They See Your Photos • Hacker News Board

Re: They See Your Photos

#101

Post by ffsm8 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

wildzzz wrote: post #61

bestouff wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, I uploaded some exif-less photos and in my cases it guessed between somewhat well to astonishing well.

I uploaded a pic of some friends at the lake and it guessed a very specific lake 1000 miles away from where it was taken. Obviously it was a very generic background, all you see is trees and water so it could be anywhere. I uploaded a scanned photo from when my parents were my age standing in front of a NASA sign at KSC and it got it right but I think you can read some text on the sign. It can also be tricked really…

And you think it's acceptable to upload photographs of your friends to some random service to use as it sees fit?

Glad I'm not your friend, honestly.

Re: They See Your Photos

#102

Post by wongarsu » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

marksully wrote: post #84

You inferred this from the photo? > He is presumed to be agnostic, heterosexual, and politically aligned with the Democratic party

If you believe this study [1], humans can guess party affiliation at least slightly better than random chance from images alone.

Or [2] is an (unscientific) exploration from the other direction, prompting image generation models to make images of republican and democrat voters, with very different results

1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2807452/

2. https://rooftopsquad.com/democrat-vs-republican-faces/

Re: They See Your Photos

#103

Post by 28304283409234 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

Nifty3929 wrote: post #33

Seems like nonsense to me. I'd love to see the prompt. From one of the sample images: "They likely share an agnostic worldview and identify as heterosexual. Their clothing is casual, and their interests revolve around skateboarding, music, and hanging out. Given their age and attire, they likely lean towards a liberal political affiliation. They display signs of classism and ageism, with potential for racial profilin…

Accuracy is not the point of the website.

Re: They See Your Photos

#104

Post by hbcondo714 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

Cider9986 wrote: post #83

Ente photos competes with Apple Photos and Google photos. It is also more open and you can share an album link with someone and they can add their photos without signing up.

Yeah, here is their Show HN from a few years ago:

We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347439

Re: They See Your Photos

#105

Post by wongarsu » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

fusslo wrote: post #93

I see a lot of comments saying all the guesses are totally wrong or horoscope-like. But, can I offer a quandary? Some companies won't care if it's wrong. If some executive decides to buy into AI profiling like this, and make customer decisions based on it, then how would the customer ever know: 1. why they are being treated differently 2. know how or why to correct it I don't know if it's scarier being RIGHT or WRONG

Also to generate value they don't need to be 100% right. Judging you on 10 metrics and being wrong about nine of them still allows them to show you highly relevant ads on that one metric they got right. Which is a win for them compared to showing you random ads

Re: They See Your Photos

#106

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

dudefeliciano wrote: post #40

Empirical135 wrote: post #26

Felt quite off for me: Wrong salary guess, wrong food preferences, wrong political affiliation, partially correct hobbies, wrong ad targeting ideas. What was surprisingly accurate: location and the fact that I (an academic male in his thirties photographed close to the mountains) might like hiking and coffee. If you knew which bike model I was googling yesterday, almost all of these guesses might have been more accur…

just knowing you were googling bikes i think i can guess your political affilition - unless there is some golden MAGA bike that I haven't heard about yet.

[deleted]

Re: They See Your Photos

#107

Post by pmontra » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

I uploaded a picture, maybe a difficult one. It described somebody like me and like the opposite of me. Every single commercial suggestion was about something I never bought on my life. I got the feeling of those weather forecasts with an icon of cloud, sun and rain for the same location in the same day.

Re: They See Your Photos

#108

Post by uvesten » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

By mistake I uploaded the same picture twice, and while all vague, the descriptions and ”data” were wildly different.

E.g. first time I was an extrovert, second time introvert… About the only thing that stayed the same was ”heterosexual”, but that’s a statistically safe guess.

Re: They See Your Photos

#109

Post by kang » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

Uploaded my face pics - the data has 13 fields, 12 were incorrect.(With it only guessing correctly the emotion on the face and some objects in the picture. it was surprising, no photo app has guessed my age with +-20yr diff.). Pretty useless demo imo

Re: They See Your Photos

#110

Post by semiquaver » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

This is just a stereotype machine. It incorrectly identified me as Christian, republican, and earning $50-75K, all of which are far off base, and apparently just because I’m white and wearing khakis.