IBM's Watson Is Now Analyzing Your Vacation Photos

jfruh writes: IBM's Jeopardy-winning supercomputer Watson is now suite of cloud-based services that developers can use to add cognitive capabilities to applications, and one of its powers is visual analysis. Visual Insights analyzes images and videos posted to services like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, then looks for patterns and trends in what people have been posting. Watson turns what it gleans into structured data, making it easier to load into a database and act upon — which is clearly appealing to marketers and just as clearly carries disturbing privacy implications.

Comments

Disturbing Privacy Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

If you so effing worried about your privacy, stop putting your goddamn vacation photos in the cloud!

Re:Disturbing Privacy Implications

[mlts]

You pretty much described it. My photos are never stored in a world accessible place, and if they are stored on the cloud, it is behind an encryption layer like BoxCryptor. Even though it doesn't mean much if the provider itself is compromised, 2FA goes without saying.

One can't control "leakage" like people popping pictures of you and tagging, but what doesn't go to a public forum doesn't get indexed, so just keeping vacation photos private is the best thing. Want to share them with friends? There are means to do it with others privately (well away from mass indexers), as opposed to tossing them onto a social networking site.

Re:You want privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could fight back by not giving your data to people whose business is to do things with it that you say you don't want.

Re: How is this relevant?

[YrWrstNtmr]

In the real world where I work, not a single American programmer that I know has gone out of town for a vacation in over a decade.

Yeah, right. In the other real world (USA) where *I* work, I don't know a single programmer that hasn't taken one or more vacations every year this century.

Re:IBM

[gstoddart]

PS There are no pictures of me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

So, you can 100% guarantee you have never been in the background of someone else's photo, tagged by someone as being in that photo ... or cross referenced with a photo from a different source which did identify you and make it easy to correlate a picture in which you are a random stranger to "Bob Smith in the blue hat lives in Chicago"?

If I go full tinfoil-hat, I see a world in which the number of sources of data are so utterly huge, and eventually interconnected that you might not have any control over this. A random picture of a random crowd would get processed and identified.

Hell, the government just needs to demand this data, cross reference it with things like drivers licenses, passports, and whatever else they can get ... and suddenly you have a very different world to live in.

Unfortunately, the real world keeps blurring the lines between what I used to think of as utterly crazy with what I now think is utterly plausible if not already happening.

Re: How is this relevant?

[PvtVoid]

> Does not scan. If there were a shortage of employees, ...

Your post is illogical. Because there is a shortage, we all have to work harder to make-up for all of the open positions. Yes, I have negotiated large raises every year for the past decade, but I have been unable to negotiate even a single day off in the nearly five years at my current company. I can't because the company needs me.

Then you're being played. Your management has overcommitted, and is treating you like galley slaves because it's boosting their bottom line to do so. And you're sucker enough to let them do it to you.

If developers are in such short supply, you should be able to easily find another job that doesn't involve abusive working conditions. Good luck.