by Aeolun 10 hours ago
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.
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
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
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?
> 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).
> 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?
Amazon Siri?
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).