It turns out it’s the sensors that are easily damaged by high powered lidar lasers.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-ca...
It's not safe just because it's infrared. And the claims that it's safe because of the exposure time is highly questionable, would you be okay with that for any other laser?
I also wonder if the smaller sensor size on phones contributes, since the energy is being focused onto a smaller spot.
Either way, for that to happen he was filming the LIDAR while active, for a decent amount of time, from right next to the car. I assume under normal conditions it wouldn't be running constantly while the vehicle is stationary?
Laptops aren't generally being used in the same areas as cars though, so you wouldn't expect to see as many cases involving Windows Hello compatible laptops/cameras.
There was someone who had his eyes damaged by sitting next to a heater.
> Moving to a longer wavelength that does not penetrate the human eye allows new lidars to fire more powerful pulses and stretch their range beyond 200 meters, far enough for stopping faster cars. Now a claim of lidar damage to the charge-coupled-device (CCD) sensor on a photographer's electronic camera has raised concern that new eye-safe long-wavelength lidars might endanger electronic eyes.
> Producers of laser light shows are well aware that laser beams can damage electronic eyes. “Camera sensors are, in general, more susceptible to damage than the human eye,” warns the International Laser Display Association
"doesn't penetrate the human eye" seems a bit hand wavy, but I take it to mean "these length pulses in this wavelength are tuned to have the power not be enough to damage the eye". Camera lenses may not have the same level of IR filtering/gathering area or, if they do, there is nothing implying the image sensor has the exact same tolerances as the inside of the eye. From the same:
> Sensor vulnerability to infrared damage would depend on the design of the infrared filters
A heater usually damages the eyes through drying out/heating up the outside layer with constant high intensity, not by causing damage to the retina (post filtering). https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q12691/
> Furthermore, since the eye blocks the IRR, the eye begins to overheat leading to eye damage and possible blindness. Because of this, you should not look at the heater for an extended period of time.
Enough intensity of any wavelength is enough to damage any camera or eye of course, but the scenario here seems to be built around that question for the eye. Similarly, I've heard of Waymo's causing 6 mph accidents but no reports of eye damage from any car LiDAR. Despite that, in the above YouTube clip Marques Brownlee actively shows his camera being clearly damaged as its moved around.
So they don't care if that breaks my phone camera? Wtf?
I would imagine, even with safe dosages, there would be some form of cumulative effect in terms of retinal phototoxicity.
More so if we consider the scenario that this becomes a standard COTS feature in cars and we are walking around a city centre with a fleet of hundreds of thousands of these laser sources.
The grandparent comment is about camera lenses with little to no near infrared cutoff filter. Some older iPhones were like that and that was the original breaking story.
Absorbing the laser isn't necessarily any good. Very hypothetically it could lead to cataracts.
Shame that perverts had to ruin that for us, it was kinda neat to point a TV remote as the camera and see the bulb light up.
Thanks! What a headache
Even mid-range sensors used in ADAS systems only cost $600-750. The long-range stuff that's needed for trucking or robotaxis is $1,500–6,000
* I have no way to estimate installation costs, but smartphones show that manufacturing at this scale doesn't need to increase total cost 10x more than the B.o.M.
There are SLAM cameras that only select "interesting" points, which are privacy preserving. They are also very low power.
They're just fancy cameras with synced flashes. Not Star Trek material-informational converting transporters. Sometimes they rotate, sometimes not. Often monochrome, but that's where Bayer color filters come in. There's nothing fundamentally privacy preserving or anything about LIDARs.
Right, but how likely is it that there will be LIDAR and no cameras (especially given the low cost of the latter)?
Pros and cons. :/
It'll never happen, but we need a bill of rights for privacy. The laypeople aren't well-versed or pained enough to ask for this, and big interest donors oppose it.
Maybe the EU and states like California will pioneer something here, though?
Edit: in general, I'm far more excited by cheap lidar tech than I am afraid of the downsides. We just need to be vigilant.
But also kinda weird. There seems to be a lot of fines for hospitals for example.
Some Portuguese hospital was fined €400,000 for ‘Insufficient technical and organisational measures to ensure information security’
Top 5 fines:
1 - Meta - Ireland - €1.2 billion
2 - Amazon Europe - Luxembourg - €746 millions
3 - WhatsApp - Ireland - €225 millions
4 - British Airway - UK - £183 millions
5 - Google - France - €60 millions
I wish every law barely got enforced this way.
I don't know about you, but on that income I would certainly not brush off such a fine as a "cost of doing business". Would it cause me financial trouble, or would it force me to sacrifice other expenses? Absolutely not. But would I feel frustrated at having to pay it, feel stupid for my mistake, and do my best to avoid it in the future? Absolutely yes.
There isn't a trend of increasing fines, nor has any fine even reached the cap, let alone applied multiple times for the recurring violations. Even more with the current US administration's foreign policy towards the EU.
While GDPR as a law is fine, with the exception of enforcement limitations, enforcement so far has been a complete joke.
And note that there is evidence for cities of tens of thousands of inhabitants from 3000 BCE, while Rome reached 1 000 000 residents by 1CE. Again, without becoming some Hobbesian nightmare.
Humans have always done mass surveillance on eachother. You don't need technology for that.
Scale matters.
While the lack of anonymity in small towns certainly puts a damper on one's ability to deviate too far from social norms, the list of things and subject that could get you subjected to government violence without creating a victimized party was infinity shorter. Things that get state or state deputized enforcers on your case today were matters of "yeah that's distasteful, he'll have to settle that with god" or it would come back to bite you when something happened 150+yr ago because society did not have the surplus to justify paying nearly as manny people to go around looking for deviance that could be leveraged to extract money. These people had way more practical day to day freedom to run and better their lives than we do now, if constrained by the fact that they had substantially less wealth to leverage to that effect.
> Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management
And they almost exclusively deal in things that historical societies didn't even bother to regulate.
You're beyond delusional if you think running afoul of HOA is worse than running afoul of the local, state or federal government. Yeah they can screech and send you scary letter with scary numbers but they don't get the buddy treatment from courts that "real" governments do (to the great injustice of their victims) and their procedural avenues for screwing their victims on multiple axis are way more limited.
Seriously, go get in a pissing match with a municipality over just where the line for "requires permit" is and get back to me. Unless you want to do something that is more than petty cosmetic stuff and unambiguously in violation of the rules a HOA is a paper tiger for the most part (not to say that they don't suck).
People don't hesitate to be aggressive even when they're not anonymous and there's a threat of accountability - see, all crime, or people just acting shitty toward others.
Mass surveillance does not cause everyone to magically get along.
Anyway I'm curious why - despite having less anonymity than at any point in history, at least from the perspective of law enforcement - we still see high crime rates, from fraud to murders?