The Facebook patent would use your family's photos to determine who you live with and to show ads.



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Facebook wants to know who you live with.

The social media giant has filed a patent for a technology that would look at your family's photos to determine who else lives in your household.

In return, this would allow Facebook to broadcast targeted ads to the entire family.

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Facebook has filed a patent for a technology that would review your family's photos to determine who else lives in your household. This would allow the company to serve targeted ads.

Facebook has filed a patent for a technology that would review your family's photos to determine who else lives in your household. This would allow the company to serve targeted ads.

Facebook has filed a patent for a technology that would review your family's photos to determine who else lives in your household. This would allow the company to serve targeted ads.

The patent, titled "Predicting Household Demographics from Image Data," was filed on May 10 but was released only on Thursday.

It describes the use of in-depth learning algorithms trained to look for details in photos, such as faces, and reference them with textual data in the person's profile that "suggest relationships "between people in the photo.

The algorithm would also examine other available data, such as comments, captions, tags, IP addresses to form conclusions.

"For example, a trained image analysis model identifies each individual shown in the user's photos, a trained text analysis model derives information about relationships between members of the user. household from the user's profile data and tags associated with photos, "says the patent.

"The online system uses forecasts to generate more information about the user and his or her home in the online system, and to provide improved and targeted content delivery to the user and to his or her audience. home. "

The algorithm detects who is on the photo and crosses it with other data such as IP addresses, captions and tags to establish a family relationship between people in the photo.

The algorithm detects who is on the photo and crosses it with other data such as IP addresses, captions and tags to establish a family relationship between people in the photo.

The algorithm detects who is on the photo and crosses it with other data such as IP addresses, captions and tags to establish a family relationship between people in the photo.

The use of this technology would give Facebook all kinds of information about households and demographics, such as age, socio-economic data, gender and geographical location, as many as 15,000 people. essential elements for advertisers.

The algorithm is able to deduce granular information such as the number of people marked on a photo, the people in the photo and the frequency with which these people appear simultaneously on the same photo.

He also examines labels to determine family relationships, giving the example of a photo including family hashtags, Christmas, husband, wife, mother or children.

The algorithm studies the email history, tag history and even web browsing history to see if multiple people share the same IP address.

In addition, he would also use Instagram images to gather information.

The algorithm can deduce granular information such as the number of people marked on a photo, the people in the photo and the frequency with which these people appear simultaneously on the same photo.

The algorithm can deduce granular information such as the number of people marked on a photo, the people in the photo and the frequency with which these people appear simultaneously on the same photo.

The algorithm can deduce granular information such as the number of people marked on a photo, the people in the photo and the frequency with which these people appear simultaneously on the same photo.

In another example, Facebook describes a man who publishes several photos of two women.

On one of the photos, he is photographed with a girl and wears the subtitle "my angel".

The algorithm deduces that he is photographed with what is probably his daughter, while the photo of the other woman is his wife.

As a result, the algorithm can also indicate that it is a three-person household, creating a richer profile so that brands can target more relevant ads to the business. # 39; user.

This is not the first patent published by Facebook regarding ways to collect more robust demographic information from users.

Earlier this year, he patented a technology that would allow him to predict "life-changing events" such as marriage, birth and even death.

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Facebook researchers may describe one of the most shocking documents about the ability to "predict an event of life" for users, such as the state of marriage, birthdays, new jobs , a birth in the family, graduation or even death.

This would help brands to run user-related ads "more efficiently and quickly," according to the patent, which was first spotted by the New York Times.

"Rather than simply relying on the speed and accuracy of a user to update his profile information, the embodiments of the invention provide for life-changing events for a user based on information available on the user accessible by the social network system ", notes the patent.

& # 39; Beyond the simple trust in modifying user profile information, the described approach makes better use of all the information contained in the social network system, such as wall posts , instant messages, e-mails, etc., to determine whether a user has undergone a life-changing event and / or to predict whether a user will experience a life-changing event at a later time. & # 39;

Facebook uses the example of displaying banner ads for wedding venues on a user's profile when it realizes that that person might be engaged.

In this case, the user may not signal that he is getting married before the fact, which is a missed opportunity for advertisers.

Facebook offers in the patent, using machine learning, to "calculate the probability that a user will undergo a life-changing event", as well as "the historical data of other users … who have lived life changing events ".

The algorithm can search for words such as "congratulations", the number of times other users have clicked on each user profile or other recorded data to form a "search engine". prediction of the evolution of life ".

It is unclear whether the ideas described in the patent filed in 2012 have already been incorporated into the Facebook platform, but this highlights the links between user data collection and targeted advertising in the company. 39; company.

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