| You're saying this with a lot of confidence, but I'm not certain I believe you. When you have facial recognition software, photos are a contact graph. When they're photos that a user explicitly uploads, they often come with location data. All of that stuff is useful to advertisers. Facebook can and does target ads based on who you know. If you upload a photo, and the metadata says it was taken today, and it has you location attached to it, and it shows you smiling next to your friend who's recently searched for the new Avengers movie, then yeah, it makes a lot of sense to show you an add for the new Avengers movie, because maybe the two of you will go to it. It doesn't even need to be that detailed. Just knowing that you're that person's acquaintance means that now Facebook can suggest that person as a friend, it means that Facebook can add that person to its social graph if they're not currently on the service. Just knowing your location means that Facebook can advertise you something from a nearby store. All of that is stuff that Facebook wants to know, all of that falls pretty squarely in the middle of the category of data harvesting. Not all data harvesting is just to serve ads, some of it is to know how to tailor the service to you to make you more active (so that you look at more ads), or to suggest friends (which increases your investment in the platform), or how to engineer the service in general (so that more people use it and look at ads). > Not facial expressions while scrolling or group photos at restaurants. Facebook used to analyze unposted status updates (where you type out the status and then delete it before you press post) so it could figure out why people were getting cold feet before sharing their thoughts[0]. You really, genuinely believe that they're not interested in your facial expressions? You really, genuinely believe that nobody at Facebook is looking into research like identifying branded products inside of user-uploaded photos? [0]: https://slate.com/technology/2013/12/facebook-self-censorshi... |