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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 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.
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.
> 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.