They See Your Photos • Hacker News Board

Re: They See Your Photos

#131

Post by xorvoid » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #123

xorvoid wrote: post #37

"The person seems to have low self-esteem, displays introversion, poor honesty, low emotional stability, very little adventurousness and poor self-control hence we can target them with both niche and common products and services." Amusing to me how wrong this is... I don't know how you can determine such characteriatics from a photo in any direction. I will admit that my appearance though tends to throw mixed and inc…

The point isn't to get it right. It's about what people with more power and capital than you will do when the AI makes the wrong inferences about you.

Maybe you need to spell out what you're implying because it's not very clear. I don't understand what's so bad about wrong inferences. I've been living with wrong inferences my whole life - it's usually others that are made the fool.

In this particular case it means that you end up with really bad ad targeting. I'm happy with that, it's much easier to dismiss and roll your eyes at scam junk ads than ones that actually know how to manipulate you...

Re: They See Your Photos

#132

Post by stratos123 » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

olmo23 wrote: post #27

JDye wrote: post #10

Reads like a horoscope, just vague stuff that's always gonna be slightly true... Picture of me in Oslo and it says "he enjoys travel". And then some really weird stuff: "he may also have a penchant for video games, excessive drinking, and skipping work". Guessing my exact location - Oslo Opera House - was impressive though.

I think it uses exif data for that, because when I tried it did show my location but the vision api was overloaded, so nothing more showed up.

I'd be surprised if that was required. OpenAI's o3 was already professional-human-level at guessing location from a photo, so unless the companies intentionally stopped training on those datasets, modern models should be too.

Re: They See Your Photos

#133

Post by lesostep » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 2:20 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

Since it's just the source of information that's different, and not the type of usage extracted, I'd assume you could check it like you could check anything else google knows about you: Settings -> Privacy and security -> Ad privacy

It's not like google weren't routinely wrong about who you were. I was a "30-40 years" "man" "have kids" ever since I was a teen.

Re: They See Your Photos

#134

Post by GaryBluto » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

Largely incorrect. It described me as (oddly enough) a Green party voter, misidentified my home office décor (describing it as being generic and safe when it is anything but). The things it got right it could have gotten from EXIF data or from just being vague.