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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

The plaintiffs in the case argued that Facebook violated that law when it introduced the "tag suggestions" feature without gaining express consent from users.

I'm going to step out on a limb here and say the outrage police are getting out of hand. Tag suggestions are incredibly useful. If I have a library of pictures (and I do), I want software to suggest tags for them. They're my pictures, FFS.

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I'm pretty sure it's because Facebook started suggesting that Alice should be tagged in Bob's photos without Alice's consent. They're Bob's photos but it's using Alice's likeness to suggest tagging her without her consent.

Edit: And the law in Illinois is (to quote the article): 'The statute requires any entity that gathers biometric data—including fingerprints, voice prints, "hand or face geometry," and retinal or iris scans—to get informed consent from those individuals whose data it collects'

If I have a 4/8k video where I recorded voice and face of a person, do I need to get a consent or only when I extract it and use it as biometric data?

depends on the state and the context, but yes: audio/video recordings without consent of both parties can be illegal.

So in Illinois it's illegal to run face detection against my own photo library, the way iPhoto did 5 years ago?

Sounds like there's a difference between gathering prints (faceprints, fingerprints, voiceprints) that can be used to identify people v. simply identifying that something is a face, a fingertip, or a voice, which is what iPhoto did.

From my understanding the distinction is whether or not personal data is being saved, so as long as iOS isn't saving/classifying specific 'faces' it's not illegal.

I think the difference is:

iPhoto says "This is a face. Would you like to type in who it is?" And Alice would type in "Bob".

Whereas Facebook uses Bob's profile information to say "Is this a photo of Bob?", leaking Bob's identity to Alice.

I might be missing something here, but I don't think the usefulness is particularly relevant.

They aren't your faces. The law just requires consent.

Calling names and swearing? Seems like you're outraged. Not them.

Maybe you're forgetting how creepy it was when it first happened, back when cellphone cameras were just maturing past the potato phase? I remember the feeling of shock and invasion when one day, suddenly Facebook's computer started calling me and my friends by name.

That feeling framed all my subsequent interactions with Facebook's burgeoning ad profiling and behavior prediction features, cloaked more artfully by FB after lesson learned not to headline their breakthroughs in computer vision. Boil we frogs on the march to normalization and surrender.

> suddenly Facebook's computer started calling me and my friends by name

Here's one creepy correlation horror story...

I just started at a new job, so got a new email account in a new domain that I've never been associated with before.

Last week I got an ipad as a gift, set it up with my personal account on my personal domain.

Last few days, I start getting spam from apple on my work email about service offers for this new personal tablet!!

Zero relationship between the accounts or domains!

The only possible explanation is they're correlating the IP address and going by that. Very creepy.

I stopped using Facebook when I was looking around the HTML tags for an image (can't recall why) and noticed it listed keywords for the image. The keywords were lacking context and only mentioned objects and weather, so it was obvious the user didn't assign them. Facebook logging what's in photos is creepy enough, but the fact it was happening in the background was the worst.

Those are alt tags and useful information for people with low vision who use screen readers

That's fine, as long as the people whose biometric profiles facebook creates have consented.

I think you'll find that by uploading them to Facebook, they are Facebook's pictures as well, to a substantial and meaningful degree.

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