VariousPrograms 3 hours ago

Gadgets were more fun before everything felt like a data miner. I used to buy all sorts of tech junk 20 years ago like PDAs, GPS, MP3 players, fitness trackers, etc. but the primary purpose of everything now feels like sending all my data to ad companies and locking me into a subscription. If something has a camera, microphone, GPS, or just wifi now my impulse is that it’s creepy or something to be weary of rather than useful.

  • bamboozled 3 hours ago

    I remember this time, some of the coolest non spy devices I remember were:

    1. Sony Clie PDA.

    2. Creative Nomad MP3 Player.

    3. Most of my game consoles, Gameboys. I especially loved the Super Scope, I couldn't believe how cool that was.

    4. Pretty much all my Linux devices until this day.

    Having a w*k with my Apple Watch first the first time was unnerving

com2kid 3 hours ago

I mean... Yes? If you ask a cloud hosted AI to identify an image, that image goes to the AI. Presumably if I am an active user of a service to identify objects in an image I want that service to correctly identify objects, which means if it incorrectly IDs something I upload today, I want it to be better at its job the next time I try.

In other news, voice transcription from Google trains itself on your voice. Oh and Google search trains itself on your searches. (Snark: assuming they still care about search quality!)

antupis 3 hours ago

Stupid question but is this wise from a business standpoint? let's say child pornography or some national security stuff slips into training data.

  • portaouflop 3 hours ago

    This stuff is already part of the training data - Laion for example (which almost everyone uses as training data) has a lot of csam in it (allegedly I never checked)

andrewstuart 3 hours ago

They’ll want to get that publicly stated early and forgotten.

GiorgioG 3 hours ago

All these companies are data ingestion machines. This is not news.

  • vvrm 3 hours ago

    This one’s a bit worse than meta’s usual sins: enabling political ads to manipulate the user is one thing. But enabling naughty people to generate naughty pictures of innocent bystanders because they happened to be in the field of view of an idiot talking to their glasses is a whole different level. Would be surprised if this is legal.

    • maeil 38 minutes ago

      Hardly worse than their usual sins considering the case of Meta and Myanmar.

ilrwbwrkhv 4 hours ago

Of course it does. Any product that you use, which has camera, is constantly feeding images to Meta's AI to train on. That's why a long time back I stopped using Oculus devices as well.

  • fsiefken 3 hours ago

    Where is it stated they sent or can sent Meta Quest pass-through images to Meta? Persistent storage of Rrom wireframe mapping for positioning I get and don't find a big issue, I thought that was on-device though.