
Facebook's AI Points Internet Drones to Where the People Are - jonbaer
http://www.wired.com/2016/02/facebook-ai-shows-internet-drones-where-all-the-people-are/
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vonklaus
Couple things.

I think it is pretty cool that a college social network has morphed into a
horrifyingly privacy invading intelligience company just as much ad the next
guy, but seriously WTF?

I assume there is a good reason they are using drones? The deep learning of
satellite data was interesting, but why is it neccessary?

Assuming you just use planet labs or something similar to get data and you
process it, you find the people. Makes sense. Except in the case that these
people regularly migrate as nomadic beduins i guess you could serve your popup
drone fleet at them as bushpeople don't have adblock.

But if they are just poor people who are trying to get by and live, to the
extent possible, like many other people, I don't get it. Surely you have a
chicken and an egg problem here, right?

They either have running water and some semblance of infrastructure like roads
and power, or they don't. Unless Matk is going to airdrop a fission reactor
wouldnt have been easier to ask thr power company or trace the lines?

Second thing. Why not towers, or just paying for LEO sattelite nets?

Don't get it, but I guesz it one ups self calibrating loon baloons...

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7952
> They either have running water and some semblance of infrastructure like
> roads and power, or they don't.

That really doesn't apply to subsistence farming communities, for example in
sub-Saharan Africa. Population will be much more dispersed than in more
urbanised developed countries. You can have tiny farmsteads with a dozen
people every 100 yards covering thousands of miles of apparently rural land.
Connecting mains water or electricity is impossibly expensive, but cell phones
can still be widely used though communal charging.

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angersock
At the risk of being gauche...

If the main benefit of Facebook is advertising, why bother extending
functionality to people who are too poor to buy anything?

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ehnto
I presume it will be targeted advertising.

But I don't know what the end goal is. Both the target market and the target
publishers are a mystery so far as I can tell.

Perhaps government or regieme campaigns will be the main buyer of
advertisements to such detatched communities. I wonder what the cost per
conversion is for rural votes?

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emehrkay
A guy on Reddit yesterday posted about going to the mall and going into a
makeup store with his girlfriend and later receiving ads for the same store in
his Facebook feed. I'm not sure if he connected to the store's wifi or not,
but still very creepy.

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cryptoz
Doesn't really matter if he connected to the WiFi: even just having WiFi
enabled/turned on means that you should assume every store that you enter
knows that you're there, and every other retail store also knows (that you're
inside a competitor's store).

There are a number of startups providing these services (some of them have
gone through YC I think?). It's now so common that you just have to assume
that if your phone is broadcasting anything at all, including looking for a
WiFi network to join, that your location is being tracked and sold for
competitive analysis by corporations.

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johnchristopher
Do we know for sure it's working: does that information lead to more sales ?

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datagram
It's generally understood that it's quite effective to advertise to prior
customers compared to say, targeting a geographic area.

Apparently it's about as effective as search ads:
[http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/16/90-of-marketers-say-
retarg...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/16/90-of-marketers-say-retargeting-
now-as-good-as-search-ads-email-marketing/)

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aaroninsf
If my job was how to craft national security policy in the face of
asymmetrical warfare, I wouldn't be sleeping much anymore.

Self driving cars? Bad enough.

Self targeting drone swarms...?

'Prepping' just seems one tiny notch more rational.

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6stringmerc
Quite an interesting approach to mapping, and it sounds pretty useful for the
intended purpose. Conversely, I'm in the 'Lazlo Hollyfeld' boat of wondering
what the purpose might be for the actual goals of Facebook, which isn't
connectivity and internet altruism, but generating revenue. In this regard, I
wonder what comes next, because looking at evidence of human activity will
probably relay more rural and dirt-poor settlements than ones with disposable
'leisure time' and monies.

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ck2
Why would you use drones instead of a one-time mesh network install that is
solar+wind powered with long term lithium battery backup?

One of these could be powered for a month off a shoebox sized battery:

[https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/projects:zsun-wifi-card-
reader](https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/projects:zsun-wifi-card-reader)

Now mesh network them every few hundred feet.

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akhilcacharya
Speed and latency, probably. They also probably think 1 UAV will be more
reliable and easy to service than 100+ base stations.

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horsecaptin
I think I'm starting to get tired of "AI". We might as well call it "computer
magic".

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clebio
[http://imgur.com/WNP6O3o](http://imgur.com/WNP6O3o) or, like, GFY and I'll go
read everything else on the internet that isn't pay-walled.

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tyingq
I'm getting the same ad blocker screen, but the thing is, I'm not running an
ad blocker.

Not sure how Wired's ad-blocker-detector works. I am on the campus of a large
company that uses a shared proxy for outbound internet. If that's triggering
the screen, that seems bad for Wired.

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clebio
I use Ghostery, fwiw.

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tcfunk
Enabling Adobe Tag Manager made the popup go away for me.

