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They see your photos

theyseeyourphotos.com

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Re: They see your photos

#91
Here are some example photos we can discuss. First a photo[1] of me trying to look Amish, and the story it gives:

  The image shows a man in a beige polo shirt and a black fedora hat. He is sitting in what appears to be an office, indicated by the presence of boxes and what looks like a printer in the background. There is a landscape photograph on the wall behind him, showing what looks like trees and a field. The foreground is dominated by the man himself, while the background includes office supplies and a wall with a picture.

  The man appears to be middle-aged, with a serious expression. He has a goatee and glasses. His ethnicity and racial background are not readily apparent from the image. He appears to be of a middle-class socioeconomic status based on the office environment. He seems to be at work, possibly taking a selfie. The picture was taken on May 9th, 2007, at 9:14 AM, using a NIKON COOLPIX L12 camera.

  The man's glasses have a slight reflection, and this reflection shows part of his workspace and other objects. It is possible to make out the small print on the label of a box behind him. The lighting is relatively soft and comes from the front, as indicated by how it falls on his face. The focus is sharpest on the man, but the background is reasonably clear.
Here's another... of me doing my best "Some like it hot" pose

  The photo shows a man standing on a city sidewalk. In the foreground, there is a man wearing khaki shorts and a gray t-shirt. The background includes older brick buildings, a street with traffic, and some trees. There's also a lamp post next to the man and a modern glass building in the distance. The overall setting appears to be an urban area, possibly in Chicago, given the architectural style of the buildings.

  The man in the image appears to be middle-aged, with a fair complexion. He seems happy, possibly amused, judging by his smile. He looks like he may be of Caucasian descent. His economic status is difficult to ascertain, but his attire suggests a middle-class lifestyle. The photo was taken on August 7, 2008, at 12:07 PM using a NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D40 camera. He appears to be simply standing on the sidewalk, perhaps taking a break or waiting for something.

  The man's watch shows a bit of wear suggesting regular use. There is a subtle reflection visible on the man's glasses that provides a small glimpse of the surroundings. The image quality indicates it was likely taken outdoors in bright sunlight. The shadows suggest the time of day, adding depth to the scene and providing an additional element of reality to the photo.
Last, a photo of Chicago[3]

  The image is a nighttime shot of the Chicago skyline from across the lake. In the foreground, there's a dark, paved walkway with a few lights and what looks like a small building or structure near the water's edge. The background is dominated by the brightly lit cityscape of Chicago, with many skyscrapers and buildings of varying heights and architectural styles. The water reflects the city lights, creating a shimmering effect.

  The photo appears to have been taken by a lone photographer, judging by the lack of people in the foreground. The picture was taken on Saturday, November 20th, 2010, at around 10:32 AM using a NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D40 camera. No people are clearly visible, so there is no information about their characteristics or activities. The overall mood of the scene is serene and peaceful, with the city lights providing a sense of quiet vibrancy.

  The reflection of the city lights on the water isn't perfectly uniform, which is a subtle detail to notice, and the slight variations in the brightness of different buildings hint at differences in their energy consumption or lighting design. The darkness of the sky suggests a clear night with minimal light pollution, outside of the city itself. The overall lighting and composition create a breathtaking view of the Chicago skyline at night.
Note that it didn't catch the inconsistency of being a night-time photograph, and supposedly being taken at 10:32 AM (likely the edit date)

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/52196125239/in/date...

[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/52194857882/in/date...

[3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/51857839297/in/date...

Re: They see your photos

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree fully but I'm going to play devil's advocate and say the person who just won the election won the popular vote so whatever you are about to get is democracy in action because the majority of people voted for what is about to happen.

No it isn't. A democracy only works with informed voters. The amount of lies and obfuscation spewed by Trump's campaign is a successful attempt to deliberately break democracy. They don't have a mandate to do much besides mass deportation because they didn't talk about firing the entire federal workforce during the campaign. Project 2025 does talk about that but Trump lied during the campaign and said he disavowed it…

> No it isn't. A democracy only works with informed voters.

By that logic we can never have a working democracy because collectively voters will always be ignorant and misinformed to some extent. We can't force voters to educate themselves on the issues and can't stop them from lying to themselves or to each other. We can do things to improve the situation, just as there has been a sustained and coordinated effort to make the situation worse, but (gerrymandering aside) we don't get to pick our voters in a democracy.

The last election was as democratic as we should ever expect it to be. Having the freedom to elect our government, by necessity, means having the freedom to elect someone who will take our freedom from us, and if we've done that we'll have only ourselves to blame.

Re: They see your photos

#93

This is just an ad for their photo service. Which presumably has terrible search features, if it doesn't use AI to analyse them. That's one of the best features in Google Photos!

How do you opt out of Google updating your user/advertising profile based on information they glean from your photos?

Google has been caught multiple times violating their own rules and the law to use all the information they have on you for advertising purposes. The only opt out is to stop using their services.

Re: They see your photos

#95

This is just an ad for their photo service. Which presumably has terrible search features, if it doesn't use AI to analyse them. That's one of the best features in Google Photos!

Hey, one of the folks working on the said photo service here.

Ente has reasonably good search[1] powered by on-device machine learning[2].

[1]: https://ente.io/blog/machine-learning

[2]: https://ente.io/ml

Re: They see your photos

#96
post #70

i gave it a picture of making some meatballs, and it didnt capture the interesting parts. a) it didnt catch that they were made of ground pork and not beef b) it didnt realize that the inconsistent browning and look of the fat was from butter browing the breadcrumbs and flour c) it didnt realize that the surrounding on the pan was bits of browned meat that fell off while rolling, instead claiming it was garlic or her…

I put in photos of someone spreading their butt cheeks on a hotel bed and it said it was a "casual" setting.

Doesn't sound like a terribly formal setting either?

Re: They see your photos

#97

This is really cool. I posted a photo of what I think was my great grandparents into it and it explained their circumstances in fascinating ways (to the point of mentioning aged clothing, a detailed I overlooked). I’ve been trying to figure out how to process hundreds of my own scanned photos to determine any context about them. This was convincing enough for me to consider google’s vision API. No way I’d ever trust…

Yeah, I know the point of this site is to give us a dystopian shock by showing us how much information Big Tech extracts from our photos, but it's inadvertently a pretty good advertisement for Google's Vision API. It did a fantastic job of summarizing the photos I threw at it.

Re: They see your photos

#98

This is just an ad for their photo service. Which presumably has terrible search features, if it doesn't use AI to analyse them. That's one of the best features in Google Photos!

How do you opt out of Google updating your user/advertising profile based on information they glean from your photos?

Move to the EU.

Somehow, neither Google, nor Microsoft, nor Samsung, nor (probably) any other big tech company, can usefully extract data from photos anymore. Face recognition in particular works like one of those Shabbat-compatible appliances: something gets extracted at some point, eventually, but infrequently, and only when you're not looking - and, most importantly, it's not possible for you to control or advise the process. The AI processing runs autonomously in such a way that you may start doubting whether it's happening at all!

I assume that this is the vendors' workaround around GDPR and such in relevant jurisdictions, but this also makes face search/grouping nearly useless. Don't get me wrong - I'm very much with the EU on data protection and privacy, but getting gaslighted by the apps themselves about the extents of and reasons for ML limitations in those apps, that's just annoying.

Re: They see your photos

#99
I enjoyed a "the photographer is likely male given the technical nature of the subject". (on a picture of computer equipment: https://nt4tn.net/photos/garage1sm.jpg)

-- it hits a lot of details in images but also hallucinates a lot. And typical of modern LLM hallucinations they're kinda insidious in how plausible they are.

It's fun seeing what triggers its class classification. People in wooded area, middle class. Add welding to the image, working class.

Re: They see your photos

#100

These are the obvious things they can see in the photos. Not shown are the various assumptions they'll make about you based on your photos such as: gay, likely uneducated, high income earner, most likely republican, narcissistic, etc. Also not shown is what they'll learn by the totality of the data they collect from your pictures such as how often you go on vacation, how often you're seen in new clothing and what kin…

Do you do any ML for Big Tech? Because it's actually a lot simpler than that: the input is the sum total of your activity, and the output is the likelihood that you'll click on an ad or buy a product on a specific surface. You certainly can predict demographic information like sexual orientation, education level, income, political party, and with a fair degree of accuracy, but all it does is add noise to the calculat…

> You certainly can predict demographic information like sexual orientation, education level, income, political party, and with a fair degree of accuracy, but all it does is add noise to the calculation you really want, which is optimizing the amount of money you'll make.

How are all those data points noise? They're crucial information used for targeting ads to a specific audience. Advertisers pay extra for it, because it leads to more sales. This is not just a gimmick, but a proven tactic that has made the web the most lucrative ad platform over any other. Adtech wouldn't be the behemoth it is without targeting, and the companies that do this well are some of the richest on the planet.

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