I'm just sitting here shaking my head... (I don't have a FB account)

https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-figures-out-everyone-youve-ever-met-1819822691?IR=T

Mark Z can filter thru them and check each one out

Linux

Ok, I'll take one and send it to them. Not my fault if they die of shock! 

Meh, my poor neighbours get a regular eye-full anyway.

This is just the start. Soon your iPhone X won't unlock with anything other than your naked body. Then Apple Pay ... and everything else will follow. Those who take their pics on Viagra, make sure you don't run out of supplies or the coffee queue will be very long.

DarthKermit:

 

Ok, I'll take one and send it to them. Not my fault if they die of shock! 

 

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure there will be a secret admirer for every shape and size.

Fred99: I'm feeling a Snopes rebuttal will probably come on this story. I don't believe even Facebook would be so dumb.

It's on Stuff, it must be true!

I would have thought that if they really wanted to achieve this result, it would be better to make software available to people so that they can create the "digital footprint" of the image at home, and send just the footprint to Facebook - that's what they say will be stored.

dickytim:

 

Meh, my poor neighbours get a regular eye-full anyway.

 

Username checks out.

shk292:

 

I would have thought that if they really wanted to achieve this result, it would be better to make software available to people so that they can create the "digital footprint" of the image at home, and send just the footprint to Facebook - that's what they say will be stored.

 

Silly, of course they're not going to do that. Because otherwise it would take about 24 hours for someone to write a small open source utility that would operate in a peer-to-peer mode to generate all possible footprints and send them to Facebook.

SaltyNZ:

 

Silly, of course they're not going to do that. Because otherwise it would take about 24 hours for someone to write a small open source utility that would operate in a peer-to-peer mode to generate all possible footprints and send them to Facebook.

 

I'm trying to work out why that would be desirable, regardless of whether it would be possible.  It's interesting (if you're into crypto etc) to work out how an alogrotihm could recognise a specific photo, and not be fooled by things as easy as cropping or simple image manipulation, and also not generate countless false positives.

But, an easy defence to your hypothesis would be to put a limit on how many footprints can be uploaded by each facebook user, and to use things like captchas for uploading.  If you have 10000 dodgy photos of yourself then I think you can take your chances.

shk292:

 

SaltyNZ:

 

Silly, of course they're not going to do that. Because otherwise it would take about 24 hours for someone to write a small open source utility that would operate in a peer-to-peer mode to generate all possible footprints and send them to Facebook.

 

 

I'm trying to work out why that would be desirable, regardless of whether it would be possible.  It's interesting (if you're into crypto etc) to work out how an alogrotihm could recognise a specific photo, and not be fooled by things as easy as cropping or simple image manipulation, and also not generate countless false positives.

 

But, an easy defence to your hypothesis would be to put a limit on how many footprints can be uploaded by each facebook user, and to use things like captchas for uploading.  If you have 10000 dodgy photos of yourself then I think you can take your chances.

 

Well, in this scenario, the fake client would not actually be fingerprinting photos, just incrementing a counter to send as a fingerprint. The P2P aspect is to make sure the work of generating counters is divided up evenly so not every client submits fingerprint 000000000000 etc. If you were at all interested in subverting the feature, you would use a botnet to do it, which will limit the number of fingerprints each client needs to submit (because the botnet is already large) and also provides you with the tools to handle captchas.

This is the same kind of technology used by tineye.com, I guess, which can recognise cropped and otherwise edited versions of an image. e.g. searching for SaltyNZ's avatar finds 3734 variants.

I wonder how accurate the "digital footprint" is? i.e. if it's *really* accurate, then it could be used to regenerate something quite similar to the original.