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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

already accept it's happening and inevitable

I've almost given up. I'm pretty much despondent at this point.

There is a booth on my way to work where they give out free Lays chips in exchange for your photo. The gimmick is that it's like a photo booth. I asked the attendant to read the privacy policy, and it's frightening, to say the least. I have no doubt that they are contracting with some AI consultant to be able to identify your face in the crowd and link it to your email address, which of course can be used to identify you freely on the Internet.

People are freely giving away their identities and their rights for a free bag of potato chips.

I always try to make sure my face is covered when I walk by it, but I can't help but despair a little when I realize that I am still surrounded by security cameras. At least one would hope that the MTA police are too busy or understaffed to do anything malicious with my face.

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It's the same as the Microsoft "How old are you?" and Google "What painting do you look like?" apps. People don't think about what's going on behind something that seems trivial.

Anecdotally, Google Opinion Rewards first question was whether or not I supported the UN. I immediately deleted the app.

Somebody, probably a political organization, ran an opinion poll on the UN and got anonymized aggregated results. What part of that made you delete the app? If you get a political phone survey, will you unplug your phone?

In Microsoft's case, my guess is that it was just a research experiment. It worked pretty well on a few family photos I threw at it.

I think that the site is not even working anymore. Anyways, they said they were not keeping the images, and I have no reason to doubt it.

It's a pity that Microsoft is going only after the corporate market, Oracle style, and not trying to make money from consumers any more. That leaves Apple as about the only big independent player in that field. We could have benefited from the competition.

Have you ever stood in line for passport/ID control at an airport or anywhere else any time in the past decade? If yes, that government's security and intelligence services (and anyone they share data with) have enough video frames of your your face to build a high fidelity facial recognition model. And it's linked to your name, nationality and passport number.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because one party is doing it, doesn't mean we want everyone doing it, or even that we wanted it to ever happen at all.

I recently noticed when coming back through UK passport/ID control that there are now boxes hanging from the ceiling in the waiting area, I assume to scoop up IMSI's/Wifi/Bluetooth/NFC MAC addresses from phones and tablets. All tied to passport/facial biometrics presumably.

Is simply turning off your device while there a solution? Asking as someone who may travel to the UK and EU this year.

No, there are stealth SMS messages and your baseband processor is receiving/answering them even when phone is off but battery is inside.

https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Dete...

I'm speculating, you could try asking GCHQ. With SDRs so compact and cheap these days the chances are high that they are installed in such places as airports and train stations. It is fairly safe to assume that turning things off should prevent most data leakage, but for the truly paranoid you would have to remove all the sewn RFID tags from your clothes and not carry contactless enabled cards.

Haven't they had your passport photo on file, like, forever? Probably since before digital archives even existed. The USA is a bit different in this regard, but every country with a national ID (i.e. most of the world) has your face linked to your name, nationality and document number, that's how ID works, it gives an ability to identify people.

They probably also have enough to generate a DeepFake if they want. Can't wait for the next big incident to involve that...

That doesn't make it ok!

That’s bad, but it’s not to exploit influence over you for profit.

Yes, unfortunately. No need to dig myself any deeper.

You say MTA, so is this booth in NYC? Where exactly is this Lay's spying machine so I can steer clear.

Those of us with the munchies also want to know the location of this snack dispensing machine.

Tunnel between the Fulton St transit center and the Oculus.

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