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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

Well, this tells us Apple has plans for facial expression mapping to emoji. Sounds a lot like the technology from their FaceShift acquisition.

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As soon as I heard this it seemed like a major phone seller. It will only be on the top of the line phone but wow does it sound fun/appealing.

It sounds pretty darn creepy to me. And it's sure to lead to social disasters - how can you boil down all the nuance and uniquenss of an individual human's facial expression to a smiley? It's bound to make the wrong face at least sometimes.

The target audience will love it, mistakes will become memes, and most won't find it creepy. I however, agree that it is creepy as hell.

What makes you think it's creepy? My sister said something similar but I don't really see it myself. Are you worried it's going to be some sort of uncanny valley kind of thing?

I'm worried about how much the camera is watching and analyzing my facial expressions.

I can't imagine that you'd be forced to use it. Disable it. (I would.) Cover up your camera.

Sure, it wouldn't stop me from buying a phone with this feature, but I still find it vaguely creepy.

OK, that I understand. I would assume it's not doing it unless an app is explicitly using it at the moment, and there's still the permission that app to need just to have access to the camera.

It would be interesting to see if there's a new permission they need to get access to this kind of stuff, but I haven't seen anything about that in the leaks.

I would assume trying to do this all the time would use up a ton of battery.

Is this different from using an emoji to approximate an emotion? Or abbreviations like lol? Or language in general? Or any communication? People will get used to it and it'll become popular if people find it useful. I personally don't use emoji much and likely wouldn't use this much either. But I can imagine others might.

  Is this different from using an 
  emoji to approximate an emotion?

Yes, very. Say I crack a joke :) You see the smiley, and it's the same (alright, roughly the same ;o) ) as the smiley someone else would use to express the same approximate emotion.

If, on the other hand, my smile looks like 8-D but someone else's looks like :=) and that other guy's looks like %} - the consistency vanishes. And that's before you start factoring in people with, say, Bell's Palsy.

I understand what you're saying. All communication has the possibility of miscommunication: and it's not just on the sender. Ever been misunderstood in face-to-face conversation? Over text? Over the phone? Over email? On an Internet forum?

If it's not useful, people won't use it. If there's a miscommunication, we have ways to resolve those. I can't imagine this is something people will be forced to use, just as people aren't forced to use emoji, or markup images.

I generally trust Apple to get this kind of stuff right, we'll see.

When my little sister saw the demos that were on 9to5mac that was sort of her reaction. She thought somewhere cute but at the same time she thought others looked kind of creepy. She had a similar reaction to some of the giant emojis The watch could send.

At the same time I could see having a ton of fun with this. Make some sort of funny voice, choose an emoji to go with it, and send it to someone as a joke.

My guess (in this is slightly based on some of the leaks from last month) is that it doesn't do any actual representation of your face. It figures out specific faces/gestures (smiling, winking, raised eyebrow, etc.) and shows those along with maybe the direction your head is looking. I'm assuming it's not real motion capture style.

> It's bound to make the wrong face at least sometimes.

I'm guessing you can cancel and try again before sending it in that case.

Really??? It sounds like something I would try once and then disable and never use again.

How can one reasonably assume that Apple has our PII self-interests in mind, whilst simultaneously building the most comprehensive PII-Invading-Spying (PII-I-S) device ever built?

FB and Goog seem to have the most PPII-I-S services on the planet, but Apple has the HW "cornered" on that invasion...

How can we even uphold a non-dystopian future.

Just look at the last decade has played out. Imagine the reverse-hockey-stick of the next decade.

So; again - How can there possibly any reasonable expectation of privacy going forward?

Given that Apple keeps a hash of your fingerprints stored on the device in a way that even Apple can't get to it (and I would assume something similar for the facial scan stuff) how are they in the same league as Facebook?

Apple doesn't even share the facial recognition data for iPhoto between your own devices.

Facebook has a profile of every one they've ever seen in a picture and can guess who they are even if they're not on Facebook.

It's completely different.

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