[onewaystreet]

It's called Photo Magic:

"By recognizing your Facebook friends in the photos you take (just like when tagging or sharing photos on Facebook), Messenger can create a group thread for you to share the photos with those friends in just two taps."

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/12/messenger-adds-new-feat...

http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/9/9696760/facebook-messenger...

You can opt-out by turning off tagging suggestions: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline&section=sugge...

[chinathrow]

I am still shocked about that feature. The messenger app is installed by millions of people. Does anyone know how the app does the friend recognition? Local on the phone or on FBs servers?

[puddintane]

Facebooks servers. Phones could not be capable of doing that much facial recognition that quick. Plus that bandwidth to grab all your friends images to compare to would be a metric ton of images given some selfie-addicts.

[unicornporn]

The other day tinfoil me finally gave in and installed the Instagram app. Marshmallow gives me more granular permission control, but naturally I had to give it access to the file system to be able to upload pictures. Knowing about their ways with Messenger, I guess it's only a matter of time before Instagram scans my whole phone for images and videos to perform biometric analysis.

[harryf]

It gets even more fun to consider all the apps using the Facebook SDK (which is basically everyone - https://gist.github.com/ryanolsonk/e33bf9e89677da9fe8ce ). Gave any of those apps access to your photos ?

[chinathrow]

That should be opt-in. What a fucked up feature.

Edit: I don't give any of my friends consent to use that feature - yet the would still scan my face. How can this even be legal.

[toomuchtodo]

Lax data privacy laws in the US (compared to Europe).

Lobby your congressperson to fix it.

[plainOldText]

You don't need to take it to the congress; just stop using the services of a company whose practices you don't agree with. If more people would do this, maybe the company will get the message and change its practices.

[takeda]

This information is too valuable to dissuade companies from collecting and using it. You can't do much as an user if everyone is doing it. In many situations you might not even know that you're being tracked, there already technologies that track you in public places.

IMO this is something that should be regulated.

[toomuchtodo]

Pragmatically, its easier for me to hold congresspeoples' feet to the fire.

[jgalt212]

Congress is broke and the tech companies know it and optimize against this and will continue to make hay while the sun shines (i.e. before the US produces any effective consumer privacy legislation).

[toomuchtodo]

It doesn't cost anything to enact legislation. Congress is a sunk cost.

[Spooky23]

Funny.

Congress cannot afford the lawyers needed to write that kind of legislation. The lobbyists write the laws they advocate for.

[toomuchtodo]

Strangely enough, Elizabeth Warren was able to put together comprehensive legislation to work towards ending Intuit's (to name the largest offender) corporate welfare [1] in the tax prep software space. Or is there an anti-private corporation/pro IRS tax prep lobbyist I'm missing?

[1] https://www.warren.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=1110

[maaku]

The article says it is opt-in.

[chinathrow]

I saw that now too. Opt-in isn't enough here, the user of the messenger app should get consent from all folks on those pictures before auto-uploading anything.

What another trove of data for FB. Disgusting.

[sp332]

Facebook lets you opt-out of being tagged, which is about all they can do. The photos don't being to you, plus they're not going to know that you're in a photo until after it gets uploaded.

[Kristine1975]

>which is about all they can do

They could not use facial recognition in the first place.

[lazzlazzlazz]

It's opt-in. Do research before experiencing moral outrage.

[retox]

This is actually terrifying to me.