A patent has recently been discovered by analysts, revealing Facebook’s controversial plans. It is suspected that Facebook ‘the social media giant’ is planning to secretly watch and record the users from their own smartphone camera and webcam.
For monitoring a person’s browsing activity on facebook, the company is seeking to utilize the technology of observing facial expression of a person, judging his likes and dislike, managing his timeline accordingly. The patent explained that the facial expression of the users usually change according to the type of content they come across with, and Facebook intends to utilize it for improving their flow of information.
This is actually for analyzing how the user feels or uses a certain information when scrolls through his feed. For instance, if a user smiles or reacts to a particular user’s picture or post, the algorithm will produce more post or pictures of that user in the Newsfeed.
The patent will robotically add the emotional information of the user to text message and through the keyboard input method, it will be able to guess the user’s emotions.
It’s quite tricky in the form of text message to convey the intended meaning and mood of the user and through this system, the misunderstandings between the users will be reduced.
Through mouse, keyboards touch screen, touch pad and several other input devices the system could gather up the data, the emotions through this system will be predicted by the typing speed of the user.
The location, how hardly or softly the keys are pressed, movements and various other factors according to CBI insights.
For integrating the emotional messages into the text messages, Facebook will likely change the text spacing, size, and font or maybe will bring out and use new formatting tools.
In February 2014, the patent application was submitted which got published in August 2015 but was spotted recently by CBI insights. But according to the social media giant, it is not planning to implement such type of technology of its users.
“We often seek patents for the technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans,” according to a Facebook spokesperson.
In the pursuit for personalizing the newsfeed, the patent raises the concern that what steps now Facebook will take.
Desmond Jones, a fictitious person was created by Facebook for illustrating how this whole system will work and according to the patent, ‘It appears from the profile that the user, Desmond Jones, was looking away from his device during a kitten video posted by Tim Boone.’
But secretly recording the user’s expression has become a concern as this can be against the user’s privacy and most of the Facebook users will dislike such kind of technology which will interpret their actual emotions which users want to hide from others.
Last year, the Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook) posted a picture which got viral on social media as in the picture it could be clearly seen that Zuckerberg covering the microphone and webcam of the laptop with a tape.
After the picture got viral, the users were left in a trance as it directly affected their privacy and covering the webcam and microphone is quite baffling but again the concern possibly will rise after the discovery of new Facebook patent.