
Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed. - zackattack
http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_really_creeping_me_out_with_this_how/
======
DanielBMarkham
Years ago I worked with a guy who used to sell computer equipment to
businesses.

He told me that when he went to different divisions in each company, they all
had org/structure charts somewhere around the office. And in every one of
them, their section was in the middle and everybody else was serviced by them.
No matter what you did, you were the center of the universe to you.

Likewise, I've had experience building and working on many computer systems
for businesses. Each of them, if successful, wants to handle not just their
thing but _everything_ for their customers. No matter what they did, they
wanted to be the center of the universe for their customers.

You can laugh at these examples, and we all know most software companies have
much great ambition than they do traction, but Facebook and Google are
actually doing this. They are becoming the center of the information universe
to their customers.

This is not a good thing.

~~~
safetyscissors
Its also not a good thing that we don't know who Facebook or Google is selling
this or giving this information to. The advertising agencies, meh kinda. The
organisations with acronyms, they are more worrisome. I also wonder, to what
extent the amount of information they have about the average user.

~~~
Xavi
BTW, Google seems to be pretty open with what they know about you. Here are
two links where they display an explicit list:
<https://www.google.com/dashboard/> and
<http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/>

~~~
deno
This is certainly not everything they know about you. This is part of their
initiative to be not-evil, it’s called Data Liberation Front[1]. In their own
words:

> Loyalty, not lock-in. We firmly believe you control your data, so we have a
> team of engineers whose only goal is to help you take your information with
> you. [2]

It’s absolutely _terrific_ that they have something like this. Many others had
to be dragged there kicking and screaming.

However, this is just not relevant to the topic at hand. This is “your data”,
the data that you deliberately created, rather than revealed accidentally. The
point of the project is to avoid vendor lock-in, rather than to protect your
privacy.

If you’re EU resident, you should be able to just write to them and they have
to reveal everything they have on you. And that list will be entirely
different from this.

[1] <http://www.dataliberation.org/>

[2] [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-choice-
ens...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-choice-ensuring-
economic.html)

------
JonnieCache
The important thing to take away from this:

If they can make guesses this accurate about your photos, imagine they guesses
they're making behind the scenes about your life, your personality and your
innermost thoughts.

If there was a page on fb where it showed all the inferences they had made
about you, sexuality, income, religion, philosophical viewpoints, mental
health, etc. then people would run screaming. Of course, a lot of people have
already told fb that info voluntarily, and that's why its possible to guess it
for everyone else.

Also potentially terrifying: a facebook fortune telling engine. I bet they can
predict your future with frightening accuracy, or they will be able to after
another decade or so of data anyway.

~~~
drats
Indeed, with all the Facebook sharing buttons around the web they have more
than your bookmarks too, they have the equivalent of uploading your browser
history each day to them. With current machine learning technology, let alone
improvements over the coming years, they'd know more or less what someone
would know if they stood behind every time you were browsing for the last few
years.

Even if you were to cancel your account you'd turn up in photos of parties on
other people's accounts and they'd follow pretty well you after you'd left
too. With their dodgy history, Zuckerberg's contempt for his own users as
evidenced by his quotes, the idea that this won't be abused is laughable.
Given national security letters (NSL) it's almost certain the intelligence
community has access. Hell you could hit a mid-level admin at one of their
data-centers with a NSL and the top level management and legal wouldn't even
be aware that there are outside entities with a connection to their database.
That's to say nothing of the extra-legal capacities of these people.

While people like to think that it's more or less anonymized clusters and
demographics that are being passed to advertisers to target ads better - not a
terribly scary thought, just more relevant ads - I think we need to be far
more cautious.

~~~
nitrogen
_While people like to think that it's more or less anonymized clusters and
demographics that are being passed to advertisers to target ads better - not a
terribly scary thought, just more relevant ads - I think we need to be far
more cautious._

How do you go about convincing the "I have nothing to hide" majority of the
population that giving away such vast quantities of information is not in
their best interests? I'm thinking of friends, family members, etc. who
honestly don't care whether the TSA sees them naked at the airport, or how
much the other agencies know about them. Where does such extreme deference to
authority come from in the first place?

~~~
MrRage
I'm not sure how compelling my argument is... but if I have nothing to hide
then why does anybody need to look? For example does the TSA seeing everybody
naked actually improve security?

~~~
rhizome
Everybody has something to hide. If you don't understand what I mean by this,
post your credit card number in a reply.

------
jhferris3
(Disclosure: FB employee, but nowhere near the photos/locations teams, just
personal experience)

In all likelihood, there's no magic. Its just comparing 'dumb' manual album
labels with places pages and trying to match them up.

I've had similar experiences with the location-suggestion feature where I was
totally bewildered by how it was getting the data to recognize the locations.
As it turns out, all of the albums they've done this for were pre-location
tagging and so I'd manually put in a location (like 'Bowery Ballroom'). So
there wasn't any particular magic in how they seem to be doing it. This would
also explain one of the other comments on here about the location suggestions
being England, Arkansas (if she just labeled the album England and the
location suggester goofed). I also had it goof when I had an album labeled
"Rhode Island and Massachusetts" and it tried to suggest a real estate agency
with that in its name.

------
brlewis
This was just answered on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-
predict-my-photo-albu...](http://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-predict-my-
photo-albums-locations/answer/Henry-F-Bridge#ans883901)

 _Henry F. Bridge, Product Manager, Facebook

Photo albums on Facebook have long had a text input field for location, but
until recently, there was no way to put in structured data in this field (like
a Facebook page). We added that ability earlier this year, and the "add a
location" feature just performs a search on whatever text the album owner put
in originally (ranked by place popularity etc) and suggests the first result
as the location of the album._

~~~
iamandrus
I uploaded pictures from a class trip on Facebook back in 2009 and had no
captions or names that suggested that the pictures were taken in California.
My camera at the time was not capable of GPS. Facebook still managed to get
the location right.

Scary stuff.

~~~
henrybridge
Like I said on Quora, we use the location field that you put into the album
when you uploaded it. The album location isn't displayed in the caption for
individual photos and isn't displayed that prominently on the album page, so
you're probably just not seeing that you set it when it was uploaded in 2009.

~~~
iamandrus
I never entered anything into the location field (I would have remembered
doing it), yet it got the _exact_ city and state where I took the photos.

~~~
modeless
You specifically remember leaving a form field blank on a web page three years
ago?

~~~
iamandrus
I would have remembered when the message to tag the location of my photos came
up.

~~~
sgibat
It didn't work like that. It was a plain blank text field among a couple other
blank text fields. No search was brought up upon data entry. Very innocuous;
Perhaps that why you don't remember it.

~~~
iamandrus
Believe me, I would have remembered doing it. I wouldn't have cared about a
location tagging message if I had entered the location manually. Not to
mention I couldn't even remember the names of some of the cities where the
photos were taken until Facebook suggested them to me.

------
drats
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-
invariant_feature_transfo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-
invariant_feature_transform)

Facebook almost certainly has more photo information than TinEye or Flickr,
and of indoor environments probably more than Google (which has reverse image
search too). Across any given bar or hospital Facebook would have maybe 5-10
other people with albums tagged with the name/gps/check-in. They'd only need
one other album though.

SIFT more or less turns every image into a bag-of-words. Your single photo,
even at different angles, is going to have a heavy match with photos they
have. If you upload a whole album they are going to have tons of matches and
they can be more or less certain of the location. To say nothing of adding
even the most basic geoip-to-city lookups that would narrow you down to at
least five cities that you and your social network inhabit. But the extra
information they have is besides the point, SIFT is enough; hospital rooms
look alike to us, to SIFT they don't.

~~~
yogrish
But why that whole technology for just making a Suggestion? There is something
else they are working on...something really BIG and a complete game changer I
guess.

~~~
drats
Also consider this, use SIFT on video stills and collect all the handheld
video of a particular concert. Use machine learning to combine all the audio
tracks and clean them up into high quality audio. Stitch the video together,
using textures from the higher resolution stills people take, to allow people
to relive the concert with a massive panoramic video (or 3D) with high quality
sound. Use it to launch a music competitor to Google or destroy Ticketmaster
(well overdue..) as bands and venues won't have to hire video production
companies to record concerts if they sell tickets through FB. All that
technology is in current research papers and prototypes at the moment, it
would probably only take two years to put it together at worst if they aren't
working on it already.

~~~
dbarlett
Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293324>

------
jagira
Just checked this.

I took some pics on a regular digital camera (no GPS) in Indore. I uploaded
them from New Delhi a few weeks later. And now FB is asking me "Were these
pics taken in Indore?". Crazy shit.

Update - I dug through my FB updates. Just before leaving for airport, I
updated my status to "Off to Indore" and after coming back to New Delhi, I had
some status updates about my office and a local park. Facebook is probably
using the the timestamps from image and relating it to locations using some
heuristics like status updates, IP addresses, image recognition etc.

~~~
kokey
I think you are actually getting to the bottom of it. A combination of
timestamps, and status updates, and probably that of friends tagged in the
same album. Could be quite effective, as we can see.

~~~
forensic
yeah this is by far most likely. The guy's wife or whatever had her phone
turned on while in labour, facebook knows her GPS coords, facebook knows she's
his wife, and so on

doesnt take much to throw out a guess based on a single GPS location +
timestamp. Even if the guess is only right 5% of the time it is still a
profitable guess to make.

------
freedompeace
How could Facebook do this (technologically)?

According to a redditor,

"

\- _It's not IP address_. Facebook successfully identified a number of
specific locations (bars, theaters, etc) even though I had uploaded the photos
from my home

\- _It's not geo-tagging_. All of my photos were taken with a camera that does
not geo-tag (Nikon d700).

\- _It's not contextual tagging_. There were no people tagged in the photos,
no comments in a lot of them, no words or phrases or names in the captions
that could have given clues

\- _It's not image recognition_. One set of photos was taken at Cafe du Nord
in SF, CA and every single shot was of the performer onstage, with no
identifying characteristics or clues to be had.

"

I would really like to know as this is very interesting and none of the reddit
comments (as of now, 12 hours after submission) really answer this question.
What technology or methods are they using to suggest (accurate?) locations
where pictures have been taken from?

Even more strangely, I have never used my mobile phone with Facebook, but when
I uploaded a photo just now of a place from my childhood to which I haven't
ever been since using Facebook, Facebook correctly suggested the location.

What the heck?!

~~~
iradik
This is how it can be done without any EXIF/GPS data with a fairly dumb
algorithm.

It's a picture of a baby at a hospital.

There are probably hundreds of baby photos being taken per day at that
hospital being posted to FB. Some have GPS and some don't.

The images that do have GPS, get recognized and lumped together as the same
"entity" since they all look the same.

FB then looks up where she lives, then looks for any photos that don't have a
location (like her baby photo), then tries to match it with any photos within
a 50 mi proximity to her hometown. Bingo finds 90% match on the baby pic in
the hospital, and asks user for verification. She says YES, then this pic gets
lumped together with all the other entities. FB also asks more often since
it's "right".

~~~
hyperbovine
A slightly more sophisticated approach would be to use the all /other/ data
they have on her to predict what hospital she is likely to choose. Why stop
with just her hometown?

~~~
iradik
Sure let's speculate they have a function that returns a guessed gps
coordinate at time t. Again there are dumb implementations for this. Can take
a time decaying and time-of-day/day-of-week weighted mode of your recognized
locations. I imagine it'd be fairly accurate.

------
phpnode
Here's my guess at how it's done:

Redditor has facebook app installed on their smartphone (or just uses the
website), sets status to "OMG wife is going into labour, at the hospital now".
Facebook now knows roughly where redditor was at the specified time based on
the ip, they can narrow this down further by looking at keywords in the status
message and check it against a list of addresses in the local area and select
the best match.

When the redditor comes to upload their photos days or weeks later, facebook
just checks the photo timestamp against the user's location +/- X hours and
makes a guess at where the photos were taken.

~~~
Peroni
The logic doesn't hold up. I uploaded a bunch of photos taken in Christchurch,
New Zealand. The pics were over two years old and I now live in the UK and
uploaded them from here. The photos were also taken on a cheap, point & shoot
camera, not a smartphone.

~~~
terhechte
It doesn't need to be taken on a smartphone. It's sufficient to open facebook
on a smartphone only once (app or web) in roughly the same timeframe that the
picture was taken. It can then look where one has been in the timeframe when
the picture was taken by comparing the picture timestamp with the list of
checkin ip addresses, and do a geolookup of the ip address against a location
database.

~~~
Peroni
Again, that doesn't align with my experience. The first smartphone I owned was
when I arrived in the UK. In NZ, I was restricted to an old Nokia work phone.

~~~
terhechte
Maybe you accessed facebook in a browser while in NZ? On a regular computer?

------
darklajid
Immature, but I really loved this comment/idea and wonder about the
feasibility of such attacks:

"You know what this means:

Time to rewrite your EXIF info and location bomb the hell out of popular
attractions. Eiffel Tower in Paris? Nope, it's in Iowa ..." [1]

Possible? Google bomb with a twist?

1:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_reall...](http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_really_creeping_me_out_with_this_how/c39vpwh)

~~~
yaix
Yep, it would be good to show that this kind of data is not reliable and
easily manipulated. But probably it will not happen.

------
ChaitanyaSai
Highly unlikely that there is anything sophisticated here. It would be too
many computing cycles thrown at something with very small RoI. Most likely
some straightforward text, date, and location matching. Many of the previous
commenters are assuming you need sophisticated pattern sifting to get any good
insights. Not true. Large numbers of facebook users are including this data
voluntarily or with their unexpurgated photos. Going after the sliver who
don't is just not a worthy investment -- yet.

------
nbm
Karan from the locations team at Facebook posted a response on Reddit. He
said:

""" I am an engineer at Facebook working on the Locations team. We use the
text entered in the location field of the album by the album owner and match
it to the best guess for an existing Facebook Page using text matching. The
popularity of the place is also used to rank the suggested places. """

[http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_reall...](http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_really_creeping_me_out_with_this_how/c3a0a0p)

(I work at Facebook, not on locations/photos.)

------
zombielifestyle
I've tried it. i don't use fb for pics. i don't use wifi on my smartphone and
i had the fb app only briefly installed. i also weren't on any trips outside
my city.

I've uploaded 4 screenshot-ed landscape (including one building) pics from
flicker with absolutely no metadata. at least 2 of them should be very
recognizable. the only thing that fb suggested was the single check-in that i
had, minimum of 500km off.

i'm pretty sure that there is only minimal (if any) intelligence on image
recognition and that they guess locations by information that "leak" from you
and your hardware.

~~~
zombielifestyle
fb don't even matches the check-in of my fake wife at hollywood walk of fame
to an pic of it uploaded by me.

------
uptown
Since Facebook knows your social connections, isn't it also possible they
check the location of the people to whom you're connected, and use their
location as a guide as to where your photos may have been taken? If a cousin
checked Facebook on a phone near a hospital while you posted a hospital photo,
they know there's a chance the cousin was visiting you and that's where your
photo was taken. They use your social grid for everything ... why wouldn't
they use it for this too?

~~~
myared
I think this is a highly likely scenario. The reddit user isn't taking into
account that much of what Facebook knows about us comes from our connections.

------
grifaton
It's not perfect yet -- Facebook knows that I went to university in Cambridge
(UK) but keeps asking me if photos from my undergraduate years were taken in
Cambridge (Massachusetts).

------
sondh
I don't think this is machine learning.

I have Facebook suggested a few albums today (2 hours ago). Some of them are
from 2+ years ago, others are recent ones. The suggestion is quite accurate
(89%, 8 out of 9 albums). With the incorrect album, Facebook suggested another
city with the same name but from another country!

So Facebook probably just combine as much data as possible and when the
matching rate is larger than some threshold, it will temporary tag the album
and confirm with users. Data may include:

1\. Album info (yeah, most of my album includes the place in it's name or
description)

2\. Comments group. 3 of my albums have a large number of comments, they are
all from my highschool friends (I grouped them all in the same group) so it's
quite accurate I guess. Also, if Facebook use the information in their smart
lists, that makes sense too.

3\. EXIF data. Some people says Facebook can read the data and cross-check the
date with its database of check-in. This doesn't happen to me but I think it's
possible. And of course, if the EXIF has geo-tagged, that info can be picked
up.

Thought?

~~~
emw
I second the idea that this doesn't sound like machine learning. I wouldn't be
surprised if there were no machine learning or data mining algorithms involved
in Facebook mapping EXIF-embedded geographic coordinates in digital
photographs and suggesting locations for an album based on points-of-interest
near those coordinates.

Maybe some neat work with GIS enabled this, but I don't see anything that
strongly indicates machine learning.

~~~
nandemo
The reddit poster claimed they didn't have GPS on their camera. What happened
is problaby (3) above:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_reall...](http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_really_creeping_me_out_with_this_how/#c39tl7n)

------
dhx
LinkedIn appears to build "social graphs" based on profile views. If person A
visits the profile of person B and C it is quite likely that some form of
relationship exists (perhaps an inverse relationship too). It doesn't just
have to be profile views -- LinkedIn most likely keeps track of search terms
too. If a random unknown visitor comes along and searches for both "Person A"
and "Person C" then it is likely that a connection exists between these two
persons.

It would be easy to train this system by displaying a "guess" (a friendship
recommendation for person A) to persons B and C. If person B or C show
interest in the recommendation then perhaps a relationship exists. Guesses
could also be formed by comparing keywords/metadata found on profiles in two
different social circles.

The reason I mentioned LinkedIn is that I think they do a better job of
recommending/guessing who your acquaintances are than Facebook.

~~~
reinhardt
I was about to post about LinkedIn too. I am convinced it uses, among others,
reverse view lookups. I have had suggestions for people I know whose LinkedIn
profile I had never viewed or searched for myself; the only explanation is
they had looked for me. I don't know if it's because I interact with it more
frequently and using real personal info but its "people you may know"
predictions are eerily more accurate than FB, or anything else for that
matter.

------
archangel_one
I've seen both extremes on my photos. One set it suggested the nearby town,
which was creepily accurate; another it asked "were these taken in England,
Arkansas" which was a hilariously poor guess. Weirdly, they managed the
difficult part (figuring out the photos were taken in "England" without any
obvious clues) but then failed to sensibly geolocate it.

------
simondlr
Facebook has suggested twice accurately places I've visited, but I pretty much
specified it in the album (Singapre and Australia).

There is an album now with random photos, with the location "Plekke" (which is
afrikaans for "places"). They are suggesting "Plekke, San Juan, Puerto Rico".
So, currently I wouldn't suggest machine learning, although it is not entirely
dismissible. They have the largest photo db in the world, they could
eventually learn and then seed it with stuff like checkins, status updates,
etc.

EDIT: I have another album called "Kuala Lumpur and Thailand", which have
pretty iconic pictures in it (Wat Pho, KL Towers, Batu Caves, etc) and they
haven't asked me about that album at all.

------
nodata
I vote cell tower info.

I have a Nokia phone with no GPS. Many programs uses the cell tower info added
by the phone to determine where the photo was taken.

------
jfoster
A test that might fool this. You will need: 1\. A facebook status
update/checkin/access from a particular location. 2\. A photo taken without
EXIF data at around the same time as the update/checkin/access above, but from
a completely different location.

Upload the photo using your facebook account. Check whether they get the
location right. If yes, the mystery continues. If no, but the location is
somewhere other than where you updated your status/checked in from, the
mystery deepens. Else, they're pairing the times together.

~~~
finnw
I think I'll set the date on my camera to 1911. A human seeing the timestamp
on the picture will just assume its a Y2K bug and will guess the correct data.
Since that's extremely unlikely IRL, the Facebook algorithm probably won't
know to make this correction.

------
barrkel
Maybe it infers from the locations of your friends. It looks like more than
one technique is used, though; probability-weighted heuristics.

------
ErrantX
I first got these notices about... oh, best part of 2 months ago. I assumed it
was everywhere but perhaps not!

------
chinmoy
I googled Zooey Deschanel several hours ago. I was logged into facebook at
that time. I log into facebook again and Zooey Deschanel in now on my 'People
to Subscribe To' list. I came to hacker news to post an ask hn thread about if
fb tracks my browsing history..and bummer I find this thread.

------
sliverstorm
I dunno about everybody else, but I'm pretty impressed. It guessed some
obvious ones- but I also had an album of photos of a car at a dealership. All
you could see was the car and the service bay, but it knew what dealership it
was.

------
Turing_Machine
It keeps asking me if some screenshots from a virtual world that I'd location-
tagged with "Cyberspace" were taken in some net cafe with that name in British
Columbia. I'm really tempted to answer yes.

------
ananthrk
Yup. I had a similar experience couple of days back when FB listed three of my
albums and correctly predicted the place names for confirmation. I was shocked
when it _correctly_ predicted the location of one of my private albums which
is an obscure town in southern India.

Given that most of my pictures were taken with cameras with no geo
identification mechanism, I can only conclude that they identify the location
based on any comments and similar photos available in _my_ network.

------
yread
I just tried to upload some photos that facebook hasn't seen yet with or
without EXIF info (obviously no or invalid geotagging) and tried geo-tagging
some photos I already have uploaded and Facebook hasn't made any suggestion
whatsoever. Perhaps I found a way to switch it off but I've just checked the
settings and none of the options seems to be concerned with suggestions for
geotagging

------
tlrobinson
The outrage expressed by some of the commenters on Reddit and here is curious.
Clearly Facebook and other companies have the technology to make these
connections. Would you rather they keep it hidden to sell to advertisers and
other potentially unscrupulous buyers, or expose it to you so that you can
either make use of the features, or decide it's not worth playing their game?

------
berberous
This had been freaking me out for months!

But I think I finally figured it out in my case. I had used Picasa to upload
the pics years ago. In Picasa, I had entered a caption with enough detail for
Facebook to guess the location. The caption had never been uploaded (i.e. set
as the photo's caption on Facebook), but I'm guessing they did somehow capture
that info on upload.

------
brown9-2
Ignoring the _how_ of this new feature, what is the upside to me as a user of
confirming to Facebook the hospital in which my child was born?

Why do they think people would generally be interested in clicking "Yes" on
these suggestions? That they are helpfully filling in the blanks on photos I
"forgot" to location-tag?

~~~
henrybridge
Disclosure: I work on location products at Facebook.

I think that real world places are an important part of who you are. Where
you're from, where you've lived, and where you've travelled to, for instance,
all help tell a story about you as a person.

The way that's represented on Facebook today is the Map on your Timeline.
These suggestions help you put more photos on your map so you can share
experiences with friends. That trip you took to Disney World 5 years ago may
be far down in timeline, but it's going to be easy for friends to find it on
your Map.

Hope that helps explain the "why" a bit.

~~~
brown9-2
Thanks for the answer.

------
shalmanese
I asked this question on Quora a few days ago:
[http://www.quora.com/Facebook-1/Why-is-the-new-Facebook-
Add-...](http://www.quora.com/Facebook-1/Why-is-the-new-Facebook-Add-a-
Location-to-Your-Photos-feature-so-good-at-guessing-the-location) but did not
get any responses.

------
steve8918
I noticed this yesterday as well. I have photos uploaded from a Canon camera
from 2007. There is simply not enough information to determine the location,
but they correction identified the bar that the photos were taken at. I have
no idea how they did it, but it really does bother me.

------
sajidnizami
There was an old vision that machines would do the stuff for you somewhere
back in the day.

Sad that we've got to a point where we can make this possible but won't
because we can't trust pie in the sky.

Torn between the two options and can't decide!

------
silentscope
I actually think fb needs to own up to how they do it. If it's geolocation
with a correlated timestamp I'd like to know.

If it's just album name suggestions, I still don't like it, but I suppose I'll
live with it.

This is creepy.

------
idunno246
Anyone else find it amusing he is complaining about Facebook knowing the
location of a photo by posting it to a more public place and confirming the
location?

------
randysavage25
Encouragement for the creation of a facebook replacement

------
yogrish
Wow! A serious competitor to SIRI in place. My guess is they are using
combination of techniques - Semantics of your Status as phpnode mentioned with
example(heard they have plans to get into semantic search to beat google),
EXIF info, IP address and also your friends replies - when is the due? which
hospital or Gynic? If hospital name is not mentioned then Gynics details and
her hospital location. Do you think all this is used just to make a
SUGGESTION?? Its a Billion$?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
If image info that users wish to enter can be guessed well this reduces
friction substantially. Having this info makes FB a more valuable marketing
tool. Why not make such suggestions.

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paraschopra
I was freaked out too, but I had relevant names for those albums like Turkey,
Shillong, etc.

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richardburton
Eventually someone evil will do something truly monstrous on Facebook and it
will make this WTF look like a drop in the ocean. I fear for my friends who
are still Facehooked.

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giulivo
I think it's just GPS positioning by the smart phone. I wouldn't be fooled by
a liar.

~~~
nmunson
Quite a few people mention the pictures were taken with a camera and uploaded
at a later date, so GPS wouldn't have been a factor. With the amount of data
Facebook has I wouldn't be surprised that they could do more than just use GPS
information to place locations.

~~~
giulivo
I'm sure there are other technologies which can be used for geolocalization
and can achieve similar "performances" (I'm thinking about WIFI networks or
IP, in some cases).

Still, I wouldn't expect a digital camera to put those informations in the
EXIF (assuming it does have a WIFI and/or an IP address)

Also, to me Facebook doesn't seem to be using any magical machine learning
algorithm capable to recognize the location of a PIC from a face, it never did
on my PICs, not even when there were landscapes in it.

The guy could instead have uploaded the photo using a smartphone which added
the GPS coordinates.

But what do YOU think instead? How does that work? Is it working also for your
uploads?

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mhartl
s/alaramed/alarmed/ in the article title

