Show HN: A tiny JS library for real-time localization of eye pupils

I suppose I used the word "paranoid" to imply that it was not entirely logical/reasonable to think so.

Thinking of it, I acquired this attitude of being overly careful since Facebook, face recognition, machine learning, pervasive privacy invasions became the norm on the web. Who knows, maybe there's a way to combine random webcam snippets with other tracking technology to gather even more data about me.

My glasses are closer to the "invsible frames" side of the spectrum than the Harry Caray / Elvis Costello style, so maybe that matters.

I guess maybe I should just review the code but I was trying to figure out if it uses other facial features to "anchor" the eyes or just the (fairly recognizable) features of human eyes themselves. Your glasses experience makes me guess it is pretty eye dependent -- it does have more trouble with one eye covered for example, whereas if it was anchoring off some combination of ear/nose/mouth/chin it should be easy enough to ID the eye from half the face, let alone with just an eyepatch-sized cover.

No doubt it "just works" for some people. For others, not so much.

Really?

I couldn't find what I was actually looking for, where Weizenbaum describes how vision or reasoning experiments might be made with benign or even cute objects, but for rather not so benign ends. I found this instead, which I think is even better put.

> Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them and so on.

> There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die. Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for example, to their destination, and all that. You see, tthe technology itself is neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides -- consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.

> Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.

> But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.

> If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.

-- Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html