Archives 20 November 2018

Facebook has submitted a patent application for technology that would predict who your family and other household members are, based on images and captions posted to Facebook, as well as your device information, like shared IP addresses. The application, titled “Predicting household demographics based on image data,” was originally filed May 10, 2017, and made public today.

The system Facebook proposes in its patent application would use facial recognition and learning models trained to understand text to help Facebook better understand whom you live with and interact with most. The technology described in the patent looks for clues in your profile pictures on Facebook and Instagram, as well as photos of you that you or your friends post.

It would note the people identified in a photo, and how frequently the people are included in your pictures. Then, it would assess information from comments on the photos, captions, or tags (#family, #mom, #kids) — anything that indicates whether someone is a husband, daughter, cousin, etc. — to predict what your family/household actually looks like. According to the patent application, Facebook’s prediction models would also analyze “messaging history, past tagging history, [and] web browsing history” to see if multiple people share IP addresses (a unique identifier for every internet network).

Microsoft broke Euro privacy rules by carrying out the “large scale and covert” gathering of private data through its Office apps, according to a report commissioned by the Dutch government.

It was found that Microsoft was collecting telemetry and other content from its Office applications, including email titles and sentences where translation or spellchecker was used, and secretly storing the data on systems in the United States.

Those actions break Europe’s new GDPR privacy safeguards, it is claimed, and may put Microsoft on the hook for potentially tens of millions of dollars in fines. The Dutch authorities are working with the corporation to fix the situation, and are using the threat of a fine as a stick to make it happen.

The investigation was jumpstarted by the fact that Microsoft doesn’t publicly reveal what information it gathers on users and doesn’t provide an option for turning off diagnostic and telemetry data sent by its Office software to the company as a way of monitoring how well it is functioning and identifying any software issues.

The US-based Pew Research Center has found the American public is growing increasingly distrustful of the use of computer algorithms in a variety of sectors, including finance, media and the justice system.

A report released over the weekend found that a broad section of those surveyed feel that computer programs will always reflect some level of human bias, that they might violate privacy, fail to capture the nuance of human complexity or simply be unfair.