
The End of Location Based Applications? - terrellm
http://blogmaverick.com/2010/07/18/the-end-of-location-based-applications/
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kevinelliott
Oh come on. Why are we still building technology that further isolates us from
each other? You need facial recognition in a store to offer a customer
rewards? Why can't you just remember your damn customers, person to person?
Why must EVERYTHING be automated by computers?

Further isolating us from each other and making us all less familiar with each
other is what causes us to divide, and then it leads to people not
understanding each other anymore. We all know where that gets us.

From a scientific and engineering perspective, this stuff is great, but I
don't think it's actually going to make our lives better.

~~~
tptacek
Because you have thousands of customers every day, and you're open 18 hours a
day and staffed by rotating shifts of people? Or because you're a chain of
stores? Or because you operate a series of related businesses? I'm all for
keeping things human-scale, but the idea that I'm going to have a personal
relationship with the guy who sells me a TV is a bit much.

~~~
joe_the_user
I don't want stores like _that_ keeping any kind of track me.

I remember ten years ago clerks at some grocery store had been trained to say
good bye to me by my name after they read it from my credit card. The effect
wasn't loyalty, it was creepiness.

I notice this isn't done anymore.

~~~
tptacek
The stores here still do it. They think my name is Ramon Vera, though.

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donw
My name... is Inigo Montoya. You billed my father. Prepare to die.

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desigooner
i don't know about the end of Location Based Applications but how will this
affect the people when they find out that a business is running something like
this?!

I for one, would probably stop going to such an establishment .. too much
information out there to be misused .. maybe something along the lines of
google capturing wifi details while driving around snapping images of roads ..

counting the number of visitors is still acceptable. running facial
recognition without any opt-in and then talking about comparing them to their
facebook profiles to identify them, is pretty much Big Brother stuff. This is
such a big privacy red flag ..

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pwim
A user needing to actively check in is a good thing, as it means the user
wants others to know he is checking in there. If a user was to check in to
every grocery store, gas station, and so on, it would lose meaning. The point
of check ins isn't to track where you are, but instead to show off to your
friends you are somewhere cool.

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cageface
The trend of online tech lately is disturbing. So much of what you are and
what you do and who you know is being mined, cross-correlated, modeled and
projected to make it easier and easier for the people that want to incentivize
your behavior. You don't have to be a conspiracy freak to find this creepy.

Can't we find ways to make technology empowering instead? To foster creativity
and direct human interaction? I'll admit that things like Meetup etc can in
some cases bring people together but the drive to monetize every nook and
cranny of our online interactions seems to taint everything.

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Tichy
Wouldn't automatic recognition be a little bit against the psychology of those
reward programs? I thought the point was to make you work in exchange for
cheaper coffee. The mental effort in doing the work should also fix it in your
mind that you can get cheaper coffee by going to place x. If you don't do
anything, nothing will register?

In the end, I will prefer the cafe with the hot waitress anyway.

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kam
People are uncomfortable with this because it inverts the roles of the sensor
and the sensed. The participant loses control over their decision whether to
check in or not.

It reminds me of Cory Doctorow's "Are You the Scanner or the Barcode?"
<http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol22?pg=12#pg12>

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joe_the_user
_Even more interesting is the fact that Facebook provides a database of 500mm
people and their names from around world. While not all profile pictures are
going to be valid in facial recognition software, most will._

I decided a while back I'd never put my face on my Facebook profile. Here's
extra incentive.

~~~
SkyMarshal
The problem is that anyone else can post photos with you in them and tag your
name not just to the photo but to your pic in the photo.

The only way to really avoid FB-face-recognition is to delete your entire
account, and hope any tags get deleted as well.

Definitely a disturbing mashup.

~~~
roel_v
Boom, spot on. I'll go even further and say that deleting your account isn't
going to be enough. In five years time, computers will recognize your image on
all pictures ever taken of you and by combining the information in the
pictures, the existing social graphs on facebook (even if you're not on them!)
and similar sites but also your email correspondence, public information etc.,
hive brains in the form of huge data centers will know everything about you.

We've long gone past the point where fighting this evolution has a chance of
making a difference. Better get used now to the idea of living in a much more
transparent society. Legislation is too slow to catch up with the pace of
technological change, and that's not even considering that for legislation you
need political will.

(the above may make it sound like I'm opposed to this transparency but I'm not
any more - I have a facebook profile, I give out my personal information like
candy bars, I don't care any more. It hasn't been detrimental to my life
quality, actually I rather like getting targeted advertisements instead of
being bombarded with ads for stuff I'm not going to buy anyway. I think when I
will be greeted by name by the guy at McDonalds, I'll think of it as quite
cool.)

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ether
Based on my humble knowledge on machine learning, the "concept" of auto-
detecting a person's identity based on her/his facebook pictures would be very
far from accurate. And accuracy seems to be the key value proposition in this
case. Maybe I'm missing something?

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roel_v
Oh but I don't think it will be from just one picture. It'll be from a list of
profile pictures you had over the years, plus your own other (non-profile)
pictures, plus the pictures of you that you were tagged in by your friends,
plus any other pictures that can be found through google or otherwise (flickr
or picasa accounts), ...

The first versions will probably be quite crappy. Give it 5 years and it will
improve leaps and bounds, plus the amount of data to work from will also
increase as more photos are uploaded.

Imagine this: the software will recognize that you change haircuts every
couple of months. From this it can derive that you are more fashion-conscious
than others and send you targeted marketing or offers. Also it can
automatically set up appointments with hairdressers, complete with 3d renders
of new, proposed haircuts that you can choose from. That would be awesome,
this is taking personalization to a whole new level.

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ether
No it's entirely a different problem.

For example, auto-tagging your pictures from 1000 photos is easy. auto-tagging
from 10,000 photos is easy. Hell, auto-tagging yourself from billion photos is
easy, and the difficulty doesn't increase with the size of the verification
set.

But when it comes to "auto-checking in", accuracy is really important. Out of
the entire world population--6,697,254,041--how many people do you think would
look similar to you? And it only gets more difficult with all those little
details such as hairstyle, makeup, etc.

The Minority report model of using retinal scanner works because the accuracy
is really high, and is statistically and scientifically proven. Same goes for
your fingerprint. But no matter how good the algorithm gets, it is impossible
to create an auto-check in system by automatically figuring out who you are
based on just image recognition.

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atomical
It won't happen. Facial recognition isn't that advanced and I doubt this
company is going to bring something like this to market without a huge
backlash. I have a picture of a trail on my Facebook profile. I suppose I have
been a lot of places recently.

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olalonde
Hasn't that technology been around for a while? I remember seeing a driver
less car that could detect people. Perhaps someone on HN has a link to the
article.

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narenrulz
can't we do this without facial recognition? how about the application
passively check-in the user(using gps) based on amount of time he has spent at
a particular location(like > 10 mins?)

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madair
There will be a backlash.

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retube
relevant: <http://face.com/>

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kwamenum86
"Few people exclude their basic name and picture information from public
search"

True or conjecture?

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Spoutingshite
It's true I fear...the big social networks (Facebook, Twitter and linkedin)
all allow both name and profile pic as public even when you make your profile
private.

Spidering this data would build an amazing database for facial recognition.
This is actually a very well developed technology...if you don't believe this
check out the Google Picasa app..it's rather concerningly good at facial
recognition.

