Mapillary joins Facebook

I was still brewing on an answer :wink: A bit sharpener formulated then I would have, but the response of @GITNE says it all.

After re reading my post, I agree, that is the only honest answer you can give, I sincerely thank you for giving it.

If you need a president of the foundation, I am your man $$$

“Deal with it” is certainly not our attitude and I apologise if it might have felt that way.

Our intention at the moment is walk the talk and demonstrate through actions our commitments to both OpenStreetMap and privacy. As you mentioned, we can’t convince you, but hopefully over time you’ll see from our actions that we are deeply committed to OpenStreetMap and privacy. These are things we care about at both a personal and professional level and the best thing we can do is to demonstrate it in the coming months and years as Mapillary continues its journey within Facebook.

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“Deal with it” is certainly not our attitude and I apologise if it might have felt that way.

Well, it certainly feels and looks this way. The thing with Mapillary is that Mapillary is not a company or start‑up like any other. It is different because it relies on the commitment and contributions of others. Sure, formally any acquisition is just a transfer of property rights. However, Mapillary comes with strings attached. Mapillary has a silent (or maybe rather voice deprived?) third party involved, which formally does not need to be heard but may not be wise to ignore. So, as I said, politics and diplomacy may be useful here.

Our intention at the moment is walk the talk and demonstrate through actions our commitments to both OpenStreetMap and privacy.

I totally agree with you on that, @eneerhut. It is too late for Facebook for just words to have any impact. Only actions matter now. And, I do believe you that the Facebook leadership is truly trying to mitigate recent data privacy scandals and is also trying to implement new procedures and data privacy standards in the company. However, for us outsiders it is very difficult to understand and verify what is actually going on inside Facebook and/or how data privacy standards are implemented. For now, we just have your word that privacy is a serious issue in the company and that actions have been taken.

Of course, I cannot speak for others but I think there are a handful of things Facebook and Mapillary could do to help restore trust in the community.

  1. Facebook CEO and head of Mapillary @jesolem should make a joint statement on data privacy regarding imagery collected on Mapillary and what is the way forward.

  2. Make a concrete statement on what happens or has happened to the original non‑blurred imagery. Details do matter.

  3. Externalize the blurring feature into a standalone application, so that contributors can automate this process locally and integrate into their workflow. I am aware that any weights data required for this to work may constitute a business secret. If that’s the case then I have no easy solution for this.

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Just FYI, the vast majority of president and other board of director jobs in non‑profit organizations are a money losing business for the people involved. Sometimes you are compensated for your expenses (which you have to prove meticulously) but that’s about it. In any event, any such job is going to absorb a lot of your time. Sorry, for having to disappoint you :wink:

:thinking: I think FIFA may be an exception to this rule? :smiley:

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I was also thinking in these lines @GITNE. Your point two more or less can be answered by point, but that could “ease some nerves”. And last but certainly not least: especially point three, @eneerhut in a sense already replied on that subject. When they could create a (separate) github of their (in my opinion very good) face & license plate detection I think that would give the option to those who want that option before uploading.
For those that don’t think it’s a problem, well they don’t have to use it then :wink: (in reply of the remark of @filipc on that subject)

PS: I would appreciate a json/xml log of each image with the detect data (and if possible with an id/info what the detector saw in that spot & a reliability value, added by a “dry run” option?)

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I redraw my candidature.
I was a pigeon, now I am a fierce enemy of FB as they want to destroy Flemish culture.
I wish Mapillary and FB many happy years deleting pictures.

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@eneerhut I do not envy you.

Exhibit n + 1 on why when you’re acquired you’re not in a position to promise anything to anyone despite any assurances from the acquirer. Or, from the consumer’s side, why those promises should carry no weight.

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I think this is good news. @jesolem Thank you for taking this issue seriously and acting on it. While this solution may not be perfect it is definitely a step in the right direction and something to build on. And, I honestly hope that this can restore some of the trust which was lost to some contributors because there is no other imagery provider with a comparable level of quality of service to Mapillary. Mapillary has become an extremely useful tool to the OpenStreetMap project and also to many other companies and public service authorities. It would be a shame to loose it, just because big money rules.

Now to the solution itself: Since the blurring algorithm is not perfect, have you considered a shorter grace period, like 3 or 7 days, for storing raw imagery in order to still be able to validate blurs and collect training data? Because the thing is that contributors and consumers are as interested in protecting privacy as in unobstructed access to other data. One frequent example for obstructed data are house numbers, which currently often enough get falsely blurred. It would be nice if contributors could continue to help improve false positive rates.

It might also be worth while looking into minimal JPEG manipulation since there is surely value in storing any privacy insensitive portion of the imagery unaltered. Well, if not for now, then surely in the future.

Imho, a standalone blurring application would be even better because we could collect training data and blur images at the same time without the need for a grace period.

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Thanks @GITNE . We did consider shorter grace periods but eventually decided against it. The contributors who would be interested in going through their uploads to look for falsely blurred areas are also often the ones that upload a lot of images which makes it hard to do in a short time window. In the end we decided to put privacy first. To answer your earlier question about what happens to the original imagery, I hope that is clear now. No unblurred copies remain.

A standalone blurring application that contributors can run on their imagery pre-upload is a great idea. We are looking at it and will share any info when we can. cc @eesger

Thanks for your input!

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Thank you for the clarification and welcome back to the forums :slight_smile:

Have you considered the idea, floated here, to blur in a reversible way - with a secret that would be encrypted with something the original contributor has (their password, perhaps)?
I often see blurs on addresses (housenumbers, flat numbers etc), opening hours and other useful data.
Short grace periods would not help in most cases.

Thanks for this clarification, this is good news!

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The iconoclast mob has won.

Hey @Richlv !
Any form of reversible solution would mean storing the unblurred image or the part that was blurred, which is what we wanted to get away from. We already in the past had the unblurred copies in encrypted storage but the information is still there and we decided to put privacy first here.

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Thinking about that, it have to agree with @jesolem. It would be possible, but very hard to engineer something that is usable and and the same time trusted by the public…
There would always be some sort of secret needed by the original uploader. What if the uploader forgets it? Is it a password? How will the process to unlock look like? And then, what if facebook decided to change its privacy policy? And lets mapillary store it the next time the uploader unlocks anything? Or if they get forced by whatever state agency?
Permanent deletion is also a hedge against that. What is not stored cannot be leaked.
And there are a lot of tasks that are more urgent that this, e.g. fixing the Android app.

Improving number detection is probably a separate task, and it might even be separate from face detection, which I deem much more critical. Not sure if facebook has an interest in that, because they probably already have much more opening hours than osm…

I don’t care about intent or what steps are taken. Facebook has proven to be one of the most evil entities on the Internet stealing peoples personal data and ignoring privacy laws. They are still doing it. That data has since been used to influence several elections.

I was on Mapillary since the very early days and has both contributed code and more than 1M images. But not anymore. I will NOT be part of these crimes. I truely feel that I have been betrayed by Mapillary and is only glad that I have kept a copy of most of my images.

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Perhaps there’s a way we could use some of the Mapillary tech for blurring in our uploader? We tried baking in a few existing detection/blurring solutions but we never quite got to an accuracy or visual level we we’re happy with.

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Some mapping-related info still gets blurred, will collect such examples in a separate thread at Page not found .

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Of course, we all knew.
As a mapper and photographer I am insulted.
They always told us that our pictures remained ours.
It has become wood photography.

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That seems harsh. Authorship of the pictures remains with the contributor (subject to the licence), but I’m not aware of a clause to keep pictures un-altered. While I’d love to see some secure way to view the original images, the challenge with that seems rather real.