IBM's Watson Is Now Analyzing Your Vacation Photos 117
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.
How is this relevant? (Score:1)
Most tech employees can't take time off. I haven't had an entire week off since 1991.
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It's a long shot I know, but he might be being sarcastic.
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Until they do find a replacement who will work for less, then you'll have a nice long vacation.
Seriously though, that stinks of terrible management.
No employees should be irreplaceable. The President of the USA is replaced every 8 years, max.
And, if you haven't had a vacation in 14 years, what would they do if you keeled over and died at your desk one day from the stress?
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There's such a huge shortage of employees that things aren't going to improve for at least the next decade. I haven't had a single day off in nearly three years.
Does not scan. If there were a shortage of employees, you wouldn't have to worry about getting fired for behaving like a human being and having a life outside of work.
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> 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. We have deadlines set by our state government that we have to meet or the business is shutdown. We would all lo
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> 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. We have deadlines set by our state government that we have to meet or the business is shutdown. We would all lose our jobs if everyone took just one week of the four weeks off a year that we get. This isn't the company's fault. They have the money and are willing to hire employees, but no one qualified is applying.
There are literally thousands of excellent developers with a least a modicum of command of the English language sitting around doing virtually nothing useful all day. Dice just has to figure out how to leverage this site correctly.
Re: How is this relevant? (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
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> Your management has overcommitted,
If you work in a regulated environment, like I do, then it isn't management that is setting the requirements or the deadlines.
Then they are taking on projects that they don't have sufficient staffing to handle.
If labor is so scarce, why don't you just jump to another job that doesn't abuse its employees? Scarcity of labor should make that easy.
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> This isn't the company's fault. They have the money and are willing to hire employees, but no one qualified is applying.
If no one qualified is applying, then you need to grow one. Get someone with general understanding of the required fields and train them. Create proper documentation and knowledge base so that people can learn appropriately. You might still not get a proper vacation next year, but 2-3 years from now you might.
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I have negotiated large raises every year for the past decade, I have been unable to negotiate even a single day off in the nearly five years at my current company
That "agreement" would be illegal most industrialised nations. Annual leave comes under the preview of "health and safety", employers/employees cannot simply 'negotiate' federally mandated working conditions out of existence without breaking the law.
Re: How is this relevant? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: How is this relevant? (Score:1)
What a load of crap. There's a massive shortage of developers so companies aren't able to let us take time off. The last time I had a full week off was in 1987.
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As someone that has worked as a developer for several large companies, I think you're a liar. I know I haven't had a contiguous week off since I got my first developer job in 1983. I think you're just trolling to attempt to make developers feel bad with your lie that you know developers that get to take vacations.
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Welcome to Sweden. Tech workers with a few years experience usually get 32 days off per year here.
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Never post any photographs of yourself online, or allow anyone else to post photographs of you online, ever. In this day and age, nothing good will come of it. You really want some people to see photos you took of your vacation, email them instead.
I disagree. I put lots of photos of me on Facebook [except for the fact that I use random strangers from Google Image]. You should do it too.
Captcha : performs.
Disturbing Privacy Implications (Score:4, Insightful)
If you so effing worried about your privacy, stop putting your goddamn vacation photos in the cloud!
Re:Disturbing Privacy Implications (Score:5, Insightful)
You pretty much described it. My photos are never stored in a world accessible place, and if they are stored on the cloud, it is behind an encryption layer like BoxCryptor. Even though it doesn't mean much if the provider itself is compromised, 2FA goes without saying.
One can't control "leakage" like people popping pictures of you and tagging, but what doesn't go to a public forum doesn't get indexed, so just keeping vacation photos private is the best thing. Want to share them with friends? There are means to do it with others privately (well away from mass indexers), as opposed to tossing them onto a social networking site.
Person of Interest (Score:2)
You want privacy? (Score:1)
Burn all the phone books!
Let's forget all this "privacy" bullshit, there just isn't any. It's like trying to stop climate change. The thing to do now it is prevent anybody from using what they have against you.
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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.
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You are chasing ghosts.
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Re:You want privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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No, I'm saying we can rapidly find ourselves in an oppressive surveillance society in which links which could never have been made will suddenly be made automatically.
So, that family vacationing from Hoboken? Their teenage daughter takes a selfie by the pool, uploads to Facebook over the hotel wifi ... and suddenly something posts to your Facebook status which says "Bob was in Mexico w
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What we REALLY have to worry about in the Surveillance State, is incorrect connections and assumptions being made. Then it starts resembling the movie Minority Report, where you have people being arrested for things they haven't even done yet. Then everything goes to hell in a handbasket, everyone is literally chasing
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Your basis for this scenario is that YOU CHOSE to upload pictures of yourself in Mexico as a married man that show you KISSING AN UNDERAGE PROSTITUTE
No, that was not the scenario. He chose to upload an innocent photo, and then the creepy tagging an analysis linked it to him in SOMEONE ELSES' PHOTO.
vacation? (Score:2)
He's gotten so cocky since he won Jeopardy (Score:3)
You've forgotten your roots, Watson!
IBM (Score:2)
Is it just me or is IBM a lot more open about what they are doing in comparison to for example Google or Microsoft ?
PS There are no pictures of me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
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There are no pictures of me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
How do you know that to be a fact? If someone else has had a picture of you at any time in the past, it very well could have ended up publicized on the Internet.
Re:IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 o
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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 c
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No, not a 100%, but the less pictures you upload the less pictures that can be used to learn to distinguish me from the next guy.
Re:What vacation? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
You Care About Privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Cool, so now .... (Score:3)
.... Watson can check out the details of my vacation trips AND curse up a storm about them?
https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com]
Getting arrested before you commit the crime... (Score:3)
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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?
before or after being sued by CBS for copying the plot of Person of Interest? [wikia.com] ;)
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They'd have to get in line behind the estate of Philip K. Dick.
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They'd have to get in line behind the estate of Philip K. Dick.
wrong. Minority Report had nothing to do with AI, it was mutants.
I worry about Watson (Score:4, Funny)
"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." "
Public privacy? (Score:2)
"I posted my photos in public and now I'm outraged that they're being looked at by people I don't know."
Good luck with that (Score:2)
My vacation photos are all of me, drunk on my couch watching the Cartoon Network.
I Like It (Score:3)
At least it's accurate (Score:1)
Subject ID: 487042-2386
Handle: Tablizer
Classification: Out-of-shape middle-aged pale balding unattractive male
Obligatory xkcd (Score:3)
"Your" = clickbait (Score:2)
Headline contains the word "your." Clickbait score+=1000;
Google does the same... (Score:2)
Their AI is so good it can recognize landmarks and objects in the pictures which you can search through later without having to bother to tag them. Of course, Google also gets to know even more about you.
I miss the old days when, in addition to sell your data for free service you also had the option of paying for things with actual money. Even Windows seems to be that way now.
Disgusting.