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Am I so cynical, or does this sound hopelessly naive? This is exactly what I would expect. Certainly of Meta. Amazon had to go out of their way to reassure peop

by Aeolun 8mo ago

Am I so cynical, or does this sound hopelessly naive? This is exactly what I would expect. Certainly of Meta. Amazon had to go out of their way to reassure people that Siri wasn’t always recording. And I’m still not entirely sure I believe that.

bdangubic 8mo ago
I find it extremely naive too. I expect much worse than this from Meta and I am often amazed at just what it is going to take for people to realize what Meta is and does. I mean it is not like we have 11 million examples of what and who they are. In this story I would have expected additionally that Meta would notice little bit of cellulite in the woman that was changing and then having the employees call her husband to tell them to surprise her with amazing cream he should buy her for their upcoming anniversary (and if this was actually part of the story I would be able to continue on top of this and would not be surprised if true).
adamwk 8mo ago
I am also surprised, but not because I believe Meta to care about the ethics of the whole thing. After all their privacy scandals, I’d assume they’d have policies in place to prevent something that can so easily be leaked. But here we are
dataflow 8mo ago
The thing is it's not just surprising from a privacy standpoint but also from an engineering standpoint -- this sounds very data-, power-, and storage-intensive, in a device that's very constrained on all sides, so it wouldn't have even occurred to me this was a possibility. When are they even uploading all the videos without blowing through their power budget and internet data limits? Are they heavily compressing it to like one frame per second or something?
- robocat 8mo ago
  > data limits The data required is small. Each embedding might be 1/2 kB per face. > power budget To process a video for biometric feature extraction, it might take 0.5% to 2% of the total power used to record a video. Video uses a lot of power (compression, screen, etc) Assuming you've got a modern device (e.g. with Apple Neutral Engine). Disclosure: Googled info (Gemini).
  - dataflow 8mo ago
    > The data required is small. Each embedding might be 1/2 kB per face. "Embedding"? This is what the article says: "In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording." You're saying they're watching "embedding"s here?
- Aeolun 8mo ago
  I mean, you store as many as you need right? I’m sure 99% of the data is just immediately trashed. They have enough home videos of kids to not need to label them again, but those videos where someone is undressing in their bedroom will show up as ‘undertagged’ because few people make those videos.
leptons 8mo ago
Amazon Siri?
- Aeolun 8mo ago
  Haha, yeah. I wrote that, thought something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Figured it probably wasn’t important to the point :) But yeah, should have been Alexa
duskdozer 8mo ago
I would have been the first to talk about meta being horrible for privacy and this goes even further than what I expected, which was: - they have the opportunity to save the video feed at any time - they are probably storing some kind of metadata of the feed, maybe some kind of analysis output - someone could hypothetically watch it I thought it was dangerous because I thought they could do what they're doing, but I didn't think that right now they actually were and so overtly

by Aeolun 8mo ago

bdangubic 8mo ago

I find it extremely naive too. I expect much worse than this from Meta and I am often amazed at just what it is going to take for people to realize what Meta is and does. I mean it is not like we have 11 million examples of what and who they are. In this story I would have expected additionally that Meta would notice little bit of cellulite in the woman that was changing and then having the employees call her husband to tell them to surprise her with amazing cream he should buy her for their upcoming anniversary (and if this was actually part of the story I would be able to continue on top of this and would not be surprised if true).

adamwk 8mo ago

I am also surprised, but not because I believe Meta to care about the ethics of the whole thing. After all their privacy scandals, I’d assume they’d have policies in place to prevent something that can so easily be leaked. But here we are

dataflow 8mo ago

The thing is it's not just surprising from a privacy standpoint but also from an engineering standpoint -- this sounds very data-, power-, and storage-intensive, in a device that's very constrained on all sides, so it wouldn't have even occurred to me this was a possibility. When are they even uploading all the videos without blowing through their power budget and internet data limits? Are they heavily compressing it to like one frame per second or something?

robocat 8mo ago
> data limits The data required is small. Each embedding might be 1/2 kB per face. > power budget To process a video for biometric feature extraction, it might take 0.5% to 2% of the total power used to record a video. Video uses a lot of power (compression, screen, etc) Assuming you've got a modern device (e.g. with Apple Neutral Engine). Disclosure: Googled info (Gemini).
- dataflow 8mo ago
  > The data required is small. Each embedding might be 1/2 kB per face. "Embedding"? This is what the article says: "In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording." You're saying they're watching "embedding"s here?
Aeolun 8mo ago
I mean, you store as many as you need right? I’m sure 99% of the data is just immediately trashed. They have enough home videos of kids to not need to label them again, but those videos where someone is undressing in their bedroom will show up as ‘undertagged’ because few people make those videos.

leptons 8mo ago

Amazon Siri?

Aeolun 8mo ago
Haha, yeah. I wrote that, thought something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Figured it probably wasn’t important to the point :) But yeah, should have been Alexa

duskdozer 8mo ago

I would have been the first to talk about meta being horrible for privacy and this goes even further than what I expected, which was: - they have the opportunity to save the video feed at any time - they are probably storing some kind of metadata of the feed, maybe some kind of analysis output - someone could hypothetically watch it I thought it was dangerous because I thought they could do what they're doing, but I didn't think that right now they actually were and so overtly