Facebook is considering technology to target entire families with ads

Facebook may soon start targeting entire families with advertisements based primarily on photos they publish online, after obtaining a patent describing such technology. The social media giant based in Menlo Park, Calif., Has developed an online service concept to identify members of a household by analyzing their photographs, profiling them into demographics, and identifying them. feed its conclusions with the Facebook announcements system. This solution uses computer vision and machine learning. In other words, it has the potential to be extremely consistent, but it never stops improving and getting better at each task, whether successful or not.

The vanilla version of the program is supposed to be formed using deep learning techniques before being tasked with analyzing family photos, although it was contemplated to systematically support similar principles of artificial intelligence. In addition to facial recognition, the ad targeting mechanism could rely on photo tags and basic information about the Facebook profile to know the habits and relationships of individual users within a given household. , explains the patent documentation. Knowing where to look is another important part of the solution, which is why Facebook wants it to be based on a robust forecast model that would suggest new data points to analyze and predict future behavior to help the delivery network. ads.

Context: Facebook does not hesitate to try to innovate in the world of targeted advertising by seeing how almost all of its business model relies on such solutions. The company can always be extremely cautious when implementing technologies for entire families, as it has recently been significantly impacted by the way it processes user data and addresses the topic of digital privacy. . Between the Cambridge Analytica scandal at the beginning of the year and several other small difficulties that followed, Facebook has now drawn unwanted attention from lawmakers and regulators in many parts of the world, including its home country.

Earlier this week, David Cicilline, the new chair of the House's Judiciary Committee's antitrust committee, said: "Facebook can not be trusted for its own regulation," adding that the newly-elected Democratic body will look at the recent transgressions of society after its swearing. Several members of the European Parliament expressed a similar sentiment earlier this year as part of an audience at which Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asking questions about the incident from Cambridge Analytica. In the midst of all this turmoil, the social media specialist continued to launch his first series of smart screens that track users throughout the room during video calls, portraying them as privacy-oriented devices, that some industry observers have found derisory.

Impact: The recently released Facebook patent raises another set of privacy concerns regarding the social media company's efforts to monetize its technically free service. If the timing of its publication is not appropriate, given the number of scandals suffered by Facebook in recent months, the company could not easily affect it given the way it filed its patent there is 18 months, before the Cambridge Analytica debacle and others. troublesome episodes. Given the current situation, Facebook will probably not be in a hurry to start mass collecting and analyzing data from the family advertising profiles, as long as this happens.