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by ssivark 2190 days ago
My guess would have been AR being the biggest driving force. Oh, and every outdoor photo on Facebook can now more easily be “placed in context” on the map. Especially given Facebook’s “sell the users” business model, an accurate map of where the users are with respect to where the advertisers are would be quite useful to them (and it wouldn’t do to depend on Google, since they’ll butt heads as advertising platforms).

Making the platform free to commercial users as well might be more in line with Facebook’s business models — I’m guessing they’d rather create an API which allows them to exfiltrate end-user data, than charge companies for using their API.
2 comments
pdkl95 2190 days ago
> an accurate map of where the users are with respect to where the advertisers are

Not just advertisers - accurate location context information can (on it's own or in combination with other data) de-"anonymise" location data[1]. Any new sources of data that Facebook can correlate with their existing hoard of data increases the precision of their model of everyone's pattern-of-life.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...

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canada_dry 2190 days ago
> and every outdoor photo on Facebook can now more easily be “placed in context”

When you factor in their ML prowess [i] it's not hard to imagine that every photo you submit w̶i̶l̶l̶ is getting automagically tagged with an astonishing amount of context: who, what, when, and where (why too since they have all of your chats/messages too).

[i] https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2

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KaiserPro 2190 days ago
Google are more likley to do this first. They already have a global scale visual positioning service.
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