Comment by mrobins
5 years ago
I’ve been watching this project for a long time and personally am very excited. The fact that it’s #1 on HN today (congrats!) makes me think I’m not the only one.
There are also a lot of valid concerns in these comments about privacy and use of algorithms. A lot of it depends on what you’re looking to gain by adopting a new service/switching away from something else and individual concern.
Personally, I’m looking for a place to store personal photos: friends, family, travel etc. Critical needs - easy sharing ideally not locked into Apple’s ecosystem - not to have my photos mined for advertising and social graph data (most important) - ideally around for the long haul but in my mind this is for sharing, not backup
I’m not particularly concerned about warrants, government surveillance etc. Again for me this is about sharing so the expectation of true privacy is low. Any photos I considered sensitive I would store elsewhere.
For me, the biggest point of confidence I have in this project is that they charge money from day 1 and don’t have a forever free plan. I’m excited about projects that offer the benefits of “social” but where the software, not my data, is the product.
re: "the expectation of true privacy" you might enjoy reading the Cypherpunk's manifesto [0]
"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."
[0] https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
I'm in the same boat, have been watching, love that they have a businessmodel and am waiting for the time when they are covering my needs (face recognition, object / scene detection...). I'd even pay a 2$/month "lurker" subscription which has like 100mb of storage so I can check the features from time to time and support the team.
As someone who's never used cloud-based photo browsers... I always assumed the facial recognition aspect was primarily for social media apps that try to tag known faces from a user's friends group, to put it in those people's news feeds or something. It's one reason I avoid being photographed and ask people not to tag my name to my face if they do post a photo I'm in. I'm wondering, what's the utility of facial recognition if you're storing/sharing photos on a service that has no database of known faces? Or is this just for image editing or red eye removal or something?
[edit] as I'm rethinking it, would this just be for searching your own images for a particular person...?
> as I'm rethinking it, would this just be for searching your own images for a particular person...?
My Synology NAS has face recognition and it is wonderful even if (actually: especially since) it has no pre-existing database and doesn't (to the best of my knowledge) share its database.
For someone like me who manages family photos for the entire family but isn't to good at recognizing faces it is just brilliant.
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It's so incredibly useful to be able to bring up pictures but you don't remember the exact time or date that you took it.
Google photos has come in so clutch when you're searching through 50k photos.
To be able to categorize by person, ex: "list all photos of Jim".
This would be a useful feature for myself, I am also loathe to tag faces on social media with all that entails; but I find myself approaching a friends birthday or other events wishing I could search my images for everything that included them from the past year
I use Google Photos extensively for this feature, it categorizes pictures of my children as they are growing up, neatly under their name. So anytime I want to see pics of my kids, I just click on their name, and I have their entire visual timeline.
Google Photos, also, time to time, makes a slideshow video of my kids pictures, labeled as "They grow so fast" etc, its really amazing.
So this is a project specifically marketed as E2E encrypted, and you are "waiting for the time when they are covering my needs (face recognition, object / scene detection...)"
You will be waiting a long long time for that.
The only way they can do that is client side, and if they go there we are back to the last few weeks discussion of Apple's new client side image scanning shit.
You do not want this service, it seems.
You want a non Google service who can do face recognition, and object/scene detection, but who'll pinky promise you they won't sell you out to advertisers or law enforcement or governments, even though they obviously could.
> we are back to the last few weeks discussion of Apple's new client side image scanning
Apple has always been indexing images on the client side. What changed is that they're now reporting the presence of a predetermined set of hashes to authorities.
If governments were to mandate that such reporting is necessary, it is likely that the enforcement will be on a device/OS level, extending the example set by Apple. Demanding compliance from every single cloud storage provider out there (E2EE or not) would be a sub optimal route for them to take.
My point being, "client side indexing" is not the evil here, and it is unlikely that storage providers will be the ones forced to share data. Your concerns should probably be directed at your operating system.
I don't think this is fair.
What iCloud Photos is doing for their client-side scanning is: (1) Not to your benefit. There is no positive outcome for you from your photos being scanned. (2) Mandatory if you want to use iCloud Photos.
In contrast, I presume this would be- (1) Only to your benefit, because all of this derived metadata around scenes and faces would also be encrypted end-to-end as part of the photo library. (2) Entirely optional.
What do you mean a long, long time?
Increasingly powerful GPU compute being released and constantly improving image recognition models out in the wild. I'd bet there's a nicely packaged, open source solution released in under 3 years.
I wonder how sales psychology might differ between a "lurker" subscription and an inexpensive limited plan? Lurker might have a more explicit "I think you're interesting and want to support/encourage you - thanks, we appreciate it" exchange. Or maybe defuse "but is it usable?" or "do I want to bother attempting to use it?" or yet-another-thing commitment concerns. Not "am I really going to use this?" but "does this look worth encouraging?". And maybe has a funnel story of "ok, now it's looking good, and I'll start using it for real... and not the mere limited plan". Sort of a patreon vibe, but blended with plans?
Looking at their pricing for €0.99 / month you can get 10gb storage, so go at it!
Storage is cheaper on S3
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