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Comment by aloer | Hacker News Reader

I was very surprised when I downloaded zoom yesterday and noticed that an “appearance enhancement filter” is enabled by default. This is something that I am not used to outside of social and camera apps from (mostly) Asian countries

Sad state of the world where the default in a business related App is essentially telling you that this is necessary. Can’t be healthy for society

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Eh, it really doesn't do much but smooth skin.

I'd rather a client/vendor/coworker not be distracted if someone on the call has big nasty pimples, and I'd rather have a coworker with big nasty pimples feel more comfortable getting on a video call.

I think there's hard to draw boundaries. Small burnishes I think everyone would be okay with a touch-up. But on the other hand large changes people will feel deceived if they meet that person irl. The difficult is in the middle, which is going to have some distribution of perception of deception.

I think this is different than touching up models because we never end up seeing their true form. Though I remember when the fappening happened a lot of people mentioned how they felt better about themselves after seeing these people's true selves.

The existence of the feature is not a problem, that’s just where technology is heading. For individual use it could be enabled, if desired

But it being made default and thereby de facto saying that everyone needs it is absurd. There is no way that something like this is not damaging to society in the long run

I wonder, however, if smoothing skin makes for a lighter (compressed) image, resulting in bandwidth savings. We don't need to see skin details in a work conversation, just expressions.

Perhaps the feature should just be renamed/rebranded to something like "smartly reduce image details to save bandwidth"?

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