Years ago I worked with a guy who used to sell computer equipment to businesses.<p>He told me that when he went to different divisions in each company, they all had org/structure charts somewhere around the office. And in every one of them, their section was in the middle and everybody else was serviced by them. No matter what you did, you were the center of the universe to you.<p>Likewise, I've had experience building and working on many computer systems for businesses. Each of them, if successful, wants to handle not just their thing but <i>everything</i> for their customers. No matter what they did, they wanted to be the center of the universe for their customers.<p>You can laugh at these examples, and we all know most software companies have much great ambition than they do traction, but Facebook and Google are actually doing this. They are becoming the center of the information universe to their customers.<p>This is not a good thing.
The important thing to take away from this:<p>If they can make guesses this accurate about your photos, imagine they guesses they're making behind the scenes about your life, your personality and your innermost thoughts.<p>If there was a page on fb where it showed all the inferences they had made about you, sexuality, income, religion, philosophical viewpoints, mental health, etc. then people would run screaming. Of course, a lot of people have already told fb that info voluntarily, and that's why its possible to guess it for everyone else.<p>Also potentially terrifying: a facebook fortune telling engine. I bet they can predict your future with frightening accuracy, or they will be able to after another decade or so of data anyway.
(Disclosure: FB employee, but nowhere near the photos/locations teams, just personal experience)<p>In all likelihood, there's no magic. Its just comparing 'dumb' manual album labels with places pages and trying to match them up.<p>I've had similar experiences with the location-suggestion feature where I was totally bewildered by how it was getting the data to recognize the locations. As it turns out, all of the albums they've done this for were pre-location tagging and so I'd manually put in a location (like 'Bowery Ballroom'). So there wasn't any particular magic in how they seem to be doing it. This would also explain one of the other comments on here about the location suggestions being England, Arkansas (if she just labeled the album England and the location suggester goofed). I also had it goof when I had an album labeled "Rhode Island and Massachusetts" and it tried to suggest a real estate agency with that in its name.
This was just answered on Quora: <a href="http://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-predict-my-photo-albums-locations/answer/Henry-F-Bridge#ans883901" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-predict-my-photo-albu...</a><p><i>Henry F. Bridge, Product Manager, Facebook<p>Photo albums on Facebook have long had a text input field for location, but until recently, there was no way to put in structured data in this field (like a Facebook page). We added that ability earlier this year, and the "add a location" feature just performs a search on whatever text the album owner put in originally (ranked by place popularity etc) and suggests the first result as the location of the album.</i>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo...</a><p>Facebook almost certainly has more photo information than TinEye or Flickr, and of indoor environments probably more than Google (which has reverse image search too). Across any given bar or hospital Facebook would have maybe 5-10 other people with albums tagged with the name/gps/check-in. They'd only need one other album though.<p>SIFT more or less turns every image into a bag-of-words. Your single photo, even at different angles, is going to have a heavy match with photos they have. If you upload a whole album they are going to have tons of matches and they can be more or less certain of the location. To say nothing of adding even the most basic geoip-to-city lookups that would narrow you down to at least five cities that you and your social network inhabit. But the extra information they have is besides the point, SIFT is enough; hospital rooms look alike to us, to SIFT they don't.
Just checked this.<p>I took some pics on a regular digital camera (no GPS) in Indore. I uploaded them from New Delhi a few weeks later. And now FB is asking me "Were these pics taken in Indore?". Crazy shit.<p>Update - I dug through my FB updates. Just before leaving for airport, I updated my status to "Off to Indore" and after coming back to New Delhi, I had some status updates about my office and a local park. Facebook is probably using the the timestamps from image and relating it to locations using some heuristics like status updates, IP addresses, image recognition etc.
How could Facebook do this (technologically)?<p>According to a redditor,<p>"<p>- <i>It's not IP address</i>. Facebook successfully identified a number of specific locations (bars, theaters, etc) even though I had uploaded the photos from my home<p>- <i>It's not geo-tagging</i>. All of my photos were taken with a camera that does not geo-tag (Nikon d700).<p>- <i>It's not contextual tagging</i>. There were no people tagged in the photos, no comments in a lot of them, no words or phrases or names in the captions that could have given clues<p>- <i>It's not image recognition</i>. One set of photos was taken at Cafe du Nord in SF, CA and every single shot was of the performer onstage, with no identifying characteristics or clues to be had.<p>"<p>I would really like to know as this is very interesting and none of the reddit comments (as of now, 12 hours after submission) really answer this question. What technology or methods are they using to suggest (accurate?) locations where pictures have been taken from?<p>Even more strangely, I have never used my mobile phone with Facebook, but when I uploaded a photo just now of a place from my childhood to which I haven't ever been since using Facebook, Facebook correctly suggested the location.<p>What the heck?!
Here's my guess at how it's done:<p>Redditor has facebook app installed on their smartphone (or just uses the website), sets status to "OMG wife is going into labour, at the hospital now". Facebook now knows roughly where redditor was at the specified time based on the ip, they can narrow this down further by looking at keywords in the status message and check it against a list of addresses in the local area and select the best match.<p>When the redditor comes to upload their photos days or weeks later, facebook just checks the photo timestamp against the user's location +/- X hours and makes a guess at where the photos were taken.
Immature, but I really loved this comment/idea and wonder about the feasibility of such attacks:<p>"You know what this means:<p>Time to rewrite your EXIF info and location bomb the hell out of popular attractions. Eiffel Tower in Paris? Nope, it's in Iowa ..." [1]<p>Possible? Google bomb with a twist?<p>1: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_really_creeping_me_out_with_this_how/c39vpwh" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_reall...</a>
Highly unlikely that there is anything sophisticated here. It would be too many computing cycles thrown at something with very small RoI. Most likely some straightforward text, date, and location matching.
Many of the previous commenters are assuming you need sophisticated pattern sifting to get any good insights. Not true. Large numbers of facebook users are including this data voluntarily or with their unexpurgated photos. Going after the sliver who don't is just not a worthy investment -- yet.
Karan from the locations team at Facebook posted a response on Reddit. He said:<p>"""
I am an engineer at Facebook working on the Locations team. We use the text entered in the location field of the album by the album owner and match it to the best guess for an existing Facebook Page using text matching. The popularity of the place is also used to rank the suggested places.
"""<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_really_creeping_me_out_with_this_how/c3a0a0p" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_reall...</a><p>(I work at Facebook, not on locations/photos.)
I've tried it. i don't use fb for pics. i don't use wifi on my smartphone and i had the fb app only briefly installed. i also weren't on any trips outside my city.<p>I've uploaded 4 screenshot-ed landscape (including one building) pics from flicker with absolutely no metadata. at least 2 of them should be very recognizable. the only thing that fb suggested was the single check-in that i had, minimum of 500km off.<p>i'm pretty sure that there is only minimal (if any) intelligence on image recognition and that they guess locations by information that "leak" from you and your hardware.
Since Facebook knows your social connections, isn't it also possible they check the location of the people to whom you're connected, and use their location as a guide as to where your photos may have been taken? If a cousin checked Facebook on a phone near a hospital while you posted a hospital photo, they know there's a chance the cousin was visiting you and that's where your photo was taken. They use your social grid for everything ... why wouldn't they use it for this too?
It's not perfect yet -- Facebook knows that I went to university in Cambridge (UK) but keeps asking me if photos from my undergraduate years were taken in Cambridge (Massachusetts).
I don't think this is machine learning.<p>I have Facebook suggested a few albums today (2 hours ago). Some of them are from 2+ years ago, others are recent ones. The suggestion is quite accurate (89%, 8 out of 9 albums). With the incorrect album, Facebook suggested another city with the same name but from another country!<p>So Facebook probably just combine as much data as possible and when the matching rate is larger than some threshold, it will temporary tag the album and confirm with users. Data may include:<p>1. Album info (yeah, most of my album includes the place in it's name or description)<p>2. Comments group. 3 of my albums have a large number of comments, they are all from my highschool friends (I grouped them all in the same group) so it's quite accurate I guess. Also, if Facebook use the information in their smart lists, that makes sense too.<p>3. EXIF data. Some people says Facebook can read the data and cross-check the date with its database of check-in. This doesn't happen to me but I think it's possible. And of course, if the EXIF has geo-tagged, that info can be picked up.<p>Thought?
LinkedIn appears to build "social graphs" based on profile views. If person A visits the profile of person B and C it is quite likely that some form of relationship exists (perhaps an inverse relationship too). It doesn't just have to be profile views -- LinkedIn most likely keeps track of search terms too. If a random unknown visitor comes along and searches for both "Person A" and "Person C" then it is likely that a connection exists between these two persons.<p>It would be easy to train this system by displaying a "guess" (a friendship recommendation for person A) to persons B and C. If person B or C show interest in the recommendation then perhaps a relationship exists. Guesses could also be formed by comparing keywords/metadata found on profiles in two different social circles.<p>The reason I mentioned LinkedIn is that I think they do a better job of recommending/guessing who your acquaintances are than Facebook.
I've seen both extremes on my photos. One set it suggested the nearby town, which was creepily accurate; another it asked "were these taken in England, Arkansas" which was a hilariously poor guess. Weirdly, they managed the difficult part (figuring out the photos were taken in "England" without any obvious clues) but then failed to sensibly geolocate it.
Facebook has suggested twice accurately places I've visited, but I pretty much specified it in the album (Singapre and Australia).<p>There is an album now with random photos, with the location "Plekke" (which is afrikaans for "places"). They are suggesting "Plekke, San Juan, Puerto Rico". So, currently I wouldn't suggest machine learning, although it is not entirely dismissible. They have the largest photo db in the world, they could eventually learn and then seed it with stuff like checkins, status updates, etc.<p>EDIT: I have another album called "Kuala Lumpur and Thailand", which have pretty iconic pictures in it (Wat Pho, KL Towers, Batu Caves, etc) and they haven't asked me about that album at all.
I vote cell tower info.<p>I have a Nokia phone with no GPS. Many programs uses the cell tower info added by the phone to determine where the photo was taken.
A test that might fool this. You will need:
1. A facebook status update/checkin/access from a particular location.
2. A photo taken without EXIF data at around the same time as the update/checkin/access above, but from a completely different location.<p>Upload the photo using your facebook account. Check whether they get the location right. If yes, the mystery continues. If no, but the location is somewhere other than where you updated your status/checked in from, the mystery deepens. Else, they're pairing the times together.
I googled Zooey Deschanel several hours ago. I was logged into facebook at that time. I log into facebook again and Zooey Deschanel in now on my 'People to Subscribe To' list. I came to hacker news to post an ask hn thread about if fb tracks my browsing history..and bummer I find this thread.
I dunno about everybody else, but I'm pretty impressed. It guessed some obvious ones- but I also had an album of photos of a car at a dealership. All you could see was the car and the service bay, but it knew what dealership it was.
It keeps asking me if some screenshots from a virtual world that I'd location-tagged with "Cyberspace" were taken in some net cafe with that name in British Columbia. I'm really tempted to answer yes.
Yup. I had a similar experience couple of days back when FB listed three of my albums and correctly predicted the place names for confirmation. I was shocked when it _correctly_ predicted the location of one of my private albums which is an obscure town in southern India.<p>Given that most of my pictures were taken with cameras with no geo identification mechanism, I can only conclude that they identify the location based on any comments and similar photos available in _my_ network.
I just tried to upload some photos that facebook hasn't seen yet with or without EXIF info (obviously no or invalid geotagging) and tried geo-tagging some photos I already have uploaded and Facebook hasn't made any suggestion whatsoever. Perhaps I found a way to switch it off but I've just checked the settings and none of the options seems to be concerned with suggestions for geotagging
The outrage expressed by some of the commenters on Reddit and here is curious. Clearly Facebook and other companies have the technology to make these connections. Would you rather they keep it hidden to sell to advertisers and other potentially unscrupulous buyers, or expose it to you so that you can either make use of the features, or decide it's not worth playing their game?
This had been freaking me out for months!<p>But I think I finally figured it out in my case. I had used Picasa to upload the pics years ago. In Picasa, I had entered a caption with enough detail for Facebook to guess the location. The caption had never been uploaded (i.e. set as the photo's caption on Facebook), but I'm guessing they did somehow capture that info on upload.
Ignoring the <i>how</i> of this new feature, what is the upside to me as a user of confirming to Facebook the hospital in which my child was born?<p>Why do they think people would generally be interested in clicking "Yes" on these suggestions? That they are helpfully filling in the blanks on photos I "forgot" to location-tag?
I asked this question on Quora a few days ago: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Facebook-1/Why-is-the-new-Facebook-Add-a-Location-to-Your-Photos-feature-so-good-at-guessing-the-location" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Facebook-1/Why-is-the-new-Facebook-Add-...</a> but did not get any responses.
I noticed this yesterday as well. I have photos uploaded from a Canon camera from 2007. There is simply not enough information to determine the location, but they correction identified the bar that the photos were taken at. I have no idea how they did it, but it really does bother me.
There was an old vision that machines would do the stuff for you somewhere back in the day.<p>Sad that we've got to a point where we can make this possible but won't because we can't trust pie in the sky.<p>Torn between the two options and can't decide!
I actually think fb needs to own up to how they do it. If it's geolocation with a correlated timestamp I'd like to know.<p>If it's just album name suggestions, I still don't like it, but I suppose I'll live with it.<p>This is creepy.
Anyone else find it amusing he is complaining about Facebook knowing the location of a photo by posting it to a more public place and confirming the location?
Wow! A serious competitor to SIRI in place. My guess is they are using combination of techniques - Semantics of your Status as phpnode mentioned with example(heard they have plans to get into semantic search to beat google), EXIF info, IP address and also your friends replies - when is the due? which hospital or Gynic? If hospital name is not mentioned then Gynics details and her hospital location. Do you think all this is used just to make a SUGGESTION?? Its a Billion$?
Eventually someone evil will do something truly monstrous on Facebook and it will make this WTF look like a drop in the ocean. I fear for my friends who are still Facehooked.