The End of Location Based Applications? | Hacker News Reader

The End of Location Based Applications?

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30 pointsterrellm38 comments

Oh come on. Why are we still building technology that further isolates us from each other? You need facial recognition in a store to offer a customer rewards? Why can't you just remember your damn customers, person to person? Why must EVERYTHING be automated by computers?

Further isolating us from each other and making us all less familiar with each other is what causes us to divide, and then it leads to people not understanding each other anymore. We all know where that gets us.

From a scientific and engineering perspective, this stuff is great, but I don't think it's actually going to make our lives better.

That really depends on what it's used for.

I don't see it as a replacement, but as an improvement.

I live in a luxury building in Manhattan. 35 floors. We have 5 doormen; they know every single person who lives in the building by name. Not only that, but they also know regular visitors by name.

When one walks in, they don't glance at a monitor to figure out who you are. They know you, they remember previous conversations (oh hi, Joubert, didn't you recently see Momix at The Joyce?)

I cant stand it when a "customer service representative" has to "fake" knowing me.

That's 5 people who's full time job is almost entirely to know the names of a little less than 1000 people. There are plenty of stores in which that many different, new people walk through the door every day.

What about the day no one wants to do this shitty job? Maybe then you'll be happy that some computer recalls your name. I know this sounds provocative but my point is that some jobs will simply get replaced by computers and robots in a not so distant future. The same happened with agriculture in less than a century and the day will come that no one will want to be a doorman.

there are many people who would rather have a job as a doorman than work in the robot factory.

I know many people who would rather work on CRM software than have to memorize thousands of customers. My point is that having human beings whose sole purpose is to remember your name isn't a luxury that should be taken as granted.

You aren't taking it for granted if you are paying for the service as part of your luxury apartment's fees.

Who says there will either job in the future?

But will there be people who would hire these people?

Why do you think this job is shitty?

Or do you think only software engineering and other "creative" jobs are worthy, and every other job shitty?

I enjoy writing software, in the same way that I enjoy breathing; it's my natural way to solve problems and explore ideas. Which is why I'm having a fantastic time with my startup, Mad Wombat Software.

But, you know what? I was just as happy when I was working as a waiter at a small French restaurant.

I danced with a widowed ninety-year old woman on her birthday. Took a picture with a guy celebrating his 40th wedding anniversary, because I looked exactly like a younger version of him. Helped a very nervous boyfriend propose to his future wife.

None of these things were big, or important in the grand scheme of society, but they made life so much more worthwhile for the people I served. There's a great deal of happiness to be found in being an excellent host.

There are people that really enjoy being doormen, and waiters, and bartenders. They work fewer hours and get more exercise than programmers as well, and also get to interact with a ton of other people -- something that I envy a bit as I bang away at my laptop every day.

Because you have thousands of customers every day, and you're open 18 hours a day and staffed by rotating shifts of people? Or because you're a chain of stores? Or because you operate a series of related businesses? I'm all for keeping things human-scale, but the idea that I'm going to have a personal relationship with the guy who sells me a TV is a bit much.

I don't want stores like that keeping any kind of track me.

I remember ten years ago clerks at some grocery store had been trained to say good bye to me by my name after they read it from my credit card. The effect wasn't loyalty, it was creepiness.

I notice this isn't done anymore.

The stores here still do it. They think my name is Ramon Vera, though.

My name... is Inigo Montoya. You billed my father. Prepare to die.

I have recently been addressed with my name by a flight attendant. I fly a lot but it's been the first time ever. They've always had this information but they almost never use it. I wonder if it would be the same in stores.

Perhaps it is a bit to late to resist. This trend started with the automobile, and only increased with the advent of television.

i don't know about the end of Location Based Applications but how will this affect the people when they find out that a business is running something like this?!

I for one, would probably stop going to such an establishment .. too much information out there to be misused .. maybe something along the lines of google capturing wifi details while driving around snapping images of roads ..

counting the number of visitors is still acceptable. running facial recognition without any opt-in and then talking about comparing them to their facebook profiles to identify them, is pretty much Big Brother stuff. This is such a big privacy red flag ..

A user needing to actively check in is a good thing, as it means the user wants others to know he is checking in there. If a user was to check in to every grocery store, gas station, and so on, it would lose meaning. The point of check ins isn't to track where you are, but instead to show off to your friends you are somewhere cool.

The trend of online tech lately is disturbing. So much of what you are and what you do and who you know is being mined, cross-correlated, modeled and projected to make it easier and easier for the people that want to incentivize your behavior. You don't have to be a conspiracy freak to find this creepy.

Can't we find ways to make technology empowering instead? To foster creativity and direct human interaction? I'll admit that things like Meetup etc can in some cases bring people together but the drive to monetize every nook and cranny of our online interactions seems to taint everything.

Wouldn't automatic recognition be a little bit against the psychology of those reward programs? I thought the point was to make you work in exchange for cheaper coffee. The mental effort in doing the work should also fix it in your mind that you can get cheaper coffee by going to place x. If you don't do anything, nothing will register?

In the end, I will prefer the cafe with the hot waitress anyway.

People are uncomfortable with this because it inverts the roles of the sensor and the sensed. The participant loses control over their decision whether to check in or not.

It reminds me of Cory Doctorow's "Are You the Scanner or the Barcode?" http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol22?pg=12#pg12

Even more interesting is the fact that Facebook provides a database of 500mm people and their names from around world. While not all profile pictures are going to be valid in facial recognition software, most will.

I decided a while back I'd never put my face on my Facebook profile. Here's extra incentive.

The problem is that anyone else can post photos with you in them and tag your name not just to the photo but to your pic in the photo.

The only way to really avoid FB-face-recognition is to delete your entire account, and hope any tags get deleted as well.

Definitely a disturbing mashup.

Boom, spot on. I'll go even further and say that deleting your account isn't going to be enough. In five years time, computers will recognize your image on all pictures ever taken of you and by combining the information in the pictures, the existing social graphs on facebook (even if you're not on them!) and similar sites but also your email correspondence, public information etc., hive brains in the form of huge data centers will know everything about you.

We've long gone past the point where fighting this evolution has a chance of making a difference. Better get used now to the idea of living in a much more transparent society. Legislation is too slow to catch up with the pace of technological change, and that's not even considering that for legislation you need political will.

(the above may make it sound like I'm opposed to this transparency but I'm not any more - I have a facebook profile, I give out my personal information like candy bars, I don't care any more. It hasn't been detrimental to my life quality, actually I rather like getting targeted advertisements instead of being bombarded with ads for stuff I'm not going to buy anyway. I think when I will be greeted by name by the guy at McDonalds, I'll think of it as quite cool.)

At least in my circle of friend, mis-tagging photos of malt liqueur cans for comic effect is all that happens.

Still, the situation is starting to remind me of Roger Zelazny's My Name Is Legion.

I've been thinking for a while that facebook photos would be an excellent training set for facial/person recognition. Not only do you have large amounts of pictures for many users, they're usually tagged down to the person (with a human-placed rectangle over their face or body).

Coupled with the fact that you'll have multiple photos in varying postures, angles and light conditions, it'd be excellent.

Maybe that's why the intelligence agencies are so interested in partnering with them :-)

Based on my humble knowledge on machine learning, the "concept" of auto-detecting a person's identity based on her/his facebook pictures would be very far from accurate. And accuracy seems to be the key value proposition in this case. Maybe I'm missing something?

Oh but I don't think it will be from just one picture. It'll be from a list of profile pictures you had over the years, plus your own other (non-profile) pictures, plus the pictures of you that you were tagged in by your friends, plus any other pictures that can be found through google or otherwise (flickr or picasa accounts), ...

The first versions will probably be quite crappy. Give it 5 years and it will improve leaps and bounds, plus the amount of data to work from will also increase as more photos are uploaded.

Imagine this: the software will recognize that you change haircuts every couple of months. From this it can derive that you are more fashion-conscious than others and send you targeted marketing or offers. Also it can automatically set up appointments with hairdressers, complete with 3d renders of new, proposed haircuts that you can choose from. That would be awesome, this is taking personalization to a whole new level.

No it's entirely a different problem.

For example, auto-tagging your pictures from 1000 photos is easy. auto-tagging from 10,000 photos is easy. Hell, auto-tagging yourself from billion photos is easy, and the difficulty doesn't increase with the size of the verification set.

But when it comes to "auto-checking in", accuracy is really important. Out of the entire world population--6,697,254,041--how many people do you think would look similar to you? And it only gets more difficult with all those little details such as hairstyle, makeup, etc.

The Minority report model of using retinal scanner works because the accuracy is really high, and is statistically and scientifically proven. Same goes for your fingerprint. But no matter how good the algorithm gets, it is impossible to create an auto-check in system by automatically figuring out who you are based on just image recognition.

It won't happen. Facial recognition isn't that advanced and I doubt this company is going to bring something like this to market without a huge backlash. I have a picture of a trail on my Facebook profile. I suppose I have been a lot of places recently.

Hasn't that technology been around for a while? I remember seeing a driver less car that could detect people. Perhaps someone on HN has a link to the article.

can't we do this without facial recognition? how about the application passively check-in the user(using gps) based on amount of time he has spent at a particular location(like > 10 mins?)

There will be a backlash.

relevant: http://face.com/

"Few people exclude their basic name and picture information from public search"

True or conjecture?

It's true I fear...the big social networks (Facebook, Twitter and linkedin) all allow both name and profile pic as public even when you make your profile private.

Spidering this data would build an amazing database for facial recognition. This is actually a very well developed technology...if you don't believe this check out the Google Picasa app..it's rather concerningly good at facial recognition.

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