"The new authentication scheme is the second in recent weeks that relies on photos. Earlier this month, Facebook asked users to upload nude photos to Facebook Messenger, as part of an effort to prevent revenge porn. Facebook said it would use the nude photos to create a digital fingerprint against which to compare future posts."
Wait what? I had to check whether today was April 1st.
Not sure how I feel about it still, but this article doesn't really accurately portray the service. From the source linked by the Wired article [1], this is specifically intended to prevent a nude photo from being shared maliciously when a user has reason to believe that it will be. They then voluntarily upload the image to Facebook which uses the digital fingerprint to prevent it from being reposted either in its original form or with slight modifications. It's always completely voluntary, Facebook is certainly not requiring or even really encouraging average users to upload their nudes.
There was a thread about this on HN -- too lazy to look it up now or repeat some of the longer comments about it. But going into this assuming that FB has no ill-intentions, FB's proposal seems by far the best solution in a world of ugly and terrible solutions.
For starters, it's intended for victims of revenge porn, which is a fairly extreme category and one in which the harassment is distinctively aggressive and virulent. Because if it weren't, the way FB deals with abusive content generally would seem to be good enough. If you come into this thinking that FB is asking everyone to upload their nudes for "safekeeping", then you've missed the point.
Secondly, it's hard to think of an implementation that wouldn't create a potential disaster that justifies doing anything special for revenge porn victims. Using the Facebook app is the most secure channel for sending FB the photos because it is a secure app that all FB users know how to use. Having the user hash on their own requires either an external app or website.
I don't think it needs to be said how such ancillary applications can be spoofed. Even if only 0.5% of users are dumb enough to fall for these spoofs, each incident would be a complete fucking disaster, for the victims and for Facebook.
As for the prospect of FB owning people's nudes. Again, in the case of revenge porn victims, the horse is already far from the barn. If we assign the worst of motives to FB, that it's a way to secretly collect nudes from users. Again, horse, barn. This secret process would be less efficient by magnitudes compared to what FB can already do today.
- It sets a precedent for uploading nude photos to FB and for them asking for it.
- You need to trust FB to delete the photos when they receive it. Yes, I understand that they probably will, but really, how many systems are those bits going to touch? How many logs are going to have this information? Can you be really sure?
A better implementation would be for the FB client to hash the file and for the hash to be uploaded. Trust issues are still there but at least mitigated to devices that you have some control over.
Evil users that hash legitimate photos can be overcome with the same review system that is being tested today.
FB has a no porn policy so wtf do you have verify you are you to get a revenge porn picture removed?
"We remove photographs of people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed buttocks. We also restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple, but our intent is to allow images that are shared for medical or health purposes. We also allow photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring. We also allow photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures. Restrictions on the display of sexual activity also apply to digitally created content unless the content is posted for educational, humorous, or satirical purposes. Explicit images of sexual intercourse are prohibited. Descriptions of sexual acts that go into vivid detail may also be removed."
https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards#nudity
> ... it's hard to think of an implementation that wouldn't create a potential disaster that justifies doing anything special for revenge porn victims.
> ...Having the user hash on their own requires either an external app or website.
What? Why can't the hashing take place in the FB Messenger app on your phone? Why does the picture need to be uploaded to FB's servers? That just goes to what Troy Hunt was saying earlier today in his testimony to Congress about how corporations are collecting data that they shouldn't even want to have. They should collect only the hash from your phone, not the picture. The hashing should be done locally to your device.
Open source a desktop and mobile tool that generates the image hash w/o the image leaving the device and have the code publicly reviewed seems like one potential approach.
People doing this frustrates me greatly. You had to type 30 key strokes. ⌘+t "ycombinator fb revenge porn" ↵ and paste the results back. How many people are going to read your comment? Maybe 10% of them want to read those links. You spared yourself a trivial amount effort by offloading it to tens or hundreds of others.
I wish people would provide links and source what they say more often. Maybe more discussion sites should let others suggest edits, like on stackoverflow. We could save some of that wasted effort.
misrepresents the idea of the service. It's supposed to tackle the 'revenge porn' issue. If someone sees their own nudes show up on facebook, they can send a picture to facebook, which I assume get's fed into an image detection service that then tries to remove the already circulating nudes automatically.
It really does seem like something an elite private club would do to get a laugh out of fooling the proles while smoking a cigar and browsing the pictures.
Sexting is quite common about young adults and so is the subsequent sharing of those photos. Being able to stop that from happening is incredibly valuable.
I am just surprised Facebook didn't instead look at a way of running these image hashing algorithms on the device instead.
While this totally blows my mind, I can see how those a decade younger might not bat an eye, they might have sent digital nudes in the past, or even have one on the phone. A decade younger than that (late teens), and they might be so impatient about having to upload a digital nude, they just wonder why you can't just use one of the ones they sent last week. The difference in how the generations view technology and digital exposure in vast. "Sexting" came into the public consciousness as a common term almost a decade ago, but that's just when it was publicly popularized.
I mean, I consciously think about every time I actually give a close approximation on my age in a public forum (like I did above), and make a call on whether it's needed or not. I feel like a dinosaur because of it sometimes, but I also feel like there's only so much privacy you're allotted, and once it's lost, there's really no getting it back. :/
Can someone explain if / how this prevents someone from just changing a single pixel and thus circumventing the hash? Are they using some kind of probabilistic hashing? Or are they just relying on the offenders to not be so clever?
To be fair the type of people who are sharing naked photos via Facebook aren't likely to be all that technologically sophisticated to enough understand hashing.
Pedophiles would be using something encrypted and anonymous anyway.
Can't they just train their system to do whatever it is they propose that it do in response to alleged revenge porn, but with any nude image/nude images generally? Will their system prevent the propagation of revenge porn videos?
Instagram did this same bullshit to me when I signed up for an account to to follow some photographers.
'Please provide a clear photo of yourself holding your government issued ID, and a piece of paper with the following code handwritten
on it'.
No, fuck that for a joke.
There's this growing trend of everyone wanting your photo and some ID, and then you have no way to verify that information is being kept securely or used for appropriate reasons.
I was trying to change my email address for the game Black Desert Online upon closing down all of my old Gmail stuff and encountered the same sort of thing!
> A photo of your photo ID card, taken in front of today's physical newspaper clearly showing the date, or over your screen showing your open ticket needs to be added as an attachment to the ticket.
> Please also ensure that the ID is a valid government-issued document and has not expired.
>> A photo of your photo ID card, taken in front of today's physical newspaper clearly showing the date, or over your screen showing your open ticket needs to be added as an attachment to the ticket.
I thought you were being sarcastic, but the page you linked indeed states that.
What is that for, a hostage negotiation? Proof that the time machine works?
How many people buy physical daily newspapers in this day and age?
I moved to Singapore. Their purchases are region locked (and may they burn in hell for that alone). Tried to change my account's country, but that requires submitting your ID and your address, the latter has to be verified by either being shown on the ID or by .. submitting a utility bill or something related.
For a game account. For a change that is irrelevant and only matters because of their shitty business practices in the first place.
I had the same happen to me when I moved countries, but I kind of understand it too as there is a whole industry of stealing and selling WoW accounts for a lot of money.
Zuckerberg is aiming to become president. They might not even need to pay him (outside of political favors, I'd imagine), because he's probably convinced he's building it for his future self.
Facial recognition is utter garbage and until every phone has Apple's FaceID stuff, it always will be. The TLAs know this and aren't going to waste efforts in that particular snake oil.
This is the case with almost all crypto currency exchanges as well. Even in that case, which I can sort of understand (even tho I still hate it), I was pretty off put by it. If Facebook or some other service starts doing this to me, I will use something else.
Oh, right yes I forgot that. I was going to sign up for Coinbase to demonstrate some stuff as a live demo - buy a few $ worth of BTC and transfer it between wallets/show it in the public blockchain/etc.
They wanted me to scan and upload a government issued ID in order to give them money. Nooope, not a chance in hell.
> There's this growing trend of everyone wanting your photo and some ID, and then you have no way to verify that information is being kept securely or used for appropriate reasons.
This is why in the EU there are laws about that sort of thing
Terrible idea. When a unique identifier is necessary, it should be minted for that purpose and only for that purpose. There is absolutely no reason, and substantial disincentive, to create any singular identifier that could ever be cross-referenced across disparate organizations/systems/etc. No, you really don't need to be able to find out exactly who voted for your party in the last election and has an income over 6 figures, nor do you need to know how many cancer survivors choose Budweiser. If what you actually need to make sure the person closing an account is the same as the one who opened it, then that is absolutely the only fact which that identifier should be capable of ever being used for.
This is the KYC (Know Your Customer) laws. Online-only banks like Ally and Simple require the same thing.
In fact, every bank requires this. If you opened a bank account in-person some years ago you may not remember but they asked you for your government-issued ID card.
wording like this is really tricky (intentionally so!), it exploits our naive notion of digital information as files.
One aspect is the machine learning you mention but basically they can also create a new "file" from your image with metadata about your image. Metadata rich enough to render the original image unnecessary. There is no way out of this relatiohship with FB, however they formulate words to comfort you, there is always a different unexpected side to what they are saying..
The more data they keep about these images that they are promising to delete, the more they would make themselves liable to be sued for privacy violation (especially in the EU).
It is a blurred line, but one that most rational companies (=not Uber) would prefer to avoid in the first place by only storing data that is necessary for their main functionality.
... and the new iphone also wants to "set up FaceID", and Samsung's S8+ literally says "Face Recognition: Register your face." / "Fingerprint Scanner: Add your fingerprints." / "Iris Scanner: Register your irises".
I used to think richard stallman was just a paranoid lunatic...
Well, the more time goes by, the more i think he was just 100% right. It's time to be much much more careful and radical with the path technology is taking us.
It's time we all invest a bit of our time to provide real open and benevolent alternatives to facebook, google, amazon, and all the rest, because they're steering internet toward an orwelian nightmare.
Network effects. You and me care. Sadly the vast majority around us bow unquestioningly to demands made by powerful groups like their govt or huge mega-corps. People seem to think these power-centres will always be benevolent and flawless... which history shows is a big mistake to assume.
I wouldn’t put a democratic government on the same level of danger than profit driven mega corps. I’m pro free market, but some corps have reach state-level impact on people lives, and they remain without any kind of overview.
I also don’t want state-run web sites to try to provide alternatives to Google ( like europe tried to do 10 years ago), so i think the foundation model is the perfect structure for that. Economically responsible, but not profit driven.
Fake News! Can't we have some trusted institution like ycombinator put these kind of comments through their truth filter before allowing them to be posted? They could even partner with Facebook to do this. /s
I will never do this. I don't even post photos of myself on FB, or use "Messenger" or their mobile app, so it probably wouldn't work anyway, but I have no doubt they're looking to monetize the feature and that businesses and governments are their target markets.
I wonder if they are using their camera permissions in Messenger to automatically grab an image when someone opens the app...is there any way to verify that?
They still have your face from scanning your friends' photos and contacts. Combine datestamp, location, messages, and posts over years and Facebook knows who was together for a photo whether or not you've uploaded any or been tagged. Facebook knows the face of everyone who is on Facebook or who knows a few people who are.
I can pull a fingerprint off the subway stair rails but that doesn't mean I can identify who it is. We anonymously reveal ourselves everyday but the danger comes from confirming which data is ours. The goal is to make it difficult not impossible.
No, not really. There are not many of photos of me on the web and any that are were taken from a distance and too low res to id me.
I've been stingy about that for a long time. FB doesn't have my phone number and I disabled the email address I used to sign up. I delete all my cookies often and use different browsers and turn off and reset my modem to get a new IP address.
I have no apps on my phone, don't use iCloud, and don't use the native "Contacts" app, I made my own for that.
I know I'm still being tracked, but not as much as most and I don't think FB could ID me right now with photos they have.
Perhaps a workaround would be to pick a random celebrity, somebody with a lot of photos online, and upload one of those.
Facebook would have no way of knowing that it's not you, and they aren't likely to complain that you look like somebody else, since facial recognition will likely always pick up loads of duplicates when used on a global scale.
Alright, they are using it when you've been locked out of your account to verify that you are who you say you are.
You'd have to seed the account in advance by uploading some photos and identifying them as yourself, and you'd have to be able to find photos that haven't been uploaded to Facebook previously.
I may be exceptionally bad at attracting and maintaining friendships. But my experience is that my time between friends is not fungible, and the strength of my friendships are not constant.
For example, my best friends are on the opposite coast. It's not financially realistic for us to hang out in person frequently. The 5 hours a week I could spend sending them letters or calling are not the same as 5 hours I could be spending turning acquaintances who live next door into good friends. Maybe even best friends. It's not theoretically a zero-sum game, of course, but we all know that's not how life actually works and that for one friend to have more of your time/attention means that another loses some time and attention.
What FB has helped me do is to remain easily connected to good friends and acquaintances everywhere. When moving to a new town, finding acquaintances who live there who have common interests with FB is much easier than calling those acquaintances out of the blue and hoping they'll hang out. Most of these acquaintances remain acquaintances, but some become friends -- and the cost of making those friends was substantially lowered.
For remote best friends, FB gives us a way to passively share our lives beyond calling and writing letters. Even if I had unlimited time to spend creating and sending scrapbooks and doing FaceTime, my other friends may not. It's not as good as being together, but I love the option to browse a friend's albums of past recent events on my own time, and then being able to at least experience those memories in a small way.
So I guess I see Facebook has being a very interactive rolodeck. It's not where I conduct my friendships (although I do, to some degree), it just makes maintaining friendships much more efficient. To the point that I keep connections that I would've otherwise dropped, because Facebook has reduced the long-term "maintenance cost". But since it's ultimately a rolodeck to me, I find it easy to ignore and not care what anyone is doing if I don't feel like it, and I have lowered expectations of what I should be getting from FB
> my friend count went way down, my friend quality went way up.
I too quit around then, and I think I feel that most on my birthday. I only hear from probably a tenth the people but now when they remember on their own and text/call it means a lot more.
> my friend count went way down, my friend quality went way up.
This is an important distinction. FB has programmed us to believe quantity is the goal, when quality probably should be. How many FB "friends" does the average user have meaningful relationships with? I'd speculate not many more than it's possible to maintain offline/without FB's "help".
I'm not sure how true that is; virtually everyone I've encountered distinguished unqualified “friends” from “Facebook friends”, the two groups being distinct, usually overlapping, categories. There are certainly people who treasure their number of social media followers, just as there have always been people who treasure the offline equivalent, and social media like Facebook makes it easier to quantity and compare than the offline world. But I don't think it's really that common for people to conflate social media network sizes with genuine friendship.
A few years ago I walked away from Facebook. Three months later, I got a phone call from my mother (who's not online) because she heard through the grapevine that I was dead. My stupid Facebook "friends" took my silence for something sinister and jumped to conclusions.
I ended up returning to Facebook and purging my "friend" list down to just a dozen actual friends.
Why are they stupid? All of a sudden, with no warning or explanation you stopped posting and responding? If I had a friend like that I might be concerned and reach out to friends or family to see if everything is okay. To me that signifies that they care about you, not that they're stupid. It's not like they filed a police report or anything.
My account went inactive and eventually was disabled. To get back into the "nightclub" now, I must submit a copy of my photo ID to verify my identity. No thanks to the Facebook bouncer thugs guarding the entrance...
FB is most likely trying to ward off spammers with this idea. Generating unique faces per spam-bot is easy now, for sophisticated spammers, then for every spammer in a few months. The poster is trying to say that this FB effort won't work well and is already only adversely affecting the most stupid and trusting.
>"Please upload a photo of yourself that clearly shows your face. We’ll check it and then permanently delete it from our servers."
>"To determine if the account is authentic, Facebook looks at whether the photo is unique."
The two statements are a bit contradictory. They might delete the photo but they won't delete its signature/fingerprint, because they need the later to check for uniqueness of other accounts.
Count your blessings. They could have additionally asked for a picture that "clearly shows your genitals".
Anywho, once the 'revenge porn' crowd starts hacking around this by chopping the said head from the said images, the central servers of FB are sure to ask for pics of genitals.
Readit News
"The new authentication scheme is the second in recent weeks that relies on photos. Earlier this month, Facebook asked users to upload nude photos to Facebook Messenger, as part of an effort to prevent revenge porn. Facebook said it would use the nude photos to create a digital fingerprint against which to compare future posts."
Wait what? I had to check whether today was April 1st.
[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/9/16630900/facebook-revenge...
For starters, it's intended for victims of revenge porn, which is a fairly extreme category and one in which the harassment is distinctively aggressive and virulent. Because if it weren't, the way FB deals with abusive content generally would seem to be good enough. If you come into this thinking that FB is asking everyone to upload their nudes for "safekeeping", then you've missed the point.
Secondly, it's hard to think of an implementation that wouldn't create a potential disaster that justifies doing anything special for revenge porn victims. Using the Facebook app is the most secure channel for sending FB the photos because it is a secure app that all FB users know how to use. Having the user hash on their own requires either an external app or website.
I don't think it needs to be said how such ancillary applications can be spoofed. Even if only 0.5% of users are dumb enough to fall for these spoofs, each incident would be a complete fucking disaster, for the victims and for Facebook.
As for the prospect of FB owning people's nudes. Again, in the case of revenge porn victims, the horse is already far from the barn. If we assign the worst of motives to FB, that it's a way to secretly collect nudes from users. Again, horse, barn. This secret process would be less efficient by magnitudes compared to what FB can already do today.
- It sets a precedent for uploading nude photos to FB and for them asking for it.
- You need to trust FB to delete the photos when they receive it. Yes, I understand that they probably will, but really, how many systems are those bits going to touch? How many logs are going to have this information? Can you be really sure?
A better implementation would be for the FB client to hash the file and for the hash to be uploaded. Trust issues are still there but at least mitigated to devices that you have some control over.
Evil users that hash legitimate photos can be overcome with the same review system that is being tested today.
"We remove photographs of people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed buttocks. We also restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple, but our intent is to allow images that are shared for medical or health purposes. We also allow photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring. We also allow photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures. Restrictions on the display of sexual activity also apply to digitally created content unless the content is posted for educational, humorous, or satirical purposes. Explicit images of sexual intercourse are prohibited. Descriptions of sexual acts that go into vivid detail may also be removed." https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards#nudity
What? Why can't the hashing take place in the FB Messenger app on your phone? Why does the picture need to be uploaded to FB's servers? That just goes to what Troy Hunt was saying earlier today in his testimony to Congress about how corporations are collecting data that they shouldn't even want to have. They should collect only the hash from your phone, not the picture. The hashing should be done locally to your device.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15648080
https://www.google.com/search?q=ycombinator+fb+revenge+porn
> too lazy to look it up now
People doing this frustrates me greatly. You had to type 30 key strokes. ⌘+t "ycombinator fb revenge porn" ↵ and paste the results back. How many people are going to read your comment? Maybe 10% of them want to read those links. You spared yourself a trivial amount effort by offloading it to tens or hundreds of others.
I wish people would provide links and source what they say more often. Maybe more discussion sites should let others suggest edits, like on stackoverflow. We could save some of that wasted effort.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creato...
I am just surprised Facebook didn't instead look at a way of running these image hashing algorithms on the device instead.
I mean, I consciously think about every time I actually give a close approximation on my age in a public forum (like I did above), and make a call on whether it's needed or not. I feel like a dinosaur because of it sometimes, but I also feel like there's only so much privacy you're allotted, and once it's lost, there's really no getting it back. :/
Facebook has absolutely no businesses to store nude pictures of their users.
[0] https://www.phash.org/ [1] http://www.lire-project.net/
Example: SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition
https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.08063v2
Pedophiles would be using something encrypted and anonymous anyway.
when will people stop using facebook?
Can't they just train their system to do whatever it is they propose that it do in response to alleged revenge porn, but with any nude image/nude images generally? Will their system prevent the propagation of revenge porn videos?
'Please provide a clear photo of yourself holding your government issued ID, and a piece of paper with the following code handwritten on it'.
No, fuck that for a joke.
There's this growing trend of everyone wanting your photo and some ID, and then you have no way to verify that information is being kept securely or used for appropriate reasons.
> A photo of your photo ID card, taken in front of today's physical newspaper clearly showing the date, or over your screen showing your open ticket needs to be added as an attachment to the ticket.
> Please also ensure that the ID is a valid government-issued document and has not expired.
You can see it here: https://blackdesert.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/210745969-...
I decided it wasn't worth it for the cost of my ID being stored with no transparency as to how/where it would end up.
I thought you were being sarcastic, but the page you linked indeed states that.
What is that for, a hostage negotiation? Proof that the time machine works?
How many people buy physical daily newspapers in this day and age?
I moved to Singapore. Their purchases are region locked (and may they burn in hell for that alone). Tried to change my account's country, but that requires submitting your ID and your address, the latter has to be verified by either being shown on the ID or by .. submitting a utility bill or something related.
For a game account. For a change that is irrelevant and only matters because of their shitty business practices in the first place.
This is next level bat shit crazy even by FB's own standards.
They wanted me to scan and upload a government issued ID in order to give them money. Nooope, not a chance in hell.
This is why in the EU there are laws about that sort of thing
This is literally stuff authoritarian regimes are doing to control their populations.
Does Instagram need to be that sure? Probably not.
In fact, every bank requires this. If you opened a bank account in-person some years ago you may not remember but they asked you for your government-issued ID card.
It's the same thing.
It is a blurred line, but one that most rational companies (=not Uber) would prefer to avoid in the first place by only storing data that is necessary for their main functionality.
It's time we all invest a bit of our time to provide real open and benevolent alternatives to facebook, google, amazon, and all the rest, because they're steering internet toward an orwelian nightmare.
I also don’t want state-run web sites to try to provide alternatives to Google ( like europe tried to do 10 years ago), so i think the foundation model is the perfect structure for that. Economically responsible, but not profit driven.
I've been stingy about that for a long time. FB doesn't have my phone number and I disabled the email address I used to sign up. I delete all my cookies often and use different browsers and turn off and reset my modem to get a new IP address.
I have no apps on my phone, don't use iCloud, and don't use the native "Contacts" app, I made my own for that.
I know I'm still being tracked, but not as much as most and I don't think FB could ID me right now with photos they have.
Facebook would have no way of knowing that it's not you, and they aren't likely to complain that you look like somebody else, since facial recognition will likely always pick up loads of duplicates when used on a global scale.
You'd have to seed the account in advance by uploading some photos and identifying them as yourself, and you'd have to be able to find photos that haven't been uploaded to Facebook previously.
My experience deleting it 5 years ago is summarized as: my friend count went way down, my friend quality went way up.
Your results may vary, but the purpose of my comment is not to immediately be worried that Facebook is a mandatory lifeline for your social life.
For example, my best friends are on the opposite coast. It's not financially realistic for us to hang out in person frequently. The 5 hours a week I could spend sending them letters or calling are not the same as 5 hours I could be spending turning acquaintances who live next door into good friends. Maybe even best friends. It's not theoretically a zero-sum game, of course, but we all know that's not how life actually works and that for one friend to have more of your time/attention means that another loses some time and attention.
What FB has helped me do is to remain easily connected to good friends and acquaintances everywhere. When moving to a new town, finding acquaintances who live there who have common interests with FB is much easier than calling those acquaintances out of the blue and hoping they'll hang out. Most of these acquaintances remain acquaintances, but some become friends -- and the cost of making those friends was substantially lowered.
For remote best friends, FB gives us a way to passively share our lives beyond calling and writing letters. Even if I had unlimited time to spend creating and sending scrapbooks and doing FaceTime, my other friends may not. It's not as good as being together, but I love the option to browse a friend's albums of past recent events on my own time, and then being able to at least experience those memories in a small way.
So I guess I see Facebook has being a very interactive rolodeck. It's not where I conduct my friendships (although I do, to some degree), it just makes maintaining friendships much more efficient. To the point that I keep connections that I would've otherwise dropped, because Facebook has reduced the long-term "maintenance cost". But since it's ultimately a rolodeck to me, I find it easy to ignore and not care what anyone is doing if I don't feel like it, and I have lowered expectations of what I should be getting from FB
I too quit around then, and I think I feel that most on my birthday. I only hear from probably a tenth the people but now when they remember on their own and text/call it means a lot more.
This is an important distinction. FB has programmed us to believe quantity is the goal, when quality probably should be. How many FB "friends" does the average user have meaningful relationships with? I'd speculate not many more than it's possible to maintain offline/without FB's "help".
I ended up returning to Facebook and purging my "friend" list down to just a dozen actual friends.
I always wondered what my Facebook acquaintances thought when I left.
I figured they didn’t care Id left to give it much thought or that I was being a prick and had deleted them.
I'd add that the lessened noise contributes to a sense of clarity which in turn contributes to an ability to think critically on the spot.
It's not like facebook is a nightclub that will refuse re-entry once you leave or anything.
Tadaa. Another pointless privacy invasion that only affects the fair and honest.
>"To determine if the account is authentic, Facebook looks at whether the photo is unique."
The two statements are a bit contradictory. They might delete the photo but they won't delete its signature/fingerprint, because they need the later to check for uniqueness of other accounts.
Anywho, once the 'revenge porn' crowd starts hacking around this by chopping the said head from the said images, the central servers of FB are sure to ask for pics of genitals.
No.
Facebook is not the Almighty God.