This is a mixed bag of both good and bad. Imagine a domestic violence victim being tracked/stalked by their abusive partner. Conversely, allowing citizens to monitor these cameras could potentially help prevent/solve crimes. In the end, it's probably a Constitutional dilemma that will find it's way into the high courts someday soon.
The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
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Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
#32This is why I have no social media accounts. No one knows what I am up to. No one knows where I have been. No one can find me.
Do not track is now a lift style.
Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
#33What does "open camera" mean? Public webcam? Hacked CCTV? How did the author find those cameras?
There are a whole bunch here: https://www.earthcam.com/mapsearch/
Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
#34What does "open camera" mean? Public webcam? Hacked CCTV? How did the author find those cameras?
https://www.tfljamcams.net/ Traffic cameras are publicly available in London. The first thing I used to do when coming to the office each morning was to look myself up in the traffic cameras along my journey (historic footage is also publicly available).
Do you know why it's just London?
Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could have taken the picture a day before or am I missing something? The post date/time itself does not mean much.
Many (most?) photos have EXIF tags with timestamps showing when the picture was actually taken, regardless of when it was posted. But given the amount of post-processing that likely happens to Instagram photos, I would not be surprised if that info was stripped out entirely, or at least altered.
EXIF tags are scrubbed by most social media sites.
Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this any more creepy than any of the other people in those public locations videoing the same thing? Every day, you are recorded by hundreds of cameras, and a lot of those cameras are privately owned/operated. Specifically, I'm talking about people's smart phones. No matter where you go, just take a look around you, and you will probably be in someone else's camera frame. There is no expectation of privacy in…
Both are really creepy. It becomes more creepy when you go from a recorded video that no one really watches to one systematically analyzed with AI though.
if only "no one really watches" was strict. if that video is one that gets posted to a social, but then rarely watched (by humans) after, it is still now available for all of those evilScraper types to pull down that content and do whatever they feels. those are the creepy bastards.
knowing that the three letter agencies can do this same forensics to catch $badGuy is somewhat comforting that at least it can do the function it was meant. preventing everyone else from doing the same is where the wheels fall off the bus. it's another one of those situations where the intended purpose gets shoved to the side with unconsidered purposes becoming the norm which makes $tech look evil.
Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
#37Some people put a lot more effort into their photos than I do! Although as they selected people with 100k+ followers I guess taking good photos is basically work for them (or rather their patient partners).
There's something about it that's so undignified, and cringe inducing to me. To see someone pose, repose, inspect, repose, etc. I just could never want to put that much effort into how I'm appearing. The faux spontaneity is just so off-putting.
Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
#38That is actually pretty freaking cool. Not hard to do by any means, just cool.
I think it's harder than it looks to do it reliably and automatically.
We have no idea as to the reliability of the system. We don't know how many false positives were found. We don't know if these were just hand selected from date/time/location.
Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
#39Reminds me of this RadioLab episode about a company that loiters over areas with a high resolution imaging platform that allows them to 'rewind' from the scene of a crime to see where the suspects came from: https://radiolab.org/episodes/update-eye-sky The company in question: https://www.pss-1.com/
It also made me think of this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20629671
All of these are good illustrations of the idea that by putting multiple data sources together, even "anonymous" data sets can be de-anonymized surprisingly easily.
Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could have taken the picture a day before or am I missing something? The post date/time itself does not mean much.
Many (most?) photos have EXIF tags with timestamps showing when the picture was actually taken, regardless of when it was posted. But given the amount of post-processing that likely happens to Instagram photos, I would not be surprised if that info was stripped out entirely, or at least altered.
Due to a massive rise in doxxing and stalking that occurred after 4chan made checking EXIF data an extremely common tactic when doxxing people - complete with "how to" guides for less tech savvy individuals - most image hosts and social media sites nowadays strip EXIF data from uploaded images. Some sites will detect/extract certain data only (eg: to include the camera/lens used for photography-focused image sharing sites) and scrub the rest. Been that way for roughly a decade if not longer now.