I was initially put off by the webcam permission requirement, but the terms and conditions page says it's basically an art project and they don't send any data off (unless you explicitly accept it at the end) so I gave it a chance.
I'm glad I allowed webcam permission because it was an interesting, informative, and fun look at biometric tracking.
Apparently I'm "violently average" which is not a way I would previously have described myself. According to this site the most unusual thing about me is that I read the terms and conditions before ticking the "accept" box.
Same, but I think people generally over-estimate how much different from average they are. (It's from the webcam's pov anyway) Usually I also don't like interactions with the webcam but this was interesting enough.
Same, I had the wrong webcam plugged in and when I plugged the right one the website bugged so I had to reload. It said I didn't read the TOS but I did... oh well.
I didn't read them because I don't believe them anyway. If the website uses my camera, I'll just assume that everything is recorded and sent to advertisers and shady governments before I closed the tab. So I did not want continue with this one. It was after reading the comments here I decided to give it a go. Terms and conditions played not role.
> According to this site the most unusual thing about me is that I read the terms and conditions before ticking the "accept" box.
I’d put forward the hypothesis that people who read the terms, and who are therefore concerned about privacy, are also less likely to be willing to agree to submit the data at the end.
Do you avoid tourist attractions and cities so that you aren't included in other people's photos? Even though I'm not an Apple customer, for example, I'm sure they could infer much of my movements from their photo database using only other people's photos (I live in a city).
Most people have such weird and illogical views on privacy. A website collecting face pictures without anything else is pretty useless. Walking in to a retail store owned by a company using facial recognition on a huge range of owned stores is a serious privacy issue.
And the bait on the hook is not a good indicator either - an appeal to a deep drive or insecurity in many people.
Obviously not determinative in itself ,but if I wanted to harvest a lot of faces in a hurry, that's exactly the sort of bait that I would use (I can hardly think of a better one off the top of my head).
Not useless at all, there are usually enough pictures of people on the internet with names, metadata, etc attached to immediately link and identify. Basically what Clearview does (did?). I would not be surprised if this was a data collection siphon.
I don't think this is a scam/data collection site (as others have recognized the researcher involved, etc.), but what would stop a random website from claiming it was "sponsored by the EU"?
Could be used for a scam, by a stalker, for social engineering, or several other evil ploys. Today, there are so many possible bad actions which are happening... On average, they are unlikely, but not impossible. And who knows about the long run.
> If you open a website in a fresh browser context and let it use your camera, isn’t this about the same as walking down a street with CCTV cameras?
In my country, there are harsh regulations on public cameras. Private people are not even allowed to capture you outside from being in the background.
It could use that to impersonate you in a mobile banking application through biometric authentication. It's getting pretty popular in my country (I think it's required by law or something).
For the extra paranoid, I can confirm that it does work offline after you press the button and let it load. You can hide your face until it loads, and then cut the connection. Be sure to close the tab before you go online again.
I work for a company that does projects that are sometimes funded by the EU. I've never heard of the EU ever asking for something in return. You submit your project, the EU either decides to give you money, or not, and you do your project. Sometimes they check whether you've actually done what you said you'd do. No one in the EU has time to deal with the output of the billions of euro's they invest in random projects.
It's not clear if you're trying to make us feel better (the EU doesn't care about this project's data) or worse (the EU has ineffective oversight over this project -- anything could be going on).
If its a small project they very rarely «check» that you have done what you have done. A lot of it is self reporting. The reporting of course takes a while and you have to describes for instance your results, which wouldn’t be too hard to fake but I assume very few do this.
A. No way for me to verify nothing shady is in the investment deal, and
B. The government may be able to turn around when the project gets big, and say "hey remember when we funded you? Yeah, now we have a say. We need you to do ___."
I don't like using software or projects funded by things I disagree with. And the government is overwhelmingly so.
It said I was way heavier than I was, way younger than I was, and way more attractive than I am. All the while I was staring into it with good lighting. Me thinks it is not useful.
I don't recall if the score went from 1 to 10 or 0 to 10 (or even if they mentioned that).
If it was the latter wouldn't that put you slightly over average beauty? Even if not, it could have been worse to be determined "less than average" by a machine!
This is fun, but it got my age very wrong, the first run through failed to guess at all, the second run through it underestimated by 13 years.
It underestimated my BMI a bit, though I am losing weight at the moment and my face does seem to be getting thinner so maybe that's thrown it, and generally it told me I'm quite attractive, so ... all good :)
I'm also reasonably sure other factors also influence these algorithms. Hair style, framing, lighting, the clothes found on your shoulders, angle, distortion by the camera lens, and most importantly, similarity to high-scoring faces in the source data set.
My self-esteem is fine! A 5 is not bad : half of people are prettier than me, half are less pretty. But calling a "5" a "1" is a little mean, no? ;-) Don't really care.
Sorry to break it to you, but I'm pretty sure the wording on the site (which I don't have open anymore) suggested 5 was below the "normal" range, which presumably means it's well below the median. I'd be extremely happy to hear some more flattering interpretation.
Then you're missing the point the website makes about this and other algorithms like it being extremely unreliable. There are tons of biases in the training data, and not just ethnic/cultural ones mentioned. For starters, you're comparing a crappy webcam to a model that in all likelihood is based on people's best selfies.
The model tries to fit you into a very narrow niche. On top of that it will do so poorly.
Apparently I'm just shy of being fugly and look seven years younger than I am. Which is kind of damning with faint praise, but in a dark room when I'm barely awake? I'll take it.
It guessed my age wrong, my BMI wrong, it got the thing that I came closer wrong, it got my expression wrong, and my attractiveness, which SHOULD be much higher ;)
I gamed the attractiveness model for as long as I could, trying different angles and glasses on/off and hit 9.2. If dating apps use a max() across pictures that would be great.
Got my age to high, when in real life I usually get picked out as younger than I am. BMI was significantly off too. Can't argue with the not-pretty assessment though! Might give it another chance under better light later.
When I saw that it said I lied about my age (it thought I was nearly 10 years younger), I wondered whether there was going to be another metric later about whether being accused of lying made you appear angry. I was disappointed by this one omission, but greatly enjoyed it overall!
I think my inclination is to trust the algorithm more than any humans, which is the interesting part! It gave me a confidence boost far more than I've felt when other people have told me such things.
Interestingly, if you click on the ToS you end up on a page explaining how it works (can't link it).
The beauty scoring model was found on Github (this or this one). The models to predict age, gender and facial expression/emotion are part of FaceApiJS, which forms the backbone of this project. Do note that its developer doesn't fully divulge on which photos the models were trained. Also, FaceApiJS is bad at detecting "Asian guys".
Apparently some dating apps rates their users with these sort of algorithms. Maybe I'm living under a rock but I did not know that was a thing.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement No 786641.
Indeed - I was also surprised by this. One possibility, which I hope is true, is that the authors are funded for something else (some actual research). If they spent a few hours of their workday to throw this together, they might be obligated to cite their funding agency.
I know for a fact that I've acknowledged funding agencies on papers about topics that were at best extremely tangential to my grant.
A less flattering possibility is that they wanna use EU affiliation as a badge for respect for privacy or something like that.
You have to label it clearly in your project if you have received Horizon money. It's a requirement from CORDIS. The funding is for the whole SHERPA project, not just for that page.'
The first objective of SHERPA is to "represent and visualise the ethical and human rights challenges of SIS (artificial intelligence and big data analytics) through case studies". This page does that nicely. That it is put together with available resources instead of some over engineered solution is just a plus.
I'm mesmerized that so many of the HN crowd are willing to let some website take pictures of them in order to present some "funny/interesting results".
I live in a big city where my face is captured in millions of frames by security cameras everyday.
I used android devices, now I use an iphone, and I keep cloud accounts and personal photos backups with both companies. I have linked-in, facebook, instagram and handful of other accounts with varying levels of personal information.
This cat is already out of the bag, and has been for quite some time.
It just goes to show you that the vast majority of ppl don't care about privacy (FWIW, I used the site as well and didn't care at all, didn't even read the disclaimer)
It underestimated my age by 15 years. Not sure if this is due to the AI being biased or simply inaccurate in general. (I'm Asian, and from the experience of me and others, Asians tend to get their age greatly underestimated in the west.)
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadI'm glad I allowed webcam permission because it was an interesting, informative, and fun look at biometric tracking.
Apparently I'm "violently average" which is not a way I would previously have described myself. According to this site the most unusual thing about me is that I read the terms and conditions before ticking the "accept" box.
I’d put forward the hypothesis that people who read the terms, and who are therefore concerned about privacy, are also less likely to be willing to agree to submit the data at the end.
JC Denton: I don't see anything amusing about spying on people.
Morpheus: Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.
JC Denton: Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.
Morpheus: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
If you open a website in a fresh browser context and let it use your camera, isn’t this about the same as walking down a street with CCTV cameras?
Obviously not determinative in itself ,but if I wanted to harvest a lot of faces in a hurry, that's exactly the sort of bait that I would use (I can hardly think of a better one off the top of my head).
Except for it being sponsored by Eu - home to the most effective privacy jurisdiction on the planet.
I get your point, but I am not sure how fresh our browser context is.
Could be used for a scam, by a stalker, for social engineering, or several other evil ploys. Today, there are so many possible bad actions which are happening... On average, they are unlikely, but not impossible. And who knows about the long run.
> If you open a website in a fresh browser context and let it use your camera, isn’t this about the same as walking down a street with CCTV cameras?
In my country, there are harsh regulations on public cameras. Private people are not even allowed to capture you outside from being in the background.
(I'm 54% averagely normal)
The worst case scenario is far greater in magnitude than the best case scenario.
Just not worth any risk here.
It's more akin to those spying doorbells from Amazon and friends, which I personally would try to avoid when I can.
The concentration of data and the lack of necessity of your face being recorded in the first place change the decision making process significantly.
If you're extra extra paranoid, use a disposable VM in Qubes OS.
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/how-to-use-disposables/
But they might store stuff to localStorage. Right - localStorage is also a thing. And so are cookies.
No thanks.
A. No way for me to verify nothing shady is in the investment deal, and
B. The government may be able to turn around when the project gets big, and say "hey remember when we funded you? Yeah, now we have a say. We need you to do ___."
I don't like using software or projects funded by things I disagree with. And the government is overwhelmingly so.
You are spoiled.
Attractiveness a lot higher than i would expect (but still in range). Could be that attractiveness is related to age and BMI?
Seems im not normal when it comes to looking at dogo (why people are so sad?)
It was fun, NGL.
I never noticed the dog picture somehow, and I guess sad is my default facial expression.
It underestimated my BMI a bit, though I am losing weight at the moment and my face does seem to be getting thinner so maybe that's thrown it, and generally it told me I'm quite attractive, so ... all good :)
I took a shower, shaved, brushed my teeth, put on a nice shirt, fixed my hair and offered a good angle of my best smile at the camera. I was now a 9.
Fwiw, telling someone a 5 is a 1 is even meaner.
:-/
The model tries to fit you into a very narrow niche. On top of that it will do so poorly.
Thanks, I guess? Got pretty close on age underestimated my BMI a little.
I gamed the attractiveness model for as long as I could, trying different angles and glasses on/off and hit 9.2. If dating apps use a max() across pictures that would be great.
It kept saying my age was 18-20, but I'm 32.
Finally it kept predicting my BMI as 30+, even though it's 22.5.
So it was interesting, and a pretty cool tech demonstration, but it wasn't too accurate for me.
I think it's wrong though, judging by my "success" (lack of) with women.
And I have to say, thowawayben, that you are indeed one handsome devil. Please feel free to upvote my comment.
The beauty scoring model was found on Github (this or this one). The models to predict age, gender and facial expression/emotion are part of FaceApiJS, which forms the backbone of this project. Do note that its developer doesn't fully divulge on which photos the models were trained. Also, FaceApiJS is bad at detecting "Asian guys".
Apparently some dating apps rates their users with these sort of algorithms. Maybe I'm living under a rock but I did not know that was a thing.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement No 786641.
I know for a fact that I've acknowledged funding agencies on papers about topics that were at best extremely tangential to my grant.
A less flattering possibility is that they wanna use EU affiliation as a badge for respect for privacy or something like that.
The first objective of SHERPA is to "represent and visualise the ethical and human rights challenges of SIS (artificial intelligence and big data analytics) through case studies". This page does that nicely. That it is put together with available resources instead of some over engineered solution is just a plus.
Literally my first thought.
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/786641
I used android devices, now I use an iphone, and I keep cloud accounts and personal photos backups with both companies. I have linked-in, facebook, instagram and handful of other accounts with varying levels of personal information.
This cat is already out of the bag, and has been for quite some time.
"How gullible am I for uploading my face to some random data harvester?"