Don't share pictures of your kids online | Hacker News Reader

Don't share pictures of your kids online

iafrikan.com

47 pointsiafrikan18 comments

I'd suggest going an extra step: keep the imagery of you and your family out of the cloud altogether. Spending a decade in adtech, ML, and behavior targeting scared the willies out of me, and I'm building something for my family to use: https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/

I'm not sure that images should be your largest concern.

Messaging apps and the sites you visit online are much richer sources of data for adtech and ML.

I agree that messaging apps (including gmail) are used to enrich the targeting cloud for a given user, but many use a secure-ish app by default (iMessage). Also, if you use an adblocker (like ublock origin), those should mostly muzzle pixel beacons.

The metadata you can pull from a series of images is remarkable. Did you know that most smartphones from the last 7 years will encode not just GPS coordinates, but the compass heading of the lens? Just from that stream, you know (most likely) where the person lives, works, and spends time. Throw in face detection and you know who else lives at your home, and who your coworkers are. It's a metadata treasure chest.

Plus, with as high resolution as cameras are now, you could even identify some of the products and brands in their house, estimate taste and income based on interior finishes and visible products. Is that birthday cake sitting on a granite countertop? Expensive furniture or cheap? KitchenAid mixer in the background? Oh look, a book shelf in the background, lookup all those titles. Bill O'Reilly book, must be conservative. Rachel Maddow books, liberal.... There really is a ton that can be gleaned from just random photos.

Advance image processing AI by 1000x (which could happen in 10 years) and the images are much more dangerous.

I think we're there already. A generic getting-started-with-AI online course will do a reasonable enough job at object detection and identification to be dangerous.

Facebook already knows who your friends are and what you've been up to even if you have never used the site, because it's seen you in the photos they uploaded.

Love the copy on that page.

Are you going to use a third party application for backups? How about sharing? The application you are building looks interesting!

> Are you going to use a third party application for backups?

macOS, Windows 10, and Ubuntu Desktop all come with built-in, incremental backup solutions that work well (at least for me), so I think that need is taken care of.

There are a number of apps on iOS and Android that allow arbitrary folders to be synchronized with a server or NAS. I'm using Resilio Sync, and it seems to work.

> How about sharing?

I've written a design doc for sharing that I'm about to build out. I'll share it with you.

> The application you are building looks interesting!

Thanks!

What can us kids do to stop this? As sitting down and talking doesn't work. I'd rather not have people knowing when I'm not home.

Hide in the bushes and take pictures of your parents. Send them to your friends. If told to stop, ask your parents how they define the terms "double standard" and "leading by example".

Not sure if I'm joking...

Oh my god. This is a great idea. Thanks!

It's really not....

You're better off finding adults your parents respect and ask them to help you talk about all this with them.

Don't share pictures online. If you have to, send them via e-mail. Host your e-mail using a private provider. Make your family do the same.

The problem is there is so much inertia to overcome with "free" email and photo hosting that I could talk 'til I'm blue in the face to family and friends and they just ignore it.

And hosting your own email has been effectively ruined by spammers and overzealous spam filtering. Running your own email server is technical and time consuming at least at first.

Yeah don't :=)

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