Hacker News Reader

Comment by MonkeyMalarky | Hacker News Reader

The bit about using face recognition to customize the music is cool until you think about how it would be cloud based, your face would be associated with an advertising ID, and your day-to-day comings and goings in the physical world would be tracked. But hey, it starts playing the Gorillaz when you get on so totally worth it right?

View on HN

It’s all fun and games until I step onto the elevator.

If life’s taught me anything, it’s that other people don’t like the music I like and I have access to an effectively endless amount of it between Bandcamp and YouTube.

My outrun music would be amazing on an elevator full of people though.

Screeching tires, synthesizers, and engine sounds as we plunge.

Mine would definitly be an truthful emulation of the elevator crashing up/down the shaft.

Taking a guess: djent?

Everyone was happy until I stepped on the elevator and Trout Mask Replica came on.

I always think of Johnny Rotten’s story of playing it at parties to piss people off for these examples. And I do actually like it. But I will admit I listen to Safe As Milk far more often.

Gorillaz or targeted advertisements?

Hello, Mr. Yakamoto, welcome back to the Gap! How'd those assorted tank tops work out for you?

It troubles me rather deeply how many people I have talked to about that movie who completely tuned out the whole pervasive advertising subplot. Didn't see it.

I was talking about the ads on every vertical surface in the mall, not long after the movie came out, and someone said, "I guess I didn't notice." This is how democracy dies. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Ready Player One is much more on the nose about it, but it goes by so fast people likely missed it too:

> we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/06/minority...

> But Minority Report, though it was written and filmed before 9/11, might be Spielberg’s most prescient work of all. Tasked with predicting our near future, he imagined an America filled with dazzling inventions but rotting from the inside out, one in which the erosion of civil liberties is thinly veiled by chest-thumping braggadocio about technology’s power to solve every problem. Spielberg's eye-scanning cameras and autocratic cops could easily be exchanged with the overreach of the PATRIOT Act, or the NSA listening in to casual conversations. The film’s warning is one the world is only beginning to heed. We may not have precogs dreaming of murders in police precincts, but so much beloved technology of today is just as effective at watching and constricting our lives.

Most (probably all?) of the social criticism in the movie comes from the Phillip K. Dick source material. It was a good movie IMO but Spielberg is not exactly anti-establishment.

But there's a very popular song that says he is! Who am I to believe? A rock star or some random person on the internet?

The benefits of having face masks normalized!

Would you be against such a system if the recognition was done entirely locally and it only sent aggregated stats (male, 30-39) to the cloud? I feel like this is coming whether we like it or not, but we (as engineers) can at least try to push it in the right direction.

My guess is it doesn't do proper face recognition but just tries to put you into a bucket. "Oh you are a female teenager, play whatever is popular for that bucket"

People are already pushing back to one-way collection of such data in public spaces, so I would guess that an implementation that does that and directly acts on it (effectively pigeonholing you in a generic musical preference cohort based on age and sex) would cause an even stronger reaction.

In the Netherlands a couple of those companies that rent out screens with advertising in the public space placed new versions that included a camera above the screen meant for measuring people's reactions to content shown, detecting demographics and mood. After public backlash they promised these were deactivated until the legal situation became clear, but by now they've stuck thick badges over these with their brand name. I guess they got sick of people putting stickers over the camera holes.

The right direction, IMO, is to keep the elevators silent. If someone implements your proposal, someone else will top that with complete tracking and the killer feature being the accurate music choice. I bet nobody would like to sign an agreement or privacy policy to use an elevator though. Less is more in this case.

It's too easy to track where you've been walking inside a shopping mall, and if you're the only person in the elevator, it can trace that you were previously looking at {laptops,refrigerators,lingerie} and play an ad to promote the product to get you to seal the deal... "Today at the lingerie department we have a 20% discount!"

This is an honest question. Stop acting like asshat redditors with the downvotes. A downvote on this is not a no vote to the question.

For what it's worth, I'm not one of the downvoters but as much as it its an honest question, it also has obvious answers. If you bucket by age/gender/race you will immediately be accused of ageism, sexism and racism. Your statistical model can even be 99.9% accurate too and it won't even matter because it will take just that 0.1% walking into an elevator, becoming offended, posting about it on Twitter and it blowing up in your face.

I've suspected for several years now that Sheetz convenience stores do this. Or possibly that the person that does their programming has an extremely diverse taste in relatively obscure music overlapping several of the songs I've engaged with on social media in the past.

I get the feeling that at some point the muzak groups did some kind of study that shows shoppers are more likely to frequent a place if they play one slightly obscure song they really like. Which will lead to places like a convenience store playing a string of obscure tracks from a large variety of genre's.

Or at least that's how I explain my local store playing a country song into some obscure song I love from 20+ years ago, into some modernish pop song.

Maybe some place has furthered this with recognition software, but I don't interact with much social media and still have noticed this.

That seems plausible, I always chalked my suspicions up to paranoia more than anything but it could still be an unsettling feeling from time to time.

This already happens.

Your day to day comings and goings in the physical world are already tracked.

The final battle in the lord of the rings: "My brave warriors! We have already lost. Freedom is not worth fighting for. Orcs outnumber us, and they are so cruel! If we surrender to Sauron, he might choose to burn us quickly. Let's give up our swords, bend to the enemy and show them how spineless we are!"

So you interpret my comment which is a purely factual one as willingness to giving up on Privacy? OK.

"You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" [1]

Not to pick on you for any reason, but I interpret it that way too. And FWIW I thought akomtu's comment was quite funny.

Saying that a state of affairs already exists is no kind of moral or rational argument against the wrongs of bad circumstances. In it's most charitable interpretation it's just empty "whataboutism". A less charitable take is that it's tacit support for a situation by propagating morale-sapping defeatism.

I'm glad that more people are starting to call out "Privacy is dead just give up" naysayers.

Now, I'm not saying you are one or that is your intent, but please be mindful that statements that seem to normalise bad circumstances in an offhand way can can't help but be interpreted at lending assent.

As Howard Zinn put it [1]:

  "The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant
  opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak
  out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of
  their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious
  catalysts for change."

The same goes for bad ideas as for bold ones. So instead of simply amplifying what is in a rotten world, why not go one step further and say what should be if you wish to say anything at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn:_You_Can%27t_Be_Ne...

> Now, I'm not saying you are one or that is your intent, but please be mindful that statements that seem to normalise bad circumstances in an offhand way

In case it was not clear, the parent comment I was responding to was mentioning "if we do that, we'd be tracked day and night wherever we go" (I paraphrase) and to me it's amusing that that poster did not notice that it's already happening right now.

That does not say anything about this being desirable or not, again.

> say what should be if you wish to say anything at all.

You don't have any say about how I should comment on HN.

.... if you keep a mobile device on you or live in a surveillance state.

the percentage of people without a mobile phone is becoming vanishingly small, and even if you don't have one, most states in the west have now implemented tracking of cars, face recognition and the like in cities and public places. Let's not forget tracking of any kind of digital spending including credit cards, which can easily clarify where you have been and when.

I guess you are still safe if you go alone in the middle of the woods without any device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com