Re: [projectvrm] Facial recognition's 'dirty little secret': Millions of online photos scraped without consent

[Benjamin Goering < >]

How can you consent to that which you don’t know exists today and for some infinite time into the future?  

IMO personal responsibility is important in all this too.

It seems to me people want the benefits of sharing their creations without the downsides, and want to blame platforms or regulators instead of their own decisions to share in the first place.

It's like if I improvised a song or melody in a public square to impress some cuties nearby, then get mad when a friend hears the same tune form someone else on the radio. Well, not only get mad, but try to go chase down and punish the radio station (or even the maintainers of the public square) because I "didn't give permission". I threw it into the commons; what is done after isn't my permission to give. If I wanted to maintain control of the thing, I shouldn't have used it to impress the people in the square. I don't get both the social benefit of sharing it far and wide and freely and also the right to control what people do with it.

And notably, when singing in the public square I also could never consent to all possible things that could be done with the song by any private enterprise within earshot. That's not a unique critique to social media platforms, it's the nature of information broadcast.

Just my ethics on this. So much blame on others, but I almost never hear "I regret sharing that, so I will take responsibility to alter my future behavior".

Specifically, I think a billion people see the relatively new capability of broadcasting their ideas or stream of consciousness quickly and broadly using web publishing, and they want to take advantage of it. Instead of learning how to publish it using the almost-infinite amount of options on the web, they take a shortcut and use Facebook because it helps them accomplish their goals cheaper and faster. Facebook provides this service to them for a cost. After awhile, and after they get the benefit of using this service, they get mad and cranky. But in most of these scnarios (though I admit, not all) they should be critical of themselves, not only Facebook.

> the unworkability of the current consent model.

There are many current consent models, not just any one.

People are choosing the ones they want. I'd rather fund innovation, competition, education on consent models than regulate away what billions of people are currently choosing: to share their data publicly because it has perceived benefits to them (e.g. social credit "omg saw your pic of the vacay, looks so amazing!"), not just downsides. If the downsides start outweighing the benefits, they can delete their stuff from the platform. I support establishing right to delete everywhere, but not because aggregation is wrong. Aggregation/bundling is one of the most fundamental ways of creating value.

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 3:30 PM MXS Insights < "> > wrote:

It really speaks to one of the main challenges around data, and the unworkability of the current consent model.  

How can you consent to that which you don’t know exists today and for some infinite time into the future?  

Data, images loaded/shared for one purpose are then used for a purpose never imagined of conceived of, what risks are the individuals potentially subject to in the future?

A share on a photo site to be used as ‘clip art’ is one thing, but to be used as a training material for some future algorithm of unknown purpose?  Is this even covered in the intent of Creative Commons?

On Mar 13, 2019, at 7:15 PM, Guy Jarvis < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Hmm,

This is a really interesting aspect of the web, the opt-in assumption/assertion that publication automatically means putting that content into the public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Robots.txt is a classic example of that approach, ie a spider and index free for all unless explicitly opted-out

Where the clash between cyber and real worlds occurs though is with the reuse of content, so FB were happy to scrape and republish images but object strenuously and litigiously when others copy and reuse/republish whatever FB publish (even though FB isn't even a content creator per se, beyond the functionality of their website).

Guy

On Wed, 13 Mar 2019, 15:05 Benjamin Goering, < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I think it's a feature that I (or anyone) can download any image on the web.

Sometimes it seems like people want the benefits of publishing things to the world without any of the downsides, but it's a natural tradeoff. Any way of artificially interfering with that is going to be swimming upstream. The only way to win the "private publishing" game is not to publish.

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 7:17 AM Guy Jarvis < " rel="noreferrer" target="_blank"> > wrote:

Rather like FB got started by scraping college year books without consent, there's a pattern here...

On Wed, 13 Mar 2019, 01:05 Dr. Augustine Fou, < " rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank"> > wrote:

@OliviaSolon: "Earlier this year IBM released a dataset of 1 million photos of people's faces designed to reduce bias in facial recognition software. I was surprised that the pictures were taken from Flickr & so investigated the origins of facial recognition datasets"

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facial-recognition-s-dirty-little-secret-millions-online-photos-scraped-n981921

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Benjamin Goering, Software Producer

bengo.is

@bengo - github.com/gobengo - linkedin.com/in/benjamingoering

--

Benjamin Goering, Software Producer

bengo.is

@bengo - github.com/gobengo - linkedin.com/in/benjamingoering