Startup Wants To Peek Through Your Home's Wired Cameras 186
alphadogg writes "The little cameras in your home are multiplying. There are the ones you bought, perhaps your SLR or digital camera, but also those that just kind of show up in your current phone, your old phone, your laptop, your game console, and soon your TV and set-top box. Varun Arora, founder of startup GotoCamera in Singapore, wants you to turn them all on and let his company's algorithms analyze what they show, then sell the results as marketing data, in a sort of visual version of what Google and other firms do with search results and free email services."
Re:Editors: This is March 1st, not April 1st (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you perfectly control what everyone else says or does with information about you anywhere? This is not a Facebook problem, the solution is to find better friends.
It would normally be difficult to aggregate and analyze all of that information in a single central place. At least without a court order. Facebook is a system designed to do just that, with no court order needed since you agreed to give them permission to the data. To ignore that obvious fact means you are either being dishonest or you're performing mental gymnastics to rationalize away legitimate concerns about Facebook, no doubt to dismiss the foolishness of using it. Otherwise it would be hard to continue doing so, which you fully intend to do.
No, it's not difficult to see what's happening here and it's really transparent. You're just a different kind of fanboy and those pesky facts won't stop you. A Microsoft fanboy has to downplay the whole abuse of monopoly thing. An Apple fanboy has to downplay the disadvantages of walled gardens. You have to downplay the fact that the system is carefully designed to separate users from their privacy. That kind of selective blindness is a step towards psychosis, you know.
Further, I appreciate the way I disagree with you, therefore I must have horrible friends (and by extension be a horrible person myself), but I tire of these little childish stabs that have no place in rational discourse. Facebook's privacy settings, even with friends who use them perfectly, don't stop Facebook and its marketers from analyzing data everyone posts to Facebook. My friends have the decency and self-respect not to betray my trust, but that's no good if I am communicating with them and the medium of communication itself is untrustworthy.
In the case of using Facebook while desiring privacy, that's the situation. Thus, I don't use Facebook and neither do my friends. Isn't that so much easier than trying to perfectly control everybody else? When you don't use a system designed to violate privacy in the first place, suddenly there is no need for that.
This is a problem quite unique to Facebook and systems like Facebook (such as MySpace before it, etc). Trying to generalize it the way you are doing in order to obfuscate that fact is beneath you, or should be.