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Now, Facebook wants to use your smartphone camera to spy on you

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Sushant Talwar
Sushant TalwarJun 14, 2017 | 21:29

Now, Facebook wants to use your smartphone camera to spy on you

In today's dose of worrisome news, social media giant Facebook is cooking up new plans to violate our privacy. According to patents unearthed by tech analytics firm CBInsights, Facebook is developing ways to track a user's mood by using their phone or computer cameras against them. 

The report adds the motive behind Facebook's using such invasive methods is to analyse the user's emotions so that it can provide content better suited to their mood. However, it's not as innocuous as it sounds. What is sure to concern many, the patent – Techniques for emotion detection and content delivery – proposes using “passive imaging data,” or visual data captured to monitor the user.

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In simple terms, this would enable the tech giant to essentially record the user and their expressions using their own phone or web cameras even when they are not actively using Facebook's platform. 

How will it work?  

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With the incremental growth in processing capabilities and user data becoming the new age gold, Facebook intends to put to use advancements in machine learning capabilities to identify the user’s emotion and collect it as data for future use.

As per the patent, the collected data will be used by an algorithm tailored by Facebook to determine how a user responds to the consumption of a particular type of media helping it decide what kind of content to provide to them at a given moment. For the tech giant, it will not only help it keep its users hooked, but will also open up new ways of creating secondary data based on the insights that it collected from the users.

In the lack of strong privacy laws, these insights and the secondary data collated from them, can then further be sold to third party clients.  

However, that's not where Facebook's sinister plans end. Mark Zuckerberg owned company through the implementation of another innocuously named patent - "Augmenting text messages with emotion information" - will help supplement the data collected from your phone's camera.

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This evil sidekick patent, if in effect, will factor in the speed of typing, the content of the text and even the way the handset is held, etc, to collect more information for its machine learning-based algorithm to identify the user's mood. 

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Should you be concerned?

Well, the simple answer to that question is, YES ABSOLUTELY! As CBInsights points out in its report, the proposals made in the patent are opening up Facebook to an "ethical minefield". The proposals will not only allow the company to gain data on what the user is feeling but will also cross all lines of ethics by opening up a new way of invading privacy. 

It is scary to think how this patent will leave users across the globe open to Facebook's prying eyes even in their most personal and intimate moments. 

However, as is the case with most patents, they don’t always make it through to the end product- so it’s not clear whether Facebook will ever roll out this new feature. But, if Facebook does, and you find yourself being recorded when you are at your most vulnerable, under the current privacy laws, there won't be much you can do to stop it from using that data to exploit you. Unless of course, you plan to uninstall Facebook from your phone or tape that camera on it for good.  

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Either way, be scared, be very scared. Big boss is watching. 

 

Last updated: June 14, 2017 | 21:29
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