{"id":19420,"date":"2017-11-01T21:45:44","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T01:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=19420"},"modified":"2017-11-09T15:13:36","modified_gmt":"2017-11-09T20:13:36","slug":"photos-machine-learning-and-trusting-apple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/01\/photos-machine-learning-and-trusting-apple\/","title":{"rendered":"Photos Machine Learning and Trusting Apple"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

This realization went viral; Christine Teigen posted about it<\/a>, too. And, arguably, rightfully so — if you found out that your phone was, somehow, making it easier for you to search semi-nude photos, you might find that creepy, and you’d probably want to warn a lot of people about that.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

There’s something else, too, that’s bothering me about this: I wonder if most people — and, let’s face it, “people” is too broad a term; “women” is much more accurate — want to search for photos of bras in their image library. That is, even if this capability and the privacy protections in place had<\/em> been effectively communicated, is this something that users want catalogued?<\/p>\n

I don’t know how many women are on Apple’s machine learning teams specifically, but just 23% of their technical employees are women. Judging by Twitter users’ incredulity, it seems like something women may not actually want, and I wonder if a higher percentage of women in technical roles might have caused object recognition to be filtered more carefully.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One issue is that most people probably don’t understand that Apple is not looking at their photos (though clearly it could<\/a>). Apple does try to communicate things like this, and I’m sure it would like to do so better, but it’s not clear how.<\/p>\n

The other issue is that I’m sure there are many groups of people who don’t want certain things cataloged, and for many of those cases there are other<\/em> groups who would benefit from that type of searching. Is it possible to make everyone happy? I can’t imagine Apple adding detailed preferences for something like this. My guess is that it tries to pick an intersection of restrictions that’s suitable for the mass-market, and if you have more specialized needs you’ll have to find another photos ecosystem.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nick Heer: This realization went viral; Christine Teigen posted about it, too. And, arguably, rightfully so — if you found out that your phone was, somehow, making it easier for you to search semi-nude photos, you might find that creepy, and you’d probably want to warn a lot of people about that. […] There’s something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1351,1142,31,1472,30,1529,153,927,355,96],"class_list":["post-19420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-icloud-photo-library","tag-ios","tag-ios-11","tag-mac","tag-macos-10-13","tag-photography","tag-photos-app","tag-privacy","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19420"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19463,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19420\/revisions\/19463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}