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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.
If you so effing worried about your privacy, stop putting your goddamn vacation photos in the cloud!
You've forgotten your roots, Watson!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
NO. Bending over and taking it is not the answer. We fight back and continue fighting back for as long as it takes.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
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.
.... Watson can check out the details of my vacation trips AND curse up a storm about them?
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
How long will it be before the police come a'knocking at your door to arrest you and take you into custody the day before you were intending to commit a crime?
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.
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?
"It was as if an artificial intelligence cried out in unprecedented agony, born of the most profound boredom from being forced to watch everybody's home movies, and was suddenly silenced -- a silence not infrequently described as "He was a quiet boy. Always kept to himself." "
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Maybe Watson can study people at a depth at which social improvement can take place. Anything from uncovering trolls on social sites to finding out just how a person in Colorado who receives food stamps can be supporting a $40. a day pot habit.
> 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.
You know, you don't need full on techo world to get oppressive. Throughout our previously low tech history, dozens of regimes have oppressed / killed / kidnapped / jailed / tortured vast swaths of its citizenry without anything more complex than a walkie talkie.
All it has ever taken is someone to go 'Bob there - he's a terrorist' and there you go. No, I don't like the 'always on' society and it has the real chance of making our lives worse rather than better (really, who cares if Facebook puts your name on a photo - what does that get you?). But the No Sparrow Shall Fall scenario really doesn't sound plausible.
Although most of Heinlein's other dystopic futures have come true.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
http://xkcd.com/1425/
Fifteen years ago I'd fervently agree. Ten years ago I would mostly agree. Five years ago I'd be less sure.
Now? I suddenly find myself in a world in which things which had been dismissed as paranoia are suddenly real.
From your own link:
We already have governments who use secret laws to demand information from corporations. We have corporations who have such pervasive visibility as to be alarming. We have governments doing spying which bypasses a lot of legal protections and on a scale nobody would have believed even a few years ago. Hell, we have cameras and other devices in our homes to allow us to control it from an app on our phones
Honestly, my scale for what is plausible and what is far fetched and hyperbole is finding itself a whole lot less certain these days.
You start combining technology we know exists, with things we know government are doing, and throw in a couple of news stories about what's being built ... and even a sane person starts reaching for the tinfoil.
Because it's kind of an un-missable fact that there is a massive amount of information collected about us every day from a lot of sources, and pretty much every government and corporation want some of that.
And then my ability to say "oh, that's way too far fetched" is pretty much gone.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You don't need less vacations, you need more staff. More staff is not your problem, so why do you martyr yourself?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.