Claims like these make privacy-focused efforts less valuable, and I wish people wouldn't make them.

What value is there in taking care to store biometric data only locally, in a separate chip inaccessible even to the OS, if people will simply claim it's equivalent to keeping a remote database of millions of faces?

People will be much less likely to make those claims if you clearly state where the data is being stored. This article + their project page doesn't mention anything about privacy.

I don't know anything about Squeezenet, but it makes a lot of calls to storage.googleapis.com. I wouldn't be surprised if it's making some PUT requests. https://github.com/googlecreativelab/teachable-machine/blob/...

People need to ask the question before making assumptions. In the case of Apple, they said it directly in the presentation of FaceID as well as TouchID IIRC. Yet people made these claims anyway. For this project, they also state it clearly on the page:

> Are my images being stored on Google servers?

> No. All the training is happening locally on your device.

Where is it clearly stating that? I couldn't find anything in the linked article + the github repo + teachablemachine.withgoogle.com

But I do agree people need to ask the question before making assumptions. Sadly, the two popular mindsets is either to not think about privacy at all, or believe that everything is infringing on your privacy.

1. Go to the site: https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com

2. Press "Start" or "Skip tutorial" (You don't have to give access to anything)

3. Scroll down to read the FAQ

Ah, I didn't get that far due to it requesting the webcam. I'd prefer that they state it before the request, but an FAQ at the start of the project is good enough.

I think the post above was referring to Apple, not Google. In the latter case, I think the claim is justified.

Facebook beat them to it... that's the whole reason for tagged images imo. Then they can relate identities with each other and with exif gps data to track their movements over time.

Yeah it's a little hilarious how people just keep giving Facebook more and more data to experiment with.

HN discussions tend to devolve into rants about privacy. There are a lot of repeated discussions that occur here. They overwhelm the discussion about the actual technology

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/groundhog-day-amazon...

I can solve the privacy problem by not using their products? I disagree: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI–King_suicide_letter

Also, my own personal privacy is less secure if it's a relative inconvenience for employers. If everyone but me gives up their privacy then there's more pressure on me to follow suit.

The argument even doubles back on itself. If these comments aren't interesting to you... don't read them. Embrace tree-style collapsible comments.

The comments are repetitive and are basically complaining. If there was something to be learned that would make it useful and interesting.

You can learn lots of interesting things by invading people's privacy.

I responded to the argument you linked. You're avoiding a more interesting discussion on the topic. Push the [-] button and move on. Your comment is blatantly hypocritical:

"Every time X is updated people complain about X; those people ignore the details of the update."

"Every time people complain about X other people complain about them complaining about X; those people ignore the details of the complaint."

That's because the privacy implication of the technology should be part of the discussions on the technology... technology is not neutral, the way its used and the privacy implications are significant.

Once the big data genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169

I am pretty sure that Apple does not save your image data in any database. Apple is really trying to differentiate itself on privacy.

Also, I don't think that this sends any data to Google, since it trains the neural net in the browser. You could even verify this yourself by looking at the source code.

The machine learning is done in the browser with deeplearn.js, so the images aren't being sent to Google's servers.

The faces are unlabeled, and I'm not sure what that data would be good for. If Google really wanted face data, they could look at:

- Gmail / Google Plus / Google Apps profile pictures

- Google Street View

- Google Hangouts

- implementing a primitive Face ID or Snapchat-style camera on Google Android

- the large mass of face pictures that they index with Google Images

Google Photos seems like the absolute best bet there, they're "organizing" them there by default.

Can't believe I forgot about that one! I'm an avid Google Photos user, and they definitely have some pretty amazing unsupervised clustering for faces.

Android has had face unlock for ages

What did Apple beat them to? FaceID is said to not upload data off-device.

It's good to be paranoid about it but at the same time it's quite a cool thing to offer people.

Also I think a lot of the processing is done in the browser using deeplearning.js, so I don't know how much is sent back to Google.

Don't need to, they've got Youtube or so. People has been providing free data set to Google for years anyway.

Don't worry some comment on a forum said they'd never do this, so I think we're all good!