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

You Care About Privacy?

[crow_t_robot]

You have already proven you don't give a shit about the privacy of these photos the second you uploaded them to social media where people can make instant copies and distribute freely till the end of time. Quit being so goddamned uptight about this. Your vacation photos or pictures of your child taking his first shit aren't that goddamned important.

Re:What vacation?

[BradleyUffner]

At the startup where I've worked for six years...

How many years can a startup be operating before it's no longer considered a startup?

Re:You want privacy?

[gstoddart]

You know, we're fast reaching a point where you need to get over that sentiment of nobody caring.

Nobody individually cares, but in the aggregate you should be scared.

So, picture this: You share some vacation photos to Facebook or somesuch. Facebook does facial recognition on it. IBM also comes along and does facial recognition on it, and interprets what was happening. The analytics associated with that (who already know loads about you) identify you've tagged a destination -- there's dozens of those. Facebook also knows several of your friends had status updates in the same place -- oh, and of course, the facial recognition sees them in your photos and tags you.

Now, imagine a world in which secretive government agencies can demand your data from all of these entities and insist that fact be kept private.

So, combine this and you can suddenly paint a very complete picture that you, your friends, a couple of women who are not your wives ... all flew into Mexico on United airlines, spent a week at a given hotel, were seen kissing the women who aren't your wives (in the background of some other tourist and auto-tagged). Oh, and did we mention the women in the photos were also picked up in facial recognition and identified as underage prostitutes with ties to a Mexican gang?

Your insurance now says you're ineligible because you didn't get vaccinated. Your wife now sees a picture of you in Mexico kissing someone else (even though you know nothing about this picture). The government can realize you were in the company of someone with know criminal ties. And, through parallel construction can commit perjury and hide how they came to know this.

My scenario is intended to be crazy over the top. Ridiculous even.

But the scary thing is that when you can start connecting all of these sources of information via 'big data', this is exactly the kind of thing which is rapidly going from absurd fiction to utterly real technology. The sheer scale of this data, and the sheer number of ways in which it can be automatically cross referenced should be scaring the crap out of people.

Acting like this kind of stuff can't have impacts on our lives is naive.

Acting like this stuff is the domain of tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists and bad Hollywood movies is now a thing of the past.

We're actively building all the tools we need for the dystopian future.