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AI trained on photos from kids’ entire childhood without their consent
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Even if you're not on social media, you'll probably still have a shadow profile on Google/Metas servers. My 13 month old baby has a library of images searchable in Google photos and a profile photo in the app. It's convenient, but incredibly creepy.
Yeah, why would you allow this to happen though?
It's not opt-in as far as I'm aware. Just using Google photos makes it so. I suppose I'm deep enough in the google ecosystem (well, let's say my wife is not going to move away from it) to be desensitised to how messed up it kind of is.
I was more talking about how other people (i.e. your friends) will take photos of you and post it on social media or even just keep them in their google photos, and meta/google will build a shadow profile for you without your consent via facial recognition.
No, but it's opt-out, and it is your responsibility to ensure that stuff like this doesn't happen - full disclaimer, that is my personal opinion. Pictures of third parties that did not give explicit consent for each and every picture shouldn't be uploaded to cloud providers etc., let alone pictures of kids and other parties who are unable to give proper consent.
My wife is incredibly careless with these things. She wants to know how to properly operate her smartphone and wants to care about e. g. privacy, and on paper, she does - but in practice, we do a 2 hour long session, I explain all the settings to her, where to find them, why they are important, what implications certain actions / options have for security, safety and even keeping her phone in working order, yet as soon as she walks out the door, she no longer cares one bit, will blindly click to accept all kinds of EULAs and default options, never investigate what the notifications about failed backups mean, never delete obsolete / already backed up data etc. up to a point where her phone no longer works and she then instructs Google Photos to upload multiple years of family pictures full of private moments, multiple children etc. to Google.
The UI is crappy enough so you'll spend a significant amount of time deleting the pictures remotely, absolutely infuriating. I was furious, in particular because I can't say that removing the pictures will also reverse all the potential consequences of sharing all your pictures with Google.
For reference, Google Photos does offer facial recognition, stores and estimates locations and even estimates activities based on media content.
IMHO, being this negligent is not excusable in this day and age.
I agree with you mostly, and thank you for giving such a passionate and important response.
The problem is not the people though. Placing the "blame" or responsibility on the victims of this invasive behaviour is not the correct conclusion. These settings are deliberately obfuscated and people are uneducated on privacy and how it relates to technology. This is not their fault. Life is far too complicated to place yet another burden on the individual who already has so much to think about. The change needs to come from the people, yes, but it is not the people who need to change.
You are correct. It was probably not perfectly clear from my response, but I do not want to blame the individual here.
Naturally, the "Backup all my files" setting should not be opt-out, and when opting in, there should be easy and succinct explanations of what the implications are.
Lemmy as a whole is apparently a very technical community, so we often tend to forget that an understanding of these implications does not come naturally to all users, and that there are people that need a phone just like everyone else, but might not be in a position to acquire the knowledge required to make an informed decision.
I am fully with you regarding your conclusion, up to a point where I applaud regulatory action that protects customer interests, including privacy. I do not believe that companies will sort out these problems (or in any form of liberal "self regulation", really) on their own, since it's not in their interest to do so.
I guess I wanted to express that while things are obfuscated and software is full of malicious anti-patterns, we do have to take extra care to protect ourselves, and, as was the topic here, our kids. I still actively try to work on changing the current status though, politically or by making political decisions, e. g. looking at open source / projects that are more aligned with what I'd consider to be in the best interest of users, and I'd encourage everyone to do the same.
Friends will oblige should you ask them not to post any media of your underaged infant.
It's not posting is the point.
Android phones back all photos up onto the Google cloud by default. Not everyone knows to turn this off.
I want to defend that poster but I can’t disagree with you… There is one person responsible and it’s definitely not the child….
I'm assuming all he means is that he uses Google photos to store his pictures, so Google is the one hosting them.
He said that it's creepy but convenient, digital privacy and laziness don't go hand in hand generally. Every week I read about another alternative for Google Photos, so the solution is not far away (three posts down I found this for example). To each their own I guess, but with such simple solutions I can't justify using Google's spyware.
And that's exactly why I commented the way I did. I'll also comment with a personal story to the original comment to further elaborate.
Wait until you have photos spanning from, not only your child, but your cousins' children who are photographed less often. Google can easily match up an infant to the same 10 year old child. Hell, I can barely do that sometimes and have to use context clues to figure out who the infant was.
To be fair to you, you don't have a photo library of millions of children from infant to teen to train your neurons on.
True, but then you get oddities where it asks if my FIL and Santa are the same person
I scanned a ton of my mom's family photos after she passed, and uploaded them to Google Photos. It's a bit shocking how good it is at guessing the same person at different ages, even 20+ years' difference.