Can I opt out of all of these as well?
Unfortunately, not very easily. With Google Photos, you can choose not to run the facial recognition tool on your own photos, but you can't control what other people who may have uploaded photos of you decide to do.
Facebook just recently switched to an opt-in setting for allowing its software to suggest friends tag you in their photo posts, meaning the social network will no longer make such suggestions by default. But that doesn't mean Facebook isn't scanning or processing your image, only that it won't share that information with other users unless you choose to allow it.
Welcome to the era of living publicly and naked. Enjoy.
This is what pisses me off the most about companies like Facebook and Google.
I can spend all the energy I want to not use their products or limit the amount of data that I have, but the second someone else uses it (that I communicate with, has photos of me, etc) and gives them unlimited access they know more about me than I consent to.
How do you realistically expect to prevent a company (that uses facial recognition for perhaps useful features e.g. tagging) from scanning your face? For it to know that the pixels it sees is your face, it has to have a model of your face somewhere. I guess there is no good solution to this problem.
For me, I have less issue with the fact that the technology exists.
My biggest issue comes from where the processing is being done. If it was 100% on device I would be more ok with it. Same for processing photos and anything else that needs to be done with my data.
But most companies instead ship all of your (and other people's data you happen to have) to their servers.
Untrue. When my neighbor is filming the street with his facial recognition doorbell, my family keep cloud-connected audio recorders in their homes, and my friends and acquaintances are uploading their contact lists for analysis, my privacy is systematically violated and I am subject to the surveillance network beyond any choice of my own.
It is simply ignorant to tell me I can vote with my wallet, I would have to cut social ties and move into the wilderness to escape these abusive information-gathering practices.
Doesn't that mean you have to go after your neighbour, your family, and you friends?
HN has no protection to stop me from putting my friend's email here (see@example.com) and you don't go after HN for that. You'd go after me for sharing your details.
At one point sharing home wifi with friends was a nice way to save them bandwidth. These days its a nice way for surveillance capitalism to figure out your home IP, and if they take pictures, associate it with individuals.
Ah ah, no need to go to the extra length of sharing your Wi-Fi for that, your friends' phones already know where they are by scanning nearby WiFi access points, cellular towers and using GPS.
Can I opt out of all of these as well? Unfortunately, not very easily. With Google Photos, you can choose not to run the facial recognition tool on your own photos, but you can't control what other people who may have uploaded photos of you decide to do.
For Google Photos, what can other people who have uploaded photos of me do by enabling facial recognition on them? How is that facial recognition data used by Google?
I don't understand why these articles don't even bother with a slightly more in-depth reporting, instead of just pivoting to the next bugaboo, namely Facebook.
Can I opt out of all of these as well? Unfortunately, not very easily. With Google Photos, you can choose not to run the facial recognition tool on your own photos, but you can't control what other people who may have uploaded photos of you decide to do.
Facebook just recently switched to an opt-in setting for allowing its software to suggest friends tag you in their photo posts, meaning the social network will no longer make such suggestions by default. But that doesn't mean Facebook isn't scanning or processing your image, only that it won't share that information with other users unless you choose to allow it.
Welcome to the era of living publicly and naked. Enjoy.