[lbo-talk] Happy New Year!

MM marxmail00 at gmail.com
Thu Jan 8 01:12:11 PST 2015


On 08 Jan 2015, at 12:44 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> The thing is free.

Not remotely so on any theory of value with an ounce of explanatory power. Even this tech blogger at Forbes has a better grasp of the incentives and risks:

“… When you combine these two features—automated facial recognition and algorithmic inference—you get some incredibly powerful but disquieting possibilities.

"Already, there have been cases where Facebook has outed gay people through inference-based ad selection. The same capabilities that power facial recognition could also power facial inference. Do users realize that now, or at some point in the future, Facebook could profile them racially, guess at their intelligence, judge their attractiveness or even diagnosis certain medical conditions without being supplied any specific verbal data? All of this by merely giving facebook our… face.

"What these new terms of service do for Facebook is to give them carte blanche to guess at the details of our identities that we have not specifically disclosed and target marketing to us based on their guesses. In the mirror world of big data, these hunches are as real as anything else. And indeed, in order to monetize a massive free service like Facebook, this is exactly the kind of thing they have to do. But for Facebook’s users it is looking less and less like a free service.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/08/31/new-facebook-policies-sell-your-face-and-whatever-it-infers/



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