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OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says

arstechnica.com

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Re: OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says

#91

Post by influx »

noman-land wrote: post #71
everdrive wrote: post #2

At this point, nearly every online service should be considered hostile. If they can make a small amount of money by compromising your privacy or your identity, they will. If they can make a small amount of money by stealing your attention and addicting you, they will. Are there exceptions? I'm sure. Will I be erring sometimes by being cautious? Definitely. But, there is really not much of an alternative these days.

My advice has long beem to delete every single account you've ever created on every platform. The chance of the data leaking nears 100% with time. The corporate cloud is a seriously unsafe place to be. It's a dangerous place to store your intimate secrets and a shaky foundation on which to build a culture.

Do most SaaS actually delete or do they just store a tombstone in the database for your account?

Re: OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says

#93

Post by fuzzfactor »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #34
doodlebugging wrote: post #31

I suspect that instead of them "giving" the photos to the facial recognition firm they sold them. Those photos and the PII data associated with them are the only things of value that a site like OKCupid controls.

The company was run by someone on the board of directors for ok cupid so it likely was just given

I get the idea that the OkCupid founders & investors did as well as they could with their dating business, and as a "byproduct" they built up a valuable representative database along the way.

Money was already being made off the dating alone, and the accumulating facial data was a no-cost item from the beginning.

Even though the data is mainly just a working foundation for the dating service, eventually the database got so big that lots of value could be extracted in other ways.

It would be difficult to put an exact dollar figure on the value of a database like that itself for sure.

And selling it could be considered unethical in some peoples' eyes, so those in control could very well have decided to start that adjacent facial recognition company in response. After all, regardless of an inaccurately valued asset, OkCupid is not passing the data on to a different company for good. The dating company is not losing anything nor getting any compensation for it. OkCupid just keeps on going like normal while the new face-recognition company springs up.

This is AI. This "limited" facial recognition approach doesn't require ownership of the data, they just needed to "borrow" it for a while.

Re: OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says

#94

Post by pixelmelt »

rdevilla wrote: post #67
freeAgent wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of stuff continues to ramp up as everyone rushes to train LLMs while governments are pushing for ID verification that would make it impossible to use the web (or even one's own computer) anonymously. It's a very dark time for anyone who cares whatsoever about privacy or digital sovereignty.

Nonsense, I have it on good authority that the old internet sans LLM surveillance capitalism is still alive and well. You just stopped going there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47589055

And so did everyone else, making it... Dead? If you've got some good alternative communities then do tell!

Re: OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says

#95

Post by eviks »

saintfire wrote: post #61

"... agreed to a permanent prohibition barring them from misrepresenting how they use and share personal data. " So... Their punishment for breaking the law is having to promise to follow the law going forward? I wish I had that superpower, too.

But this time it's permanent!

Re: OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says

#96

Post by eviks »

tehnub wrote: post #70

This incident was from 2014. I wonder how many OKCupid employees and shareholders from then are still at/invested in the company. What do corporate punishments do if the people who made the mistake aren't even there to receive them?

They do exactly the same as when the people are around to receive the unbearable punishment of... promising the company will follow the law

> OkCupid and Match do not have to pay a financial penalty in a deal made with the FTC over an incident from 2014. OkCupid and Match did not admit or deny the allegations but agreed to a permanent prohibition barring them from misrepresenting how they use and share personal data

Re: OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says

#98

Post by eviks »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #65

In a free market the company that makes every cent they can has a survival advantage. Enough time and transactions and the market will be made entirely of survivors. The rest will have been out-competed. One counter-pressure is regulation. But hey the US has a fetish about deregulation and so here we are.

How does giving data out for free, no cents involved, match with your template?

Re: OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says

#99

Post by rglullis »

gmerc wrote: post #82
rglullis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every online service This deserves a few qualifiers. I think this should be applied to any service that is - "free" or "freemium" - wrapped as a black box which gives no way out for customers. There are plenty of companies out there who provide services based on FOSS, but we collectively shy away from paying them because it seems "silly" to pay for software that people can run for free.

24andme was not free. Any investor backed startup or PE acquirable will sell all assets to Peter Thiel ventures eventually to make some last cash. Most AI startups will never be profitable.

"23andme", you mean? They were not free, but they were not building their product on open standards, were they? So the don't my pass my filter as well.
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