I’m going to start out with the obvious- that most of these arguments are copypasta from a decade and a half ago when smartphones got cameras. Distracting. What about the gym? Easy for bad actors to abuse (OMGWTFBBQ!)
The glare from headlights comment was weird. Do the lenses not include an AR coating, or perhaps the author doesn’t normally wear glasses? I decided to check on that last one and was surprised that there was no by line, just a generic nyt link - not even to the article. Of course Brian X Chen appears to be a real NYT journalist, but in no other online pictures does he wear glasses, so I presume he doesn’t wear corrective lenses or he wears contacts. Not too surprising then that the glasses - and a big, black, fat-rimmed resin model at that - would be distracting, even outside of the decisions to record or not.
Which brings up the last bit - to record you have to initiate it. I presume this is for battery life, as powering the sensor, processing, and transmission to a storage device all take non-trivial amounts of power for a device that small. For the panicky fear of constant surveillance the article has I expected it was an always-on live-stream to the Meta servers that was occurring. Color me unimpressed.
When the idiotic masses and paid influencers hop on board like they always do it will spur a bunch of companies to make similar and maybe one of them will be worth buying.
Would be nice if it was possible to subscribe to en email to receive this blog automatically. Also, would be nice to post youtube links via piped or some other front-end app, since its about privacy :)
yeah never used that to be honest, I guess I have a reason to check it out. Still, to reach people a newsletter straight into an inbox is better. What RSS is recommended?
There is a 0% chance that AI can accurately determine if someone is 18 or not, even with hypothetical futuristic AI technology. Some 20-year-olds look very young. Some 16-year-olds look shockingly old. And nobody changes very significantly between the day of their 18th birthday and the day they were 17 years, 364 days.
Hell, even 13-15 year olds are looking much older. I genuinely saw one in normal clothes, took a guess based on her being around maybe 20. Saw her a day later in school uniform. And only under 16’s wear them.
Really did make me realise I am shit at age guessing.
To quote the Simpsons: “0% is a percentage as well!” And that will be more than enough for politicians who know nothing about the topic and are blinded by the hot tech-buzzword of the minute (especially if it turns out they or some of their friends can make a shitload of money with it. I love capitalism and democracy.)
As an outside observer, UK politicians (even Conservatives) seem to tend to be a bit better at this sort of thing than American or Australian (“the laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”) politicians. There’s a much stronger tendency for their back benchers to vote against the party line than we have, too, which is great for deliberative democracy.
To be fair, that at least is hypothetically possible. Working out someone’s age exactly purely based on their face is not even possible, so you can argue against it very easily from a purely technical standpoint.
Facial recognition with a database is quite good today, and will only get better. To argue against that you need to start getting into the privacy and ethical arguments.
Exactly, this is something that even humans would have a hard time doing. Even though AI can do many things better than humans, humans are better at vision at the moment.
Eh, humans are better at certain kinds of vision—particularly on tasks that deal with non-white people where the AI was trained mostly on white people.
But things where the vision is looking at very fine detail, AI is very good at. Like determining if a patient has a disease based on a retinal scan or other medical imagery.
And I think it’s fair to say that, at least superficially, the problem in this thread seems like it might be more similar to those medical cases where an AI could do a really good job. The problem is that actually, no. There’s no known marker that could determine age with the level of accuracy that would be required for this task.
We have no visibility into Google’s internal processes. The developers that work on the product would probably know, but the rest of us can only guess.
Contacts has a Trash can. Deleted contacts are deleted after 30 days. You can empty the Trash yourself. Log into the web interface and find Trash on the left.
Thats just a user frontend showing your personal view of things . Nobody outside Google knows for sure if they really remove it from their end. All we know is they COULD keep a copy for themselves.
@lemann Thank you! Yea, many of my contact's emails are probably on Yahoo instead, so it's not that much of a biggie. I know nobody using Tuta or Proton or whatever. And probably they no longer care since most people use their emails only for logging in to websites that don't support SSO with social networks/Google and just outright create a new email if they forget their password to that. But hey, less data for Google is still less data for Google.
I self host Bitwarden (Vaultwarden) so I just use the built-in TOTP authenticator in the Bitwarden app. It’s nice to have it all in one place + having auto copy and paste when I log in. And because I self host, it’s all backed up securely and with (as far as I know) no real backdoors.
ETA: just realized what community this is in. people that replied to me I’m sorry lmao, I’m not a nut about this kinda stuff and I’m by no means recommending this just like using it this way for convenience factor and to keep the likes of google out of my password.
Fair, although I’ve said in a comment on this account somewhere else, I self host more for convenience sake than anything. I just like having my own password manager, sure it’s not as secure to use it for MFA but it’s better than giving my passwords to Google, LastPass, etc. and then using eg Google Authenticator. Self hosting is more a corporate distrust thing than a privacy thing for me
No, please do not do this. Two factor authentication should be just that: two separate factors of authenticating yourself. Having them combined in one is the same as one factor.
Said in the reply to the other comment here, but I don’t really self host for security/privacy sake. And in addition to that comment I’d also like to say that I do use a YubiKey when possible for MFA. I’m not a security nut enough to care about TOTP (which kinda sucks anyway) all too much but for important things I do use physical MFA.
I do the same thing. And Bitwarden’s 2FA is off my phone. In a complicated world, it’s reasonable to keep 1 password + 2FA as secure as possible. I simply can’t handle the hassle of pulling out my phone for every 2FA login, but still value the protection 2FA + randomly generated passwords provide.
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