
Facebook  says it will use AI to determine when someone has died - nydel
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/09/711399357/facebook-promises-to-stop-asking-you-to-wish-happy-birthday-to-your-friend-who-d
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Barrin92
>Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on Monday announced that the social network will
use artificial intelligence to determine when someone has died, and stop
sending those kinds of notifications.

Can't wait until the facebook neural net declares me dead because of my
sclerotic post activity and my family thinks I've kicked the bucket when they
don't get an announcenment on my birthday.

Maybe instead of trying to solve everything with 'artificial intelligence' we
ought to design these systems in ways that are less prone to these sorts of
misbehaviours. Seems like building systems that work 80% of the time and then
hoping that throwing ML engineers at the issue solves the last 20% is the new
hot design pattern.

~~~
malux85
Your family’s only measure on whether you’re alive or not is the yearly
birthday reminder from Facebook?

In all seriousness, what do you expect them to do? They can’t have a checkbox
“I am dead” for you to click after you pass, so they’re using a bit of data
science to try and reduce the heartache of accidentally reminding someone when
you might be dead.

I’m no fan of facebook, I don’t have an account and I think they are a net
negative in the world, but sometimes they’re just trying to do the right
thing, and credit where it’s due

~~~
Barrin92
>Your family’s only measure on whether you’re alive or not is the yearly
birthday reminder from Facebook?

I work in a foreign country, so I guess there's the possibility that remote
family might at least be concerned if something like that happened.

>In all seriousness, what do you expect them to do?

give me control over when I broadcast out birthday reminders, because as an
infrequent user I would simply turn it off. Problem solved.

Obviously it is not in Facebook's interest to give me control over my feed or
activity to this degree, so it will never happen.

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onion2k
Birthday reminders are one of the reasons I've practically abandoned Facebook.

Seeing people wish you happy birthday on there by clicking a button
encapsulates how false the narrative is; if the reason you remembered my
birthday is that Facebook told you then we don't have a relationship where you
should be sending me a birthday message.

The only thing more annoying is that now LinkedIn does it too. That's just
weird.

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lozaning
Of the relationships where you should be sending people a birthday message, do
you have all of their birthdays memorized, or do you use a calendar? I dont
really see the difference between using facebook or a gmail calendar for
reminders such as these.

I'll agree that the simple "Happy Birthday" messages people post on facebook
are trite, but rather frequently I'm reminded that it's someone's birthday via
facebook and then text or call the person.

~~~
reaperducer
_Of the relationships where you should be sending people a birthday message,
do you have all of their birthdays memorized, or do you use a calendar?_

I'm not the OP, but yes, I have a calendar with people's birthdays in it.
Every computer since the 1980's comes with a calendar program, and now they
sync to your mobile phone, so there's no need to pass responsibility for that
sort of thing to Facebook.

I also send ( _gasp_ ) paper birthday and Christmas cards to the people who
mean a lot to me. And from what they tell me, getting a real card in the mail
means a million times more to them, since they know I took time out of my life
to think of them and didn't just click a button and move on.

~~~
dingaling
But you bought a pre-produced, mass-printed card that someone else designed.
Not very personal. How is that much different from a clicky-greeting on
Facebook, other than cost?

~~~
x0x0
Effort.

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Raed667
"Back in the day" I changed my birthday several times a year to see if anyone
actually notices or people just push a button mindlessly.

I ended up having generic happy-birthday wishes by the same people over and
over.

~~~
ruvis
I learned that you can have a birthday every 10'ish months and no one will
notice. (Except for people who actually know when it's your birthday
obviously.) More than that and people will start to catch on.

~~~
Simon_says
How did you learn that 10 months is the threshold?

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caymanjim
This kind of reminder can happen even if the person isn't on Facebook. Every
few months, a "Hey, remember this from 5 years ago?" photo pops up with a now-
deceased friend of mine. It's depressing, and my effort to get Facebook to
stop showing me "Do you want to share this memory?" photos has failed. She
wasn't even on Facebook. I suppose I could go through all my old photos and
delete them, but I'd prefer not to be prompted at all.

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aldamiz
>FB will use artificial intelligence to determine when someone has died

Everything about Facebook looks terrible

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palad1n
Actually, I kind of like that. Brings back memories of them.

~~~
JamesBarney
I'm with you. Its nice to remember, and it's nice to see the annual post when
all the people who loved them can reminisce.

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thrill
It's a start. How about allowing blocking all birthday and Billy Bob and
Scooter have been friends for x years messages too?

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throw132133
AI seems to have become the default solution for any of Facebook's problems
with its platform. It sounds great, but I start to wonder how practical is it.
Can they really determine if you are died with high probability? You would
need quite a lot of personal data from your friends and family to determine
that. oh wait..

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jammygit
I wonder why nobody's gotten around to it yet. Could it be complicated to
decide if someone passed away or not?

~~~
Jach
You can memorialize the account of someone dead without too much difficulty,
they get a "Remembering" tag on the profile.
[https://facebook.com/help/103897939701143](https://facebook.com/help/103897939701143)

~~~
camtarn
Having experienced this myself first-hand:

It's not hard, but you need to know that telling FB that your friend is dead
is even an option, then go search for that. For most of us that probably seems
pretty simple, but we're definitely the outliers in regards to technical
sophistication and knowing how a site 'should' work.

In addition, there's the 'etiquette' of trying to figure out if you, as a
friend, should do that, or whether you should leave it to their family, and
then wondering if their family even knows about their FB profile, etc.

As the article pointed out, 'there are likely far more accounts that haven't
been memorialized' \- which suggests that people don't do it.

~~~
Jach
That's fair. If I didn't do it for my mom, I doubt it'd have been done. I
don't even think I'd consider doing it for a friend, that's something I'd
leave in the hands of whoever has the death certificate.

Facebook surely indexes a lot of the internet, "AI techniques" like entity
resolution on obituaries would probably go a long way to finding unreported
deaths.

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oceanghost
Not all memories aren't happy...

Like the happy memories of my ex-wife which are now a tragedy to me -- that
everyday Facebook wants to remind me about. I don't use facebook much.

There should be a filter button such that I can say, "I don't want to hear
about this person anymore."

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anoncake
> Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on Monday announced that the social network
> will use artificial intelligence to determine when someone has died, and
> stop sending those kinds of notifications.

Since there is no way Facebook will get 100% recall: no, it will not stop
doing that.

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hbosch
I’m sure whatever technical achievement solved this problem will somehow lead
to people instead offering condolences on the passing of their still-living
friends.

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abductee_hg
false positives incoming... also convincing fb you're dead (instead of
deleting your account) will become a new dark pattern?

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ipsum2
Tired of this media narrative. Why spin a positive feature into something
negative?

