A team at Google has proposed using AI technology to create a "bird's-eye" view of users' lives using mobile phone data such as photographs and searches.
I find it odd when people get upset at the idea of having access to their own aggregated data but almost never get upset when they hand over massive amounts of data to companies that can privately do the same things on their data.
Google already processes your Photos data, and while you get their facial recognition data pipeline fed back to you, there’s a fair bit of other analysis going on that you aren’t always seeing. But people aren’t generally complaining that they are scanning your photos for criminal activity or trying to maximize product engagement using the data.
But if suddenly they turn back over access to that deep analysis so you can ask a chatbot “what did I eat for my birthday two years ago and who was there” and get a description of the meal, who else was there, and relevant images without needing to scroll back your timeline - now it’s suddenly creepy and we don’t want it (even though literally all that information is already being processed at roughly the same level of fidelity already).
I find it odd when people get upset at the idea of having access to their own aggregated data but almost never get upset when they hand over massive amounts of data to companies that can privately do the same things on their data.
Google already processes your Photos data, and while you get their facial recognition data pipeline fed back to you, there’s a fair bit of other analysis going on that you aren’t always seeing. But people aren’t generally complaining that they are scanning your photos for criminal activity or trying to maximize product engagement using the data.
But if suddenly they turn back over access to that deep analysis so you can ask a chatbot “what did I eat for my birthday two years ago and who was there” and get a description of the meal, who else was there, and relevant images without needing to scroll back your timeline - now it’s suddenly creepy and we don’t want it (even though literally all that information is already being processed at roughly the same level of fidelity already).
People are weird.
It was always creepy. But this just pushes that creepiness right into peoples’ faces so they can’t ignore it.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Good psychological analysis.
yeah. I prefer actually to see the data they collect on me plainly so I have a better idea of what it all is.
I love this post. Thanks. 🥰