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by dataflow1 days ago |
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upvoteby Aeolun1 days ago|
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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 people that Siri wasn’t always recording. And I’m still not entirely sure I believe that.
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upvoteby duskdozer20 hours ago|
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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

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upvoteby adamwk1 days ago|
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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
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upvoteby dataflow1 days ago|
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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?
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upvoteby robocat1 days ago|
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> 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).

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upvoteby dataflow20 hours ago|
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> 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?

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upvoteby leptons1 days ago|
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Amazon Siri?
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upvoteby bdangubic1 days ago|
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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).
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upvoteby autoexec1 days ago|
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Yeah, this is something you 100% should have expected. This could not be more on brand for facebook. Even if someone told me facebook wasn't using their glasses to invade the privacy of their users I wouldn't believe them. Compromising people's privacy for profit is what facebook does. Violating the trust of their users is basically all facebook has ever done.
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upvoteby financetechbro1 days ago|
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I’m not sure what sort of signals you’ve gotten from Meta that would suggest they are above this type of behavior?
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upvoteby dataflow17 hours ago|
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> I’m not sure what sort of signals you’ve gotten from Meta that would suggest they are above this type of behavior?

It wasn't Meta's morals that gave me any signals to that effect. It was the potential legal minefield on top of the engineering challenges [1] that made it so I didn't even consider this as a possibility. In fact I'm still confused. I don't understand how they would be pulling this off despite those challenges, and I would love to.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47225772

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