Facebook Glitch Lets You Search For Pictures of Your Female Friends, But Not Your Male Ones (thenextweb.com) 67
Belgian security researcher Inti De Ceukelaire has found an unusual glitch in Facebook's search function. Facebook lets you search for photos of your female friends, but refuses to let you look up pictures of your male friends. The Next Web has managed to replicate the glitch across several Facebook accounts. "When you type 'photos of my female friends' into the search bar, Facebook will return a seemingly-random selection of photos from your female friends," reports TNW. From the report: Switching out "female" with "male" returns something completely different. Instead of pictures of friends from within your social network, you're instead shown a selection of pictures from across the social network. In our experience, these came from accounts and groups we did not follow. Facebook will also ask if you meant to type "female," assuming you mistyped your query.
If you're feeling an overwhelming sense of deja vu, you're not alone. The predecessor to Facebook was a deeply unsavory site called Facemash that allowed Harvard University students to rate their female colleagues based on perceived physical attractiveness. It's a far cry from the now-hugely popular social network site, used by millennials and grandparents alike. Facebook has desperately tried to shed this deeply questionable part of its history for something more saccharine and innocuous. [...] The main difference though is that this is almost certainly an innocent mistake, rather than the product of dorm-room shenanigans.
If you're feeling an overwhelming sense of deja vu, you're not alone. The predecessor to Facebook was a deeply unsavory site called Facemash that allowed Harvard University students to rate their female colleagues based on perceived physical attractiveness. It's a far cry from the now-hugely popular social network site, used by millennials and grandparents alike. Facebook has desperately tried to shed this deeply questionable part of its history for something more saccharine and innocuous. [...] The main difference though is that this is almost certainly an innocent mistake, rather than the product of dorm-room shenanigans.
Yeah, sure... (Score:5, Funny)
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You know how the saying goes. Once you've seen on set of boobs... You want to see them all...
Re: Yeah, sure... (Score:1)
Yes, this is why zuck built Facebook in the first place...
"Glitch" (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:"Glitch" (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, right. "Glitch..."
Well, it is a glitch. Only Zuckerberg is supposed to have access to that functionality.
Great for finding transsexuals (Score:1)
If that had been present before my marriage. And my second to last marriage.
Seems their AI knows us better than I though (Score:1)
> Facebook will also ask if you meant to type "female,"
I was underestimating this whole AI craze, but turns out it's pretty legit.
Strange (Score:2, Flamebait)
Other than work acquaintances about 90% of the people I have in my "friends" list are female.
For the statistically inclined, of the 89% about 70% are either females I have or females I would have sex with.
The rest are relatives of some kind or other. which are not included in the previous paragraph, well except your mom. /s
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For the statistically inclined, of the 89% about 70% are either females I have or females I would have sex with.
For the pedantically inclined, you didn't specify the split of that 70%. For some reason for anyone talking about their sex life on slashdot, I'm inclined to think is skews all one way.
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Do you know what is most successful in female reproduction, pretty but stupid, just look around you and it is even celebrated. Who hates it the most, jealous men who don't get an easy ride or is that a hard ride or fugly women who can't get the free hard ride and have to work and compete with men and struggle and hence want to change the rules. Punish pretty but stupid women and drive them into menial work where the fugly can dominate them and make it easier to compete against men by downgrading the competi
Seriously? (Score:2, Interesting)
While I can understand wanting to look for photos of friends, what possible reason could someone have for only wanting to see pics of their male friends or female friends? If they have someone in mind, they can search for pictures of that person.
But I can think of precisely zero cases where I would want to discriminate which photos I wanted to see of my friends based on their gender.
So am I out to lunch here? Can someone explain why this should actually even be a thing?
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Stupid people seek to gain social status by comparing and rating the looks of their female friends. Broke dirtbags collect and trade pictures of other people's female friends as though they were baseball cards. Pictures of guys just aren't that popular, though I suspect the search logic would know what you meant if you searched for "penis" instead.
what possible reason (Score:3)
Possible reasons to do things are more common than jelly beans under sofa cushions. Dislodge the sofa cushion of your imagination, then stoutly hold forth your outstretched apron skirt to receive a giant payload.
Here's a starting point: people add search terms to narrow the field of search when seeking something you dimly recall, but where the precise contents (such as personal names) have slipped from mind.
If you're trying to recall the design of some cute top, "female friends and gay f
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While I can understand wanting to look for photos of friends, what possible reason could someone have for only wanting to see pics of their male friends or female friends?
Facebook: a boon for the lazy stalker with ADHD.
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So am I out to lunch here? Can someone explain why this should actually even be a thing?
Seriously, you need someone to explain "the birds and the bees" to you?
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What does romantic have to do with it ? And why limit to a single friend of the female gender ?
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Well, he did mention the "birds and the bees"... call me old fashioned, but I'd generally think that a person is going to have at least some amount of romantic (as opposed to platonic) attraction to whoever they decide to mate with.
My bad. Monogomy is the social norm for human beings, so I may have overgeneralized.
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Are you a prude in real life or do you just pretend to gaslight people on Slashdot ?
Guys want to stare at boobs. Guys search female friend pictures to scope out their boobs. Doesn't have anything romantic, doesn't have anything to do with long term commitment.
It's no different than going to Pornhub. Or do you also stick to only a single porn star for "monogomous" reasons ?
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Uh, sure.... except they were talking about Facebook, not a singles or dating site, hookup site, or porn site... and, in particular, people searching their own *friends*, not strangers' pics.
Maybe I am a prude, but I seriously had no idea that using Facebook in this way was actually a real life thing until seeing this. In retrospect, I know I shouldn't have been all that surprised, but that didn't mean it was something that I'd have actually ever imagined real people doing.
Bug or Feature (Score:2)
You say "bug", I say "feature".
at 15, every codebase w/ glitch it deserves (Score:2)
Now to update that for the 21st century:
I'm not exactly filing this glitch under "accidental".
This is not a glitch (Score:1)
This an artifact of some mouth-breathing troll brogrammer's passive aggressive sexual assault plans.
There is different functionality here (Score:5, Informative)
I just spent some time testing this. I see two things going on. One is that the frequent search terms are definitely biased towards searching for female photos. This may be legit and simply represents what people search for most.
Here are the search suggestions when I type "photos of my":
photos of my female friends
photos of my friends
photos of my female friends in bikinis
photos of my boyfriend
photos of my girlfriend
photos of my female friends this month
photos of my friends from this month
photos of my wife
There is, however, most certainly an actual difference in the functionality between searching for "photos of my female friends" and "photos of my male friends". When I search for the female friends, I see a search result box titled in bold text "Photos of my female friends" and it does indeed contain pictures of my female friends. Beneath this box is another result box titled just "Photos" with random posted photos (4 of the 6 are of females, but not from my friends).
Now, when I search for "photos of my male friends" it does not have a results box that says "Photos of my male friends" at all, and instead only has the generic "Photos" box with photos from random posts (and two have men in them along with females, and one is only of a female - however none is of just a male).
So there is definitely a difference in actual functionality here, at least from my account as a male. It was implemented to function in this way.
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That is the implication in the article.
The predecessor to Facebook allowed you to rate your female friends.
I would assume they had some functionality built in to get the list of female friends... that would make it easy to rate.
Somehow this functionality was kept in facebook including the search strings.
Probably an honest mistake, but also surprising it wasn't taken out or have the male version added as time went on.
Re: There is different functionality here (Score:2)
I have to ask....who would search for "pictures of my wife"?
Edit: I guess a lot of people? There are certainly a lot of results.
string matching substring (Score:5, Interesting)
'male' is a substring of 'female' any search for the string 'female' would not match 'male' but a search for the string 'male' would match 'female'
It couldn't be that simple could it?
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Good point
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The gender is most probably not stored as a text string in their database, and even if it were, the search would need to know to look in the gender field in order to match it.
They could store the gender as a tag on each image, together with other tags, but even then they would need to populate the tags with the gender implicitly from the data. Add to that that a substring search requires more processing than a word search (depending on the database and index funct
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It would also match tamales and malediction.
There are ways round that.
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/sarcasm I propose we use a different word for female say "fale". Oh wait, that doesn't have a good connotation. =P
What happens when searching for drinking buddies aka "ale" ? Will it match male AND female?
If they are doing substring matching then the algorithm is an epic fail.
i.e.
In the early days of UO you couldn't type "assassin" because the profanity filter would find "ass". God help you if you wanted to use "compassion". LOL. There are a ton of valid words with ass in them. [thefreedictionary.com]
This isn't rocket science --
Possible unintend consequence (Score:2)
You know, it's actually far more likely that this would have arisen if you'd restricted people from searching for pictures of females *who were not their friends* but didn't make the same restriction for males.
This could in fact be a feature intended to prevent harassment / stalking of women who haven't accepted you as a friend.