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Comment by jonlucc | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people have said this, but Facebook has upload directly from phones to their server, right? So I would be shocked if they aren't trusting the time tags from direct uploads and metadata set by the camera (which they strip before displaying, but surely they ingest it) more than they trust upload times.

Also, people tag themselves all the time, and if you upload a photo with people, you can tell quickly that they already identify people with high accuracy, because they suggest tags for you.

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Seems you're missing one thing here, rewind 10 years back and the iphone 3G got released at the end of that year so not many people were using phones to take pictures and even less uploading them as their data plan did not allow when coverage allowed to do so.

You're really reaching now. People were regularly using phone cameras long before smartphones. By the time smartphones were a few gens in it was ultra common, and a big benefit of them (that even non-technical people could understand) was that you could use wifi whenever possible and avoid data charges (which really weren't much higher then than now in most markets; "unlimited" plans were more common too). Also the 3g has a 2mp camera, so we're talking about pictures that are 2-3MB at most. The suggestion that people were shy about uploading relatively small photos to Facebook circa ~2008, and that this supports this flimsy story in any way, is sheer nonsense. I'm no fan of Facebook - am a long-term outright refusenik actually - but the conspiracy theories are getting out of hand. There is zero substance to this article, it's wildly speculative clickbait.

In 2008 Facebook itself was in its infancy. Orkut was still the largest social network, only toppled around 2011. The majority of the world was definitely not uploading any phone pictures anywhere.

> In 2008 Facebook itself was in infancy

That's quite an overstatement, to put it very mildly. Facebook was allowing open non-.edu signups by 2006, and the buzz around it from it's school success was immense. By 2008 it certainly wasn't seeing a critical mass of boomers and other late(st) adopters, but it was still huge by any measure - 100 million users, and growing with unprecedented speed.

People were absolutely already uploading phone pictures to FB and other sites by then; I think there may even have been Facebook apps shipping on non-smartphones by that time, it was one of the earliest things carriers used to flog data plans. I agree that "the majority of the world" wasn't uploading phone pictures anywhere by then, but then I'd be surprised if that rather high bar has been reached today either.

The matter at hand is collecting user pictures for mass scale machine learning. I and everyone I know didn’t even join FB until 2011-12. 100m is nothing compared to the current 2.2B user base who is posting annotated 10 year old pictures of themselves. This is to counter the parent comment that “they already have this data anyway”, not an absolute statement on FB growth.

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