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Comment by afar | Hacker News Reader

Yeah... I mean I appreciate that people pay lip-service to privacy but a surveillance camera that counts you as a distinct individual without your consent is an invasion of privacy. The cost is higher than the price tag, homie.

Edit I am an employee of Density and definitely biased.

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I am a PM at Placemeter. We do not "use facial recognition software" in our algorithms, as Density's website claims of video-based systems. None of our algorithms use biometric markers for our counting—we're essentially the same "dumb" counters as Density's IR with the added advantage of accuracy and area of coverage.

Placemeter does much more than pay lip service to privacy. We pride ourself on our privacy efforts. If you want to lear more about them, @afar email me: david@placemeter.com

I am curious. Particularly with your new sensor. It sounded like much of the video processing happens on the unit itself, meaning faces never reach Placemeter servers. Is it accurate to say that you're only getting counts and movement data?

My other question is how you derive count without uniquely identifying someone. If I'm entering a shop and a PM sensor sees me, will it know when I leave?

Great questions.

1) the processing is happening aboard the sensor, counts are what are sent back to the servers

2) we don't do unique identification like that. We use object detection, which is different than using unique biometric markers like face detection. That means that we can track a person or a car within a frame of view, but not if they exit and re-enter the frame like in the case you described.

Does Density still use wifi pinging for part of its counts?

That's really interesting. Given a certain level of granularity, would it be possible for a person to have a unique object signature? I guess at that point, you'd just use a face. Just curious.

No wifi pinging. After Apple almost killed us a year ago with their MAC address policy change and we realized there was significant push back on privacy, we dropped the technology altogether.

Not quite sure I understand your question. We store counts, not individual object IDs, so at an individual granularity it would be the same as your IR device counting one person.

I think you should probably readjust your tact for any more comments today and in the future. Making insults, implications or even allegations about a competitor is never going to be in your company's best interest.

It is just basic marketing and public relations. Don't try to sell people on your competition being lesser, even if it's true (which it is apparently not, in this case). That does absolutely nothing to sell me on your product, but instead makes me acutely aware that you see them as a threat which needs to be quashed.

For what it's worth, I also found your use of the word "homie" rather unprofessional, off-putting and patronizing, especially in a thread which acts as public announcement of your company's product.

These things combined have opened the door for your competitor to defend themselves in a more logical and professional manner, which I would say they've accomplished in this thread. I'm entirely unimpressed with how you are representing your company, but I am very impressed with how your competitor has responded.

You're right. It was an unprofessional comment. I was flippant and insulting. You are also certainly right to be disappointed, off-put, and impressed with how PM responded.

Product of tiredness and being trigger-happy with the reply button today.

Apologies to dfine and Placemeter.

It happens. And I didn't mean to publicly shame you, either. There just happens to not be private messages here, so public was the only option.

No worries. I totally earned that one.

If a camera films you while you are on someone else's property, then I'd argue it isn't an invasion of privacy since there was no expectation of privacy to begin with.

Also, it would be nice if you would identify yourself as an employee of Density when you post comments.

I agree. But I think there should be a distinction between being on someone's property and being recorded for security and being in a cafe, having your face recognized as someone that frequented a sex shop last week, pairing that with an online profile, and then being pushed a retargeted ad campaign about your fetish.

For the record, that's not what Placemeter does. We don't individually identify people with our algorithms. (I am a PM at Placemeter.)

What the....?

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