Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

driesdepoorter.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 112 posts

Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

#71

Post by jrockway »

somebodynew wrote: post #61
Cyberdog wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was scared at first too until I realized we're talking about people already taking photos for the purpose of posting to Instagram anyway. It's involuntary surveillance while participating in voluntary surveillance.

It's only following people who posted their own photos voluntarily in this particular implementation, but consider the next incremental step for this same approach: a website where you upload a photo of anyone's face and get a map/trail of every public photo/video posted by someone else where that face appears in the background for the last month. Now you're not just finding the subject of a voluntarily portrait in s…

My favorite part of the pandemic is it being socially acceptable to wear a face mask. I enjoy the break from surveillance.

Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

#72

Post by secretsatan »

mjwhansen wrote: post #22

very thought-provoking - people think only a portion of what they’re doing is shared, but government sees all

These are probably privately owned cameras, which are far more widespread, i don’t think governments have what meta has on you.

I’d go so far as saying, hand wringing over government surveillance has served as a smokescreen over the proliferation of private surveillance.

Not that i want to advocate for government surveillance, just that, in my experience, people who worry so much about it seemed to have entirely missed how much private companies have expanded into public space.

Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

#73

Post by secretsatan »

bmicraft wrote: post #66
spoonjim wrote: post #54

Can someone explain to a novice how “AI” is used here? Is the person in the IG image being correlated to a security camera time stamp with face recognition or similar?

The instagram photos are most likely not posted exactly when they were shot but some time after. Also, even if they post a rough location there is no guarantee that they would show up on any particular cam. I'd image the ai has to go through a very large amount pictures and cam footage to find one where the influencer shows up on a cam some time before it was posted.

The metadata of the image would reveal the actual time taken over when it was posted

Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

#74

Post by ahofmann »

jdelman wrote: post #14

"Enemy of the State" (1998) tech becoming reality.

Well, some of the things shown in the film were already reality at that time. Only that one was called a conspiracy theorist, if one has noted this at that time.

Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

#75

Post by doodlesdev »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #13
jsdwarf wrote: post #7

What 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).

What the actual fuck. This is actually frightening. I can watch anyone, anywhere, anytime in London, anonymously, without them knowing? I guess I have to add yet another city to my never-visit-again list. No wonder schizophrenia is more common in developed countries, you ARE being watched.

Remember that this is still 2022. People think there's no privacy anymore, but in a few decades we are going to look back and wish we could go back. Of course these are public spaces where privacy has never _truly_ existed, but having cameras transmitting your every step to anyone with internet access is chilling.

Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

#76

Post by Gordonjcp »

sangnoir wrote: post #57
matt-attack wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seeing how the sausage is made almost always results in disillusionment regardless of the industry. Some of the magic was taken away when I learned that certain scenes a movie I liked required dozens of takes: it felt too mechanical/industrial and went against my romantic notions of how art is made. This is not far off from the pose-repose-inspect cycle you noted, but has a much larger supporting crew (and budget) an…

Are you kidding?

How you stitch each of those together into a seamless ever-changing story *is* the magic, especially when you know how it's done.

Everything happens in tiny almost imperceptible 1/24th of a second steps, and yet eye-blink instant can make the difference between you believing a scene and not believing it.

Next time you watch a film or a TV programme, try to see how the trick is done. Watch for how people are positioned so that their eyelines cross when they're talking. Watch how when you cut from one shot to another, there's a movement in the shot that you leave, that matches the shot that you enter. This fools you into not "seeing the join". As you turn your head to look around you blink subconsciously, so your brain is used to dealing with cutting between scenes. How you do that to tell a story is a phenomenally powerful and beautiful art.

Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

#77

Post by robk »

willxinc wrote: post #70

The concept and visualization reminds me a lot of similar technology in the TV show Person of Interest. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_serie... It's quite interesting to think about how relevant the themes being discussed in that show are ever present today.

Underrated show and absolutely prescient!

Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

#78

Post by lilsoso »

jrockway wrote: post #71
somebodynew wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only following people who posted their own photos voluntarily in this particular implementation, but consider the next incremental step for this same approach: a website where you upload a photo of anyone's face and get a map/trail of every public photo/video posted by someone else where that face appears in the background for the last month. Now you're not just finding the subject of a voluntarily portrait in s…

My favorite part of the pandemic is it being socially acceptable to wear a face mask. I enjoy the break from surveillance.

Masks increasingly help less and less, for example see:

https://www.datasciencecentral.com/sunglasses-and-face-mask-...

Re: The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken

#79

Post by cmeacham98 »

robk wrote: post #77
willxinc wrote: post #70

The concept and visualization reminds me a lot of similar technology in the TV show Person of Interest. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_serie... It's quite interesting to think about how relevant the themes being discussed in that show are ever present today.

Underrated show and absolutely prescient!

It was a cool show, but a lot of the domains I am familiar with (hacking/cybersecurity, programming, compression) were very much made up for the storyline, so I suspect they didn't have much accuracy in domains I don't know much about (superintelligent AI, government surveillance, etc).
Post reply on HN