A Rather Alarming Story/PSA

I've been gone again haven't I? Well, last week, my family and I went to New York State to stay at a cottage. Interestingly, we stayed not too far away from the place that Tony Stewart killed a man during a race. We were going to go watch the race originally but we ended up not going. Anyways, that gives you an idea of where we were staying. So after coming back from the cottage, I was ready to re immerse myself into the digital world like all people do after sometime away from it all. And then something alarming happened.

I had decided to start by checking Facebook to catch up with my friends and such. It was a pretty typical day on Facebook with the constant scrolling with the occasional funny picture or so. I should probably introduce two characters here before continuing. I will change the names here for privacy reasons. Person A, or "Adam" and Person B, or "Bobby". If you have read my introduction a while back, you would know that I spent around 2 years as an international student. While there, I met people from around the world. I met Adam and Bobby during this time but Adam and Bobby had never interacted with each other. Years have passed and Adam and Bobby are several countries away from each other yet they have become "friends" with each other on Facebook by adding all their suggested friends.

So while browsing Facebook, I see a picture that Adam posted with him and his friends. That's when I notice an overlay over the picture, saying: "Would you like to tag Bobby"? That was really strange to me because how and why did Adam write that without knowing Bobby? Hovering over the yes-no of the suggestion showed me that they had boxed out one of the people in Adam's picture as Bobby. Now this was obviously not actually Bobby but someone who looked strikingly similar to him. That's when I realized that Facebook analyzed everyone in Adam's picture and when I viewed it, they compared the analyzed faces to our mutual friends. Since one of the people in Adam's picture looked like Bobby, they thought that Bobby was the person in Adam's photo and thought to do me a favour by letting me tag Bobby with a simple click. This may seem like a cool feature that Facebook has implemented but is it really?

What does this event show Facebook knows already? This means that Facebook knows what all of its users look like based off of analyzing and recording all tagged photos. It knows how we look to the point that it can identify a user in a picture almost perfectly.

What does this implicate in the future? This technology is quite powerful and it will definitely be used in the future. There are good and bad things that can come from this. In terms of "good", there are a lot of cool services that can be made a reality. One that I thought of off the top of my head is shopping. For example, if you wanted to see how a certain jacket looks on you, this technology could possibly generate a model/image of you in the jacket so you can see if you want it. On the otherhand, if Facebook sells this information (like it does with a lot of other user info), ads could become a little creepy/annoying if a picture of you in the Bahamas pops up in every page saying "LIVE YOUR DREAMS" or something like that. Another useful service Facebook could make is and identification service. If a someone robs a bank and it's on security tape, the service (if sophisticated enough) could help identify the robber. It's like something straight out of modern day spy movies. But like the shopping service, there may be some sort of ethical line being crossed if this becomes a reality. The main cons I see with this service being more prominent in the future is the loss of privacy and anonymity. People are already complaining about how their IP is always being tracked and the whatnot but if your facial details and physical measurements are being recorded, is it that much of a stretch? I personally think that recognizing faces is not that much of a stretch from recording where you are and your interests (like Facebook already does) but ethically, this discussion should have never happened. Ever since Snowden, it's a well known fact that online privacy is no longer a thing. Simply by opening any webpage, someone somewhere can find out where you are. This should not have ever happened (ethically speaking) but there is too much potential for business with the technology so it happened. The same thing applies to facial recognition. We can get the cool services that I listed above but with it, we're giving away another part our ever diminishing online privacy. And with that, I leave you to make up your decision whether or not facial recognition is crossing the border.

TL;DR Don't get Facebook


For More Info on Tagging Suggestions that Facebook implemented in 2013, click here.