BuckeyeDennis wrote:
it just creeps me out that a big commercial database is working hard to record as many details of my life and interests as possible. By linking to his Facebook account, my brother's iPad correctly identified almost all of the relatives in a family-reunion photo. Amazingly, it even ID'd a picture of my 20-something niece hanging on the wall, taken when she was about 6 years old.
Regarding the identification of an individual in a photo. Please understand that it was not Facebook (the corporate entity) that identified individuals in a photo, it was a Facebook user that "tagged" a section of the photo as an individual. This is why it is uncannily accurate. Someone that knew what your niece looked like at 6 yrs old tagged that section of the photo not Facebook or a computer system.
My kids are kind of funny and my SS (among other things) has been tagged as me in a photo or two.
The tags are collected as part of the photo and linked to it. If the individual being tagged is on Facebook, and have loose security settings, then anyone that knows them or is friends of a friend will get the notification that so and so was tagged in a photo. I keep my settings as tight as I can on Facebook and only allow direct friends to see things regarding me. Never friends of friends. or everyone.
The only reason I got a FB account was to monitor my teenage son. He is now 19 and in college and I no longer have the need or desire to monitor his activity. The only reason I keep it now is my daughter's postings of my Grandson. Other than that, I have no real use for it.
So we are clear. Most Major Companies, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, twitter, Walmart, Large grocery store chains with membership/discount cards(Safeway), etc all have a means for capturing, storing, analyzing, and SELLING metadata regarding usage. Most go way farther than just the "metadata" in terms of capture. Yes, Safeway, Costco, and Walmart collectively know almost the entire contents of my house (If someone with the right skills and access wanted to search hard enough, they could figure it out) . This is actually quite different from George Orwell's scenario in that the 1984 scenario involved the Gov't and thought police. The current intrusions do not attempt to control or make illegal my thoughts/preferences, they are just observing what I do and marketing to that preference/behavior. If it means lower prices and better deals for me, I'm OK with that. Google brings in billions of dollars from search and uses that to improve the technology. The use of Google's product offerings is mostly $0 and I'm good with that. I get much better search results when I am logged in because they know what I have clicked on in the past and where I typically spend my time when browsing this gets me the results that mean the most to me. Bing, Yahoo, and Ask all do it too, you are tracked and monitored. (I do Understand that I am willfully surrendering my privacy by logging in to a $0 search engine and using it).
I have taught all my children that there is absolutely 0 expectation of privacy on any form of electronic communication especially the Internet. Never post anything or click anything you don't want the whole world to know about. Including e-mails, texts and so called "private messages". If the communication uses the TCP/IP communication protocol it is suspect and subject to monitoring unless specific encryption algorithms have been applied to secure the communication.
The bottom line is we live in Modern America and the corporate world has a pretty good understanding of who you are and any proclivities or preferences you may have. Short of an "End of world" scenario, this genie is not going back in this particular bottle. Learn to live with it or move to Alaska or some other remote area and go "Off the grid" entirely.