Windows 10 spies on everything you do, and presumably windows 11 does to a greater degree.
Your windows photos app has over 122 tables [0] of analysis on every picture on your machine. It does facial recognition and more and likely reports a lot of this back to ms. That’s just one app!
Hm, the word “likely” is doing a lot of work there. If anything local storage of this stuff is encouraging, it suggests at least the possibility that this isn’t all living in the cloud. But it’s being interpreted as a negative with an unsubstantiated assumption about how the data is being used.
I’d also like to think we could have a better discussion on HN than “big number scary”. 122 tables sounds like a lot, sure. They could denormalise the whole dataset and keep it in one table, key/value store style. Would that be better? It’s a photo app with facial recognition. Stands to reason that it needs to store facial recognition data.
> Your windows photos app... does facial recognition and more and likely reports a lot of this back to ms. That’s just one app!
The link you cite though was careful to avoid making claims that couldn't be substantiated. It lists only what is in the database locally and the telemetry section doesn't include image content/metadata but user interactions with the app itself.
> more and likely reports a lot of this back to ms
Isn’t this the literal definition of FUD? Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
I would like to hope the orange site approaches this topic with more substance. Do the analysis of network traffic to see what gets sent home. Decompile the binary to check it out for these sorts of things. Don’t just write your anti-MS fanfic and pretend that it’s something meaningful.
People and object detection are pretty baseline features for a photo management app these days IMHO. I like that my photos app automatically finds all the photos of my dog.
I disagree. I don’t want that feature. None of the photo apps I use by choice have it, and I’ve never once used it on iOS. It creates multiple albums for the same person anyway so it’s useless.
You not wanting it != table stakes for a photo app.
I use it, my family uses it, my friends use it. Anecdotal data to be sure. But I think if barely anyone used it you wouldn’t see it as a base feature in almost every photo sharing app.
It is how the default photos app for ios and android work and have worked for years. If you can't search by person or
by the content of the photo you're falling behind.
I would argue such feature only exists on big tech photo apps as an excuse to do facial recognition and eventually extricate such data trough whatever means. The benefit to the user is just a minor side effect.
I would argue that’s another example of FUD. It’s a useful feature a lot of people like. Similarly I find geotagging of photos tremendously useful. I don’t believe that feature was added to phones to extend the surveillance state, I believe it was added because a camera was combined with a GPS and it made logical sense.
Why is this downvoted? This is just true. You "totally into hacker stuff hackers" don't see it, but talk to any normal phone user on the streets and ask about his photo app.
> I would like to hope the orange site approaches this topic with more substance.
You won't find that here if Microsoft/Windows is in the title. HN will default to FUD on anything from Redmond.
How many here complaining about analysis in the photos app on Windows also sync all their photos to iCloud or Google Photos, which does the exact same thing? I bet it's a lot.
Windows has info about everything. Even have a history of USB drives ever plugged into the system. Maybe all this for when someone gets in the crosshairs and an infiltrator squad can swoop up all the info to use against the individual.
Your windows photos app has over 122 tables [0] of analysis on every picture on your machine. It does facial recognition and more and likely reports a lot of this back to ms. That’s just one app!
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/8zk1yy/a_simple_...