The most curious thing about this project is how people seem to have a visceral reaction to having photos of them made without their permission; but having their activity tracked online hardly evokes the same reaction. It's weird. What harm is a random picture of my face in public going to do? But still some people worry so much about that. Whereas only very few people show the same reaction to the fact that Google s…
It's magical thinking. People don't understand how technology works. More than that - because it's not really about computers . Most people don't understand how reality works. What is information. How reasoning works. What can you infer from observations. They feel (and sometimes, in some places, really think) that a picture is like a piece of their soul. But it isn't. It's just a hash of their phenotype, useful most…
A faceless computer, doing it in the background environment outside of your perception unless you really dig in under the hood triggers none of that. It's the same reason why most humans are not anxious about the footprints they leave in the sand on the beach, because it feels about the same.
A lot of the rich and powerful understand this dynamic well, and use environmental stonewalling to say no to people vs. a direct human interaction.