FaceApp concerns: compare it with Facebook | Zola ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear Blog

This article alerted me to a popular app named FaceApp.

The article mentions that user pictures are most likely taken and uploaded to Russia. Let me rephrase this in the heads of people who think as far as their nose takes them:

Russia. The reds. Commies! They're taking our pictures now!

So, what can they learn from taking our giving them our images?

Well, having a system that successfully identifies faces is one thing. It might even be 100% successful (which no such system currently is), but to what extent?

I agree that it seems that FaceApp's use of data is fishy; at the very least, they're not transparent about how user images are used.

I've seen fearful social-media posts that shout about the app, asking people to think twice before posting their pictures to Russia.

Is Russia the problem? Does the fact that the images travel across country lines into Russia make them...different from images that travel into the USA? Or—insert nefarious sound here—will you get hacked now?

Let's take a step back and think about how we use Facebook.

In 2017 Facebook boasted two billion monthly users uploading 350 million photos every day, a supply operation that the corporation’s own researchers refer to as “practically infinite.”

In 2018 a Facebook research team announced that it had “closed the gap” and was now able to recognize faces “in the wild” with 97.35 percent accuracy, “closely approaching human-level performance.” The report highlights the corporation’s supply and manufacturing advantages, especially the use of “deep learning” based on “large training sets.”

Facebook announced its eagerness to use facial recognition as a means to more powerful ad targeting, but even more of the uplift would come from the immense machine training opportunities represented by so many photos.

By 2018, its machines were learning to discern activities, interests, mood, gaze, clothing, gait, hair, body type, and posture. The marketing possibilities are infinite.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Profile Books.

One nice thing about Facebook being utterly borked right now is it gives you a chance to see what its (very nice!) accessibility feature auto-alting images does.https://t.co/a3w9PcOosR pic.twitter.com/dnTXOih8Hp
— Dieter Bohn (@backlon) July 3, 2019

Keep the above tweet in mind as you see the following tweet and read the paragraph underneath it to get context.

https://twitter.com/oasace/status/1149181539000864769

In layman's terms, what Jusupovic found was altered "metadata" attached to the photos. Similar to a watermark, this data follows the image wherever it may travel online.

If uploaded to another platform that works with Facebook or its advertisers, this code will relate the image to your Facebook profile. This way, the platforms can coordinate user information and target you with advertisements or campaigns that fit your browsing habits.

Facebook do not care about people. They care about people's behaviour. When I write this, I mean to say that Facebook cares about why you do something, when, with whom, and, ultimately, what can affect you to do as they and people who pay them money to do as they please.

Forget about ads—Facebook has, long ago. That's not their main objective when drawing you to use their site.

Don't forget that Facebook has explicitly sold ads to people who hate Jews.

In 2017, Facebook spent over $11 million US Dollars in sheer lobbyism:

Facebook’s considerable political muscle had been cultivated in just a few years as it learned to emulate Google’s playbook of political and cultural fortifications. The company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, demonstrated an iron determination to preserve his freedom in lawless space, pushing the boundaries of existing regulations and vigorously opposing even the whisper of new law. Between 2009 and 2017, the company increased its lobbying spend by a factor of fifty, building 'a massive lobbying entourage of Washington power brokers.' Facebook’s $4.6 million in donations during the 2016 election cycle complemented its lobbying budget of $11.5 million in 2017.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Profile Books.

Let's go back to how Facebook uses images.

Amazon, another massive surveillance-related company, sells facial-recognition technology which is used by many American states and dozens of countries.

These systems are often racially biased and deeply flawed in multitudes of ways. Foremost, why aren't we spending more time and money on evading the use of face-recognition systems? Ask yourselves that. Then realise who benefit from the use of such systems.

Examples:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/25/18197137/amazon-rekognition-facial-recognition-bias-race-gender

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recognition-race-artificial-intelligence.html

It should not surprise any student of the prediction imperative that with these advantages in hand, Facebook is unwilling to accept anything less than total conquest in its bid to render faces for the sake of more-lucrative prediction products. So far, Facebook and its brethren have been successful, turning back legislative proposals in Montana, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Alaska, and fatally weakening a bill that was passed in Washington state. Among the tech companies, only Facebook continued to oppose even the diminished terms of the Washington legislation.

If rendition is interrupted, surveillance capitalism cannot stand, for the whole enterprise rests on this original sin. This fact is amply displayed in the public drama surrounding the ill-fated 2015 attempt to produce public guidelines on the creation and use of biometric information through a voluntary “privacy multi-stakeholder” process convened by the National Telecommunications and Information Association (NTIA) under the auspices of the US Department of Commerce.

After weeks of negotiations, consumer advocates walked out in protest over the hard-line position of the tech companies and their lobbyists on the single most pivotal issue: consent.

The companies insisted on their right to use facial-recognition systems to identify a “stranger on the street” without first obtaining the individual’s consent. As one lobbyist in the talks told the press, “Everyone has the right to take photographs in public… if someone wants to apply facial recognition, should they really need to get consent in advance?” Privacy scholars were quick to respond that there is no lawfully established right to such actions, let alone a First Amendment right.

Nobody reckoned with the fact that the prediction imperative makes individual ignorance the preferred condition for rendition operations, just as Arendt had observed and Mackay had prescribed for animals in the wild. Original sin prefers the dark.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Profile Books.

I've not even started going into how Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—and these are the main players, but rest assured they have many partners—manipulate and debase people to make money, but do yourselves a favour and purchase a copy of Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism". After all, it's a summer-of-2019 fave.

Speaking of Facebook, I've not even started to go into the Cambridge Analytica scandal, how Facebook is big enough to circumvent GDPR with all the flagrant disrespect for the law that entails, how their $5 billion FTC fine is a joke and how their stock went up as a result, what Edward Snowden revealed in how Facebook allows the American NSA complete access to their innards, and don't get me started on the entire CIA/Niantic/Pokemon Go game surveillance stuff, but still...

So, what have we found out?

Russia is not the problem as things are worse in the USA
FaceApp may be nefarious and capitalistic—but that's nothing in comparison with Facebook
Still, if FaceApp is not transparent and use your images for anything, that's what you sign up for, both by signing up for an account and also by having your picture taken and uploaded to their system - as with Facebook