Re:Bytes Are All You Need: Transformers Operating Directly o...
by XorNot on Sunday June 04, 2023 @12:39AM
(#36183157)
Which is a hardcore effort to pretend the issue was something to do with looking at images, and not indiscriminate motivated surveillance.
No one cares about software touching their bytes: they should care a lot about software which is built with the null hypothesis of "this person has child pornography, notify the authorities".
Re:Bytes Are All You Need: Transformers Operating Directly o...
by vasco on Sunday June 04, 2023 @05:28AM
(#36184252)
If I ask to see just a bit of your private documents - I can choose the corner of the document, let's say, the top left - and I can inferr with 70% accuracy who you're getting services from, did I respect your privacy? This seems a bit like smoke and mirrors. Either scan the image or not!
Inference from partial images is super cool research for example to deal with corrupted image files, but not for privacy imo.
> We also demonstrate ByteFormer's ability to perform inference with a hypothetical privacy-preserving camera which avoids forming full images by consistently masking 90% of pixel channels, while still achieving 71.35% accuracy on ImageNet.
So the way this algorithm smooshes the matrices is "privacy-preserving" because it doesn't actually take in all the bytes. Just some of them. So it is not an invasion of your privacy, if your phone checks all your stored photos for child pornography, because it never actually _looks_ at the images. It just _peeks_ at a bit of them.