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Comment by stby | Hacker News Reader

This quickly becomes creepy beyond my wildest imaginations. Kill it with fire, please.

Why? The more personal a device is and the closer it becomes to interfacing with who we are, the more it will need to do things like this to work, else it will just feel off.

You have emotions , the device does not. No matter how we pretend to ignore it, the ability to empathize and embody the emotions of others separates us from machines. Even if they emulate it, i know they are fake (yes, i am being a machine-racist here)

There's the good ol' bait-and-switch of tech industry you have to consider. New tech is promoted by emphasizing (and sometimes overstating) the humane aspects, the hypothetical applications for the benefit of the user and the society at large. In reality, these capabilities turn out to be mediocre, and those humane applications never manifest - there is no business in them. We always end up with a shitty version that's mostly useful for the most motivated players: the ones with money, that will use those tools to make even more money off the users.

It's true with all new tech these days, and I'd be doubly worried when it comes to things like emotion detection. There are no good uses with strong business cases, but plenty of nefarious ones.

PC makers selling TPM to everyone: "We'll make your computer more secure!"

Reality: "We'll use it to store media encryption keys, so hollywood will let us stream media to your device."

I’m using TPM with free software and my own keys. It works fine.

Why do I want a device to be “personal” and “interface with who I am”?

Except that device is not owned by you, or even accountable to the public. It is owned by a private corporation whose mission is to do whatever it takes to keep you making purchases to make stock price go up.

I do not even carry a smartphone anymore and am happier for it.

in 2013 Edward showed that data are used by governments. We do not see it right now, but it does not mean it does not happen. Actually I think we do not see the scale of it, because most of us are not doing anything incorrect. It is only important for our politicians. Everybody is under surveillance. It is just we do not know the effects of it.

That's the kind of personal data that shouldn't be on a device with an internet connection.

Yes if it was a standalone device which no outside party had control over then sure. But that's not practically what any tech device has been in the last 10 years. Everything phones home. And with the amount of valuable personal data this thing could accumulate, you can be sure it will be phoning home about it all the time.

Fully user controlled device running only free software ? Sure, agree totally!

A totally closed hardware & software combination tethered to a corporate cloud ? NO WAY IN HELL!!

Give it 30 years for the open source option to catch up.

One thing that's notable about devices that "only run free software" is that they actually don't, since people use web browsers on them, and the websites are not free software.

You'd also have to never talk to another person with them, since other people are capable of manipulating your emotional state and can't be audited.

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