does, I don't know)
Turning it off/on would be difficult, but I do set most apps to only allow location services during use... but the maps I have set to always. I also don’t have the Facebook app installed
No idea if the app phones home with all historical location data if you re-enable data though...
Maybe that’s why Google likes to expire it’s offline maps ?
You're spending time and effort turning this on and off.
The rest of us don't.
If you estimate privacy risk as high, then you're naturally willing to make your life harder to avoid this risk, and you naturally come to regard those with lower risk estimates as reckless. Likewise, if you're in the other camp, privacy-preserving measures look like wastes of time and money.
It's hard to say at this point who's right. We haven't actually seen a lot of privacy-related disasters, the lack of which might seem to promote the low-risk camp, but the high-risk people would reply that the breaches that do occur will only become more damaging over time as we move online.
I'm not in the high-risk camp myself, but I do think that this camp has some valid points, since information is power, and power is ultimately a corrupting force. It should be easier to live a privacy-risk-mitigating lifestyle.
Sure you could just give in and "go with the flow" because that's what majority does and it's very convenient.
Also people as social beings want to belong to groups and doing the same stuff they do is the easiest way to gain access to groups.
That's the reason why so many use WA and FB and don't even care about their data. They already gave up and make fun about those who haven't.
If you have courage and a strong personality you can withstand this peer pressure. If you are cool enough there will be others to follow you. If not you can also learn to deal with that and in the end it's only necessary to have a few really good friends in your life.
TLDR; You gain more control over your life and strengthen your personality.
Have you ever tried putting yourself in the shoes of people who leave their GPS on? Can you see how much better the user experience is? Can you understand why someone who never had a negative experience involving their location data might prefer to leave their GPS on?
I leave my GPS on all the time. I love going back in time and see where I was at any given time. I can download the data and correlate it with a bunch of other metrics I keep track on. If it wasn't free, I would pay for it.
I'm not floored that you turn your GPS off. I've met many people just like you. Some of them had traumatic experiences in the past, others generally don't think other people are trustworthy. I can respect that. Just don't assume it's the default sentiment, because it's not.
Here's an interesting survey about trust:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/05/ssc-survey-results-on-...
I've worked in ad tech before. I used to write code to do some of this tracking and enable analytics on it. Nobody I worked with was out to antagonize users, but in principle I'd rather not feed a master profile about myself that gets matched, bought, and sold between companies and their partners. There's nothing controversial about my movement throughout the day but I feel better not being tracked.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
turning gps on before i launch maps is 1 extra tap on the toggle on my home screen.
I think the one with a traumatic experience here is you - one that prevents you from seeing very basic logic for the use case of GPS off.
Google’s implementation looks really convenient but feels too creepy to me.
It's about the 1-3% who will f* you for being a naive sheep.
That is why we can't trust these corporations and that they get more powerful everyday doesn't ease my mind (accumulation until we only have "the shop").
The problem with our economy is the basis for that. In our world (at least in the west, can't really compare that to the east as I only know it from western propaganda) the biggest goal is MONEY (=POWER).
Ethics, environment and people just don't count in this equation (ok they do if you want to improve your image).
Sure that's not what majority of the people sees but also they don't know anything about computers & software and most of them probably haven't thought much about ethics & philosophy. Just because majority does something is not a very good argument (see lemmings).
Go fishing in a secluded area regularly to establish a pattern. Then go hide your phone there one day, do crime, come back and get phone.
At worst, you're somewhere unfortunate (doing something benign and unrelated) and someone brings you in for questioning about it. Wouldn't they do that in many cases even if your GPS was off (for example, from seeing you on cameras or other means)? It seems better to be able to bring in as many people as possible to get whatever information is needed to help with whatever situation was unfortunate in the first place.
If asked, it's not like you're going to lie and say you were somewhere else if your GPS was off. This way, you at least have proof you were exactly where you said you were.
I think it's pretty safe to say bad LEOs make the news because they're extremely rare, and the backlash against each one found signifies that the oversight exists to ensure they don't last long.
Tens of thousands of people confess to crimes is because they are given the option:
- 6 months for a plea bargain confession
- 10-20yrs if they "fight the charges" but get convicted in court
Many cannot afford expensive lawyers, so often times, the odds are stacked against them in court.
In more select scenarios, people confess to crimes they had nothing to do with because of pressure applied. One of many examples would be that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge In summary: [Innocent person] + [cowprod electrocution] = [guilty confession]
Edit: flow
Looks like this, and I find it extremely awesome/useful: https://i.imgur.com/jxxjg1g.jpg
Proof: https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...
And in Europe they can't sell or pass on personal data. They can aggregate it, and sell aggregated data (e.g. for transport planning purposes)
"This includes cell tower and cell sector location, assisted GPS and cell tower trilateration."
"This includes cell tower and cell sector location, assisted GPS and cell tower trilateration."
The article literally says "cell phone location data from nearby cell towers. It's less accurate than using GPS".
"This includes cell tower and cell sector location, assisted GPS and cell tower trilateration."
An internet search showed I was not alone with such problems, and that the solution was to manually revoke some permissions for the app (thankfully it was possible).
I find it amazing that an app can make use of the GPS when it's disabled! I'm actually seriously pissed about it, but there's not much I can do about it.
Also, the only non Android phones are essentially from Apple, and they are too big for my taste. (also, ridiculously expensive ; also, my wife uses iPhones, they all ended their (short) career with a swollen battery; not sure what she does with them)
For location also Wi-Fi is used. So GPS can be turned off but they can track your location by looking at the available Wi-Fi spots around you.
And most of the time you do not need to give the app permission to use the location to do route planning even in unfamiliar neighborhood. You can just input street name or public transport stops have logical unique identifiers.
But of course most people do give permission at some point because it is easier to do so and the app i nagging constantly for the permission.
Unfortunately I believe there's not much users can do other than stopping using Facebook and any of their and similar products for good, then keep being alert because tracking people is both a business for companies and a tool for governments to suppress dissent, so anyone involved in any technology related to communications will inevitably be incentivized to implement anti-privacy features.
At a hackathon in 2012 our team in just a few hours built tech that would detect who you were standing next to or walking past, all while your phone is in your pocket - we were trying to build a tool that would replace exchanging business cards at conferences.
I'm stoked about the Librem 5 project, and I hope it succeeds enough to not disappear in a couple years. I just bought a phone, but I'll likely buy the next rev if the first one works out. I don't need much from my phone, and as long as I can make/receive calls/texts, browse the web, and can get consistent security patches from the community (e.g. some Linux distro supports the platform outside of Purism), I'm happy.
Android and iOS already support privacy controls (and root to an extent), but you're usually at the mercy of the manufacturer for updates and have to trust them to not remotely access your phone. And many manufacturers just stop sending updates once their new model is out, which is unacceptable for most people for laptops and desktops, so I don't know why it's tolerated on phones and tablets...
MAIDSAFE network!
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_...
Also there is F-Droid (only open source apps for Android) and the Yalp Store (alternative to Google Play with faked account so you don't have to own one).
Hacking my device like with jailbreak (iOS) or rooting (android) is not the way I want to have to go to feel secure and it's nothing I want to have to do before I think I can use my phone.
[1] https://forum.fairphone.com/t/list-of-fairly-fair-electronic...
Government regulation on telecom companies is the only way to ensure that there's even a line that they're required to toe.
Whoa!
LineageOS on a used android phone might be the better solution here.
Google/Apple have enough power etc. and I hope Librem5 will be here to show that it is possible to create a descent smartphone with a REAL linux (no, not android) under the hood.
Freedom is only real if you own & control it - not if someone tells you that you're free to go now (to rise the shares probably) ;-)
That was already proven possible with Ubuntu's smartphone adventure. What we need is a sustainable effort. We've managed on the desktop, hopefully the smartphone is possible too.
Of course there is the problem of all those proprietary IOS and Android only apps…
I wonder what would happen if they were just straightforward about this. "Friends you May Know is really cool! We use your phone's location data and do cross-checks on your address book to make the most intelligent suggestions. We even use some unique features of your camera to figure out if you know people!"
They don't have to give away the store, but they could certainly avoid the creepy "try and guess what ridiculously creepy stuff we're doing to suggest friends" game.
I don't use Facebook because I value my privacy, and I'd probably have less success convincing people to leave the platform if they were upfront about the stuff they do. People care a lot less about their privacy than PR firms seem to realize...
They could also come up with a more substantial business model.
I've got over 9000 suggestions and not a single accurate one. Maybe they have the best technology and all the data out there, but I'm skeptical they can really use all the data they supposedly have on me.
Same goes for any targeted advertisement, not just Facebook. Some come close (based on simple topic preferences), but in all those years I've yet to see any large number of the actually useful ones. All those data mining and AI-driven targeting seem to utterly fail, suggesting me to buy a second TV after I've just already got a new one. Or subscribe to Grammarly (every second YouTube pre-roll, seriously?!), when I've already bought that.
At worst it's usually people I don't know but logically could: friends of friends, people who worked somewhere I worked before or after me, people who went to my high school I never really knew.
Occasionally it's full of apparent shady accounts: usually fake looking accounts of attractive women I have no friends in common with, then they'll disappear. I'm guessing scammers upload fake contact lists of random phone numbers to get on people's suggestion lists
I've recently moved to a different country, and now I get suggestions of some random people supposedly from here - even though I don't know anyone here yet. Well, except a few coworkers and a landlord, who - if they have Facebook accounts - aren't in the suggestions, even though Facebook knows where I live and work (I don't advertise it, but that's not private either).
Paired with the fact that Facebook intentionally spams daily with "you have 20 new notifications", they just train me to filter and ignore their notifications. If someone's going to message me there, I won't see them until the routine monthly check.
> subscribe to Grammarly
Oh my god. I considered installing it just to stop the ads, but I see that doesn't help.
I have mixed feelings about Grammarly. It's a perfect example of a thing that should not be an on-line service, but a fully off-line product. In its current form, it's essentially a keylogger.
Wish their browser extensions would have a non-invasive on-demand mode, where the user has to click the toolbar icon to initiate the verification explicitly.
uBlock Origin works wonders in that sense.
> [Facebook:] "We’ve often sought patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans."
> “A lot of patents are filed at the idea stage rather than the actuality stage,” said Ranieri by phone. “A tech company that files a patent has, hopefully, at least thought about how to do it. You’d hope they could implement it if asked, but it doesn’t mean they have done so before.”
So if registering a patent neither requires that I actually intend to make use of the idea, nor that I even knew how to do it, what keeps me from patenting moonshots such as "A general framework for DNA-editing based cancer therapies" or "A method to construct a moon base using a mix of on-site material and material sourced from earth" and start raking in cash once someone else figures out the details and actually wants to do it?
It's true that you don't have to actually try to do the thing you patent nor that it has to actually work. However, a patent isn't an idea. It's a specific description of HOW to do accomplish something.
So your "general framework for DNA-editing based on cancer therapies" will have to include statements describe the actual process. Sometimes patents have fairly vague statements here, but, those are rarely defensible. More commonly, they balance specificity with generality.
For 1-click have a look at the patent claims https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/claims?CC...
This is not simply saying "oh, we invented the idea of a single click buying experience, nobody else can do it now." It is saying HOW they did (or would do) it and the reason Apple licensed that patent is because they did it the same way.
If someone did it in a way not described in the patent, it wouldn't be covered by the patent even if the outcome was the same. For example, the patent specifically says the server system knows info about the user. Today, you can go to many websites and 2-click order a product using Apple Pay where the server knows nothing about you. If we ignored good security practices, this could be 1 click (just skip the verification pop-up, the rest would work fine.) The patent (if it were still valid, which it is not due to expiration) would not cover this.
Now, one can still always dispute the specificity of a patent. And reading 1-click claims as a software developer, some of it may still feel "obvious," but, the reality is nobody did it before Amazon. So how obvious was it really? They go far enough to describe that the system already knew things about the user, that there was an identifier sent to relate to that info, that a single action of some kind was taken, that the system was displaying info about the product, etc.
So in your cancer therapy example, you would need a similar description of how it would work. Not down to the explicit details, but, enough to set it apart from any other similar method or approach to the same outcome.
And if you don't think such a thing would be useful to a company like this (if it could really be made to work) you aren't using your imagination properly.
Why does that not make sense? This has been the case at every job I've worked withe patent filing incentives. You get a few thousand dollars for coming up with an idea and going through the motions of writing the technical parts of the patent. The patent doesn't have to have anything to do with the business, they just want it for defense, and to increase value of a potential sale of the company.
It seems preposterous to me, but this is also the basic idea I've got from working at multiple big companies where they have training meetings to explain these things. You're very much encouraged to come up with ideas and submit them for the lawyers to look at and possibly patent even if it has no applicability to anything you're doing.
Sorry for contradicting you earlier. That still seems like a crazy way to manage IP, but after all I haven't got a better solution. Thanks for explaining. In my career I haven't been expected to produce patents very often. I'll try to remain a bit more humble.
Company A owns patents X, Y, Z. Company B owns patents M, N, O.
Company B sues company A that one of their products infringes on patent N. Company A countersues that 3 products of company B's infringes on X, Y, & Z.
That's the defensive aspect for company A. They won't instigate but they'll retaliate aggressively. This is known as the "nuclear option" as this strategy was employed during the Cold War - build up your offensive arsenal as a defensive measure to protect yourself against a first strike.
Plenty of examples during the smartphone patent wars[1] and perhaps this strategy isn't quite as successful as it once was.
For patent trolls having a large patent portfolio can increase the likelihood that you own a patent that the troll's patent is based on helping you with prior art claims. So having a large patent portfolio improves your defensiveness there. Additionally a large patent portfolio increases the value of your company because those patents are IP that have tangible value in the market; many tech companies choose not to monetize but frequently IP licenses can be bought/sold (or even the patents transferred) and mutual IP licensing is frequently part of lawsuit settlements so there's further value there. Since it's impossible to actually predict the value of almost any given patent in the future, having a large war chest improves your bargaining position/value of the patent portfolio.
Part of the reason is that companies would rather err on the side of obtaining a patent on something patentable rather than miss it & get sued by someone else. Another reason is that it can easily turn out that there are significant technical challenges in productizing an idea but you don't find out until well after you've filed the patent.
There's also a defensive aspect. For patent trolls you want to beat them to filing the patent so you have a far easier legal defence - America was first to file until very recently so that was also a significant incentive in filing defensive patents. For competitors you want to have the patent so that if it turns out a successful product by another company relies on your product heavily you can use it offensively or defensively in case that competitor comes after you (traditionally the bigger Silicon Valley companies have preferred to stick to defensive use of patents against competitors but that isn't always the case).
Finally there's a financial incentive to this from the employee side. Patents bring you bonuses and prestige. That means you have an incentive to push even questionable patents through the process. The patent filing process is completely divorced from marketing AFAIK (haven't sat on any review boards) so no one ever considers the negative PR risk from articles like this (probably rightly so).
> And if you don't think such a thing would be useful to a company like this (if it could really be made to work) you aren't using your imagination properly.
Of course it would be useful. However realistically the engineer in me thinks that when deployed at scale suddenly it can become a lot less useful than other more straightforward methods; both in terms of compute & memory required as well as accuracy. There are cheaper more accurate ways to solve this so why bother wth something so complex/expensive that carries significant PR risk? In fact, FB owning & not using this patent means they can win PR brownie points suing companies that do attempt to use this technique.
Think more along the lines of competitor companies that are already operating.
Building a large user graph from scratch is the major impediment to someone coming along and challenging Facebook. This kind of thing is trying to head off alternative ways to build that user graph.
There's quite a few papers out on fingerprinting/identifying cameras from images taken with them using intrinsics (dust, scratches, slight offset of image sensor with respect to lens).
These aren't mutually exclusive. The reality of the world may just be acquiring more scary things, and ones that are created for profit.
It may possibly be one of the worst guards against it. 99% of the population don't understand it and don't give a shit. Co-incidently that's the only reason Facebook and Google get away with it too, or it'd be far more profitable for them to back off and play the "we value your privacy" PR card.
Literally the only difference is that Facebook is headed by software engineers and governments are headed by a bunch of people with tons of power and no knowledge. You tell me which is more dangerous. You can't act ethically if you don't even understand the domain you're acting in.
On the other hand, you can do a lot more damage if you have the knowledge, and do not care about ethics.
By the way, do you see the issue of NSA carpet surveillance coming up on the ballot very often? Democracy sucks. Consensual liberal markets are the secret sauce to the free and prosperous societies humanity has produced, NOT the utter sham that is democracy.
However if Facebook gathers a large data set of known signatures to work with or worse does so from the hardware without your knowledge or consent as opposed to anyone working with your posted photo galleries is a scary Facebook thing.
The more ways we have to implicitly correlate/extract data using these techniques, the more accurate model of the world we can build.
It reminds me of this pretty cool research about extracting audio from silent videos:
http://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibr...
Where it gets scary, I guess, is where it upends the standard norms and expectations of privacy. As the tools proliferate, forensic reconstruction type analysis becomes available to almost everyone, which totally opens the doors for new levels of creepiness from all sorts of actors...
Also drone swarms. They scare the shit out of me for the same reason.
When it comes back “no data”, record yourself signing up for a FB account, since at that point, they’ll list suggested contacts that cover pretty much everyone you know.
(Even if this doesn’t work as I predict, it’d document what they’re doing for gpdr compliance.)
This sounds like something out of Silicon Valley.
Though I do think it would be nice to have a hardware (iris?) way to close off the camera. Some laptops have this, though I'm sad mine doesn't.
https://harvestimaging.com/blog/?p=814
So likely to provide a few bits of entropy.
2006: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3455253_Digital_Cam...
Notes (by El Gamal of FPGA fame, not cryptography fame): http://isl.stanford.edu/~abbas/ee392b/lect07.pdf
Forensics: https://www.mobiledit.com/camera-ballistics
Anti-forensics (counter-measures/imitation): https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07795v1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305181626_Removing_...
How is this possible? Wasn't it a requirement of a patent grant that you actually try to put it to use?
I'm wishing for a "dumb" social networking company, where the people who run it are idiots and I don't have to worry about this kind of invasive engineering (I long ago deleted my Facebook).
There's always twitter, I suppose.
I think the point you were trying to make is that I shouldn't directly tie intelligence with unethical behavior (i.e. all smart people are unethical), and you're right. That said, my point remains ... in this age the unethical exploits will by definition be discovered and implemented by intelligent individuals.
Always reminds me of part of the speech at the end of The Great Dictator.
"We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost."
The only solution to the privacy problem is legislation. My favorite idea is HIPAA type regulations for intimate personal data like audio, location, etc. Leak location data? That will be $10,000 per incident where an incident is one record per person on a given day.
This would transform data like this into a liability rather than an asset, pushing companies to store it only long enough to perform a given service and to develop cryptographically blinded systems whenever possible to cut exposure.
As it stands all the economic incentives encourage all vendors (even small indy apps) to maximize privacy invasion at every opportunity.
Plastic surgeons are bound by HIPAA. They do not provide essential services. Similarly, we can regulate social networks without ensconcing them into our society’s fabric as utilities.
It appears they believe it’s close to being a utility, and I’d argue in a way it has become close enough to need oversight as such.
ISPs are a utility. Facebook is not.
The commodity factor is important because it allows for fragmentation. That controls the power balance between the utilities (important: plural) and the public as a whole.
I strongly oppose your suggestion to bring in the government use of violence to impose your ideological goals on others. They have to chose for themselves.
Ok let’s test your hypothesis.
Camera noise
Right, I’m tagging you in this group photo and uploading it. Where’s your choice now?
There's a difference between being a random bystander in an individual's photo and mass surveillance of the public space through millions of photos. Just like lots of photos become something else - movies - lots of photos of public spaces become something else - a surveillance state.
You're sitting on one principle and riding it to the point of absurdity. There are lots of other principles, like the right to live in a free society. Sometimes freedom requires lack of freedom - sometimes we have to apprehend criminals. You can't ride this principle all the way without taking off your blindfold.
You don't even know which services do that. There are lots of apps out there that use FB's API and send off details of the user's phone and app activity to FB, whether or not the user has an FB account or not.
https://mashable.com/article/facebook-data-sharing-apps-priv...
For example, Kayak sends flight searches to FB. So don't fly maybe?
When I finally caved and joined (something I hope to undo shortly) I was immediately informed of all the people I know who are already on the network, not from the contacts I explicitly didn’t share with them, but from the people who searched for me before I made an account. I’ve never given FB my phone number, but I’m sure they have it in a database somewhere. They probably knew my face before I ever signed up.
You're free to take the precautions you deem necessary to prevent others from accessing information you want to keep to yourself. I will defend your right to not be coerced into producing information against you will, but I can't help you once the information is out.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect to be able to stop the collection, analysis, and distribution of data. I don't think you can reliably track the source of all data either, which makes the fine you suggest very difficult to implement. What if an individual collects and distributes the private information of thousands of people (which I don't think should be very difficult)? Are they expected to be able to afford such a fine? Who does the fine help?
I think the best approach for most people is to try to act as if they're always being watched.
The psychological effect of knowing you're always being watched could mean the end of any cultural or social innovation.
I don't see that happening... ever. Even if it were possible (I'm pretty sure dust and scratches on a camera lens aren't in focus...).
>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.
ie facebook mentioned the concept of tracking you by the dust on your lens. No evidence that they can actually do it.
This seems pretty useless. The only scenario where it gives FB more information is where person A takes a picture, gives it to person B through some route other than FB and then person B posts it on FB. Any other scenario and FB does not need to compare dust specks.
I think people who use FB generally share photos with their friends who are also on FB, through FB.
The result is basically dozens of photos out of which only the best 2 or 3 get shared on Facebook.
And in general Facebook is not how those photos get shared. Not even its Messenger because it has annoying size limits, which matter for videos. If I were to guess, out of Facebook's properties, WhatsApp is probably the most popular photo sharing app by volume ;-)
I feel there is no reason to expect Facebook would be content with data hosted on just their platform. With camera fingerprinting, they could be relatively sure who you are on other platforms like Twitter, VK, Youtube etc in cases where the user doesn't use the same email/name.
I agree with you on your other points, but not "forced".
I've left Facebook and encourage anyone who cares about privacy at all to do the same.
With the prevalence of mobile phones, whose camera lenses are likely to be exposed to a lot more "scrubbing" than a professional/dedicated camera, I suspect this might not work so well.
Also forgive me if I don't 100% take their word for it that none of this shit has been implemented except a few tests in 2015. These companies are never forthcoming with the truth around these matters of privacy and security. Ever. Any breach, any shady practice is denied until it's not possible to deny anymore. Why should they be truthful? It can only bring bad PR and there has literally never been consequences for lying about it.