I'm not really sure if that's a scary facebook thing or merely just an inconvenient reality of the world we live in now.
There's quite a few papers out on fingerprinting/identifying cameras from images taken with them using intrinsics (dust, scratches, slight offset of image sensor with respect to lens).
Is something being created for profit scarier/worse? I'm personally far more concerned about government surveillance programs that I have no option but to participate in.
I'm always confused by comments like this. Not only is corporate surveillance always one NSL away from being used by the government, but corporations aren't democracies. As a user I can't vote on what data Facebook choses to collect. Facebook's shadow profiles also put to rest the idea that you get to choose whether or not to participate in corporate surveillance.
Ask me and the other citizens of Australia what democracy has done to save us from government mass surveiallance.
It may possibly be one of the worst guards against it. 99% of the population don't understand it and don't give a shit. Co-incidently that's the only reason Facebook and Google get away with it too, or it'd be far more profitable for them to back off and play the "we value your privacy" PR card.
Literally the only difference is that Facebook is headed by software engineers and governments are headed by a bunch of people with tons of power and no knowledge. You tell me which is more dangerous. You can't act ethically if you don't even understand the domain you're acting in.
> Literally the only difference is that Facebook is headed by software engineers and governments are headed by a bunch of people with tons of power and no knowledge. You tell me which is more dangerous. You can't act ethically if you don't even understand the domain you're acting in.
On the other hand, you can do a lot more damage if you have the knowledge, and do not care about ethics.
It's not that I don't think that the government collects the data that Facebook has gathered, it's that I don't have to use Facebook.
By the way, do you see the issue of NSA carpet surveillance coming up on the ballot very often? Democracy sucks. Consensual liberal markets are the secret sauce to the free and prosperous societies humanity has produced, NOT the utter sham that is democracy.
Well I think this specific thing is just an inconvenient reality in that it is finger-printable in the first place - if one notices a distinct image distortion across all sets that would form a 'fingerprint' of sorts like if on one setting a few pixels are always black to oversimplify the principles. Facebook didn't create that reality to be analyzed.
However if Facebook gathers a large data set of known signatures to work with or worse does so from the hardware without your knowledge or consent as opposed to anyone working with your posted photo galleries is a scary Facebook thing.
I don’t think profit motive is the scary second ingredient, but rather the massive centralization of data that Facebook (and a few other tech giants) have.
The technology is super cool. As is the stuff where they can reconstruct audio from a video of a potato chip bag that was in the room. Fast computers, DSP, effective pattern matching and reconstruction... some of the most fascinating stuff out there.
Where it gets scary, I guess, is where it upends the standard norms and expectations of privacy. As the tools proliferate, forensic reconstruction type analysis becomes available to almost everyone, which totally opens the doors for new levels of creepiness from all sorts of actors...
The scariest part for me is how it keeps getting cheaper, so mass-surveillance is now possible to do economically at an unprecedented scale. It's awesome power to wield, and I'm not sure any government or company can be trusted with such power.
Also drone swarms. They scare the shit out of me for the same reason.
There's quite a few papers out on fingerprinting/identifying cameras from images taken with them using intrinsics (dust, scratches, slight offset of image sensor with respect to lens).