Comment by joering2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joering2 | Hacker News Reader

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I think its worth pointing out that regardless of how you setup your photo recognition/face identification settings, what happens behind the scene is entirely different thing.

I can see FB user turning all those recognition features off, but yet when FB is given a photo and asked by LE for help with finding you in FB network, FB can choose to comply with that and quickly find you in a stack of 100 billions of photos, providing LE with array of all your photos organized by time and place.

edit: also, I believe there will be more way of abusing photos recognition in the future. Just like Federalies are using Google Earth Maps to find who has a swimming pool and match this information against resident's taxes (whether they paid pool taxes or not) and acting accordingly if they haven't paid, I can see IRS tapping (or at least wanting to tap) into FB photos stream and find folks that bought luxury stuff and did not claim it tax-wise.

That makes me wonder two things:

1. Is it bad (or unfair) for the IRS to use technology to fight tax fraud? I mean, every dollar not collected from a tax evader is an extra dollar that must be collected from a law-abiding citizen. It sucks for the person with the pool, but if it means lower taxes for everyone else, I think that would be a good thing.

2. Google Maps is public, but what obligations does Facebook have to reveal photos that are posted privately (i.e. to friends), to law enforcement?

1. No, its not bad. I was not looking at the issue from "right" or "Wrong" perspective. This is only one example. I am sure there are others.

2. Unfortunately, its not even up to the judge to determine "obligations". Companies that grow as big as Facebook tend to turn evilish. ATT is a private company with healthy profits; your phonecalls suppose to be private and you pay ATT for delivering of service, but yet you have NSA and others involved, where the Government publicly saying "yes we listen everything, we OCR your conversations looking for terrorism, we record everything in our trillion terabytes storage center". Skype is private too but its been known they are or may be listening too.

To think that profits-seeking revenue-troubled Facebook will not want to look for additional ways of making money such as selling your data to government is naive. I really can imagine, sooner or later, an official set aside budget that Govetnment will come up with that will be spend only on asking Facebook for full access to their databases. Who knows, perhaps this is they way FB will turn profitable-healthy. Guess the question would be if that, hopefully, will finally scare ppl off of using it.

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