The folks at Facebook are taking steps to keep you out of trouble, in spite of your best efforts in the opposite direction.
Slate reports (or rather, passes on from Wired):
Let’s say you’re out drinking with your buddies, things get out of hand, you pull out your smartphone, you take a selfie in the middle of all this drunken revelry, then you take 30 or 40 more, and, without hesitation, you start uploading them to Facebook.
It’s a common thing to do. But Yann LeCun aims to stop such unbridled behavior—or at least warn people when they’re about to do something they might regret. He wants to build a kind of Facebook digital assistant that will, say, recognize when you’re uploading an embarrassingly candid photo of your late-night antics. In a virtual way, he explains, this assistant would tap you on the shoulder and say: “Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”
The idea is more than just an idle suggestion….
Fashioning such a tool is largely about building image recognition technology that can distinguish between your drunken self and your sober self. Using a red-hot form of artificial intelligence called “deep learning”—a technology bootstrapped by LeCun and other academics—Facebook has already reached a point where it can identify your face and your friends’ faces in the photos you post to its social network, letting you more easily tag them with the right names….
So it will not only know you, but know when you’re not yourself. Or not the self you want prospective employers to see.
We don’t know whether to be reassured, or creeped out. Might as well go with both…
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