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my mum just sent me a picture of her and my long time no see cousin from US over WhatsApp. Short time after that, Facebook sent me a friend proposal of a girl from US I don't know - obviously it was my cousins girlfriend because she had a profile picture with him. My cousin doesn't have Facebook.

WTF?!

so what Facebook did must have been some face analysis of the picture my mum sent me over WhatsApp and compared my cousins face with profile pictures from friends of my friends to send me the proposal I got.

this is so fucking scary! I immediately thought of @linuxxx security blog and how my usage of such software affects the privacy of others besides me being transparent as fuck.

Definitely have to rethink my software choices and app/online behaviour!

Comments
  • 10
    Surprise! Facebook uses your data. Who would have thought of that?
  • 7
    Maybe your cousin's girlfriend had searched for you or your mother recently?
  • 1
    @electrineer due to some special familiy related circumstances neither me nor my mother did know his girlfriend, especially not her name or even that she existed.
    Same the other way around. my mother met my cousin unintentionally and the whole family hasn't heard of him since years.

    Possible, but I cannot imagine that..
  • 0
    @HIGHphen I wonder why your mother chose to send the photo today. Maybe she had a conversation with your cousin today and therefore your cousin also chose to find you on Facebook.
  • 0
    @electrineer she sent the photo as soon as she took it because it was unbelievable to meet him. He was not with his girlfriend and he himself does not have a Facebook account.
  • 3
    I doubt it was face analysis... I don't think anyone currently has the computational power to analyze EVERY image sent over WhatsApp.
    It's more likely that your cousin used his gf's account to look you up as @electrineer suggested... Or maybe it was some analysis of geolocatoion data.
  • 0
    @HIGHphen Is his girlfriend related to the location your mum is at? Maybe your mother added his phone number to her phone book? All we can say is that fb's algorithm works.
  • 0
    @ricvail Well Facebook does auto tag you to photos so it does have facial analysis. The face of the cousin may not fit any user, but it is identifiable nonetheless thus saved to their databases . The analysis is done one time only, it's not that big of a deal, and then the comparison is another matter, I suppose easier.
  • 0
    @ricvail I guess it would suffice scanning only pictures of my friends friends, so doesn't have to be every Facebook user.
  • 0
    @ricvail on WhatsApps behalf the scanning is probably done client site on the mobile device so the computational power of each phone is leveraged instead of Facebooks servers.
  • 2
    @BigBoo If they would only give people a fair chance as for forming an educated opinion about it.

    @ricvail Facebook definitely has the power to analyze any picture sent through any of its services in real time.

    @HIGHphen I can't be entirely sure how they do it as i block the living crap out of anything facebook. I do know that one of WhatsApps co-founders has recently left the company because he couldn't support weakening the encryption for commercial purposes.
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