Family Tech Blog

Tag: scan

  • Soon, All Tech Will Know Your Face…Get Used to It!

    Soon, All Tech Will Know Your Face…Get Used to It!

    Facial recognition is one of the hot-button topics of 2017. iPhone is featuring it now, several social media platforms have been using it for a while to help you tag your friends in photos. In fact, Facebook has just announced how they’re using facial recognition to help the blind learn more about photos on their timeline. Artificial intelligence in our social media timeline tells us what images and posts we want to see first, it identifies who is in our photos, it even decides what ads we will be most likely to click on. Social media isn’t the end of facial recognition AI, though. As I prepare to head to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (thank you, by the way, your readership of this blog made that possible) I see more and more smart-home and gaming tech using facial recognition for their main functionality.

    Security

    The application of facial recognition in security tech should be pretty obvious. Amazon has a camera that you mount outside your door that will only allow approved delivery people into your home to drop off your packages. Smart security tech will use motion sensors and facial recognition to identify who enters a room and determine if they belong or not. If you aren’t approved, an alert goes to the homeowner and they can decide to alert the authorities or not based on seeing the picture that the security device took of you.

    Smart Home Tech

    Smart home technology isn’t early market anymore, it’s actually becoming more of a mainstay in the American household. People are calling out to Alexa, Google, and even Cortana more an more every day. The latest technology will be featuring the ability to recognize you and adjust the “settings” of your home accordingly. Think lights dimmed, music on to your playlists, coffee part started, and your tv turned on to your favorite channel. Most of the latest smart home tools are putting cameras on their devices and making facial recognition standard in their algorithms. That means that more and more “affordable” or “budget” devices will be scanning your face. When you pay less for similar tech, what you usually save money on is the privacy and security side of things. You have to be careful to understand the security settings and privacy policies of any “smart” device you purchase.

    What Parents Should Know

    Every single new tech development has the challenge of balancing convenience and progressiveness with security and privacy. Having your lights come on because a device saw your face walk into a room sounds like a really convenient thing. Being alerted by Facebook when someone uploads a picture of you is a great idea. It can help you keep photos you don’t like of yourself off of the internet or just help you make sure you are tagged in the photo you’re in. If all of these new technologies can ensure that your identity is secure then it’s a great way to use the latest developments to add convenience to your life. 

    My advice with the newest releases is always to wait a while. Let the lawsuits and hackers do what they will before you own one of the devices and your personal data is in jeopardy. Once it’s been out for a while then maybe integrate it into your life, but only if you know how to set it up and secure it properly.

  • This Bot Predicts Your Photo’s Awesomeness

    This Bot Predicts Your Photo’s Awesomeness

    The selfie is this generation’s business card. We use these photos to say who we are and what we’re all about. We try to put our best face forward and represent ourselves as what we’d like others to think about us. Everypixel Aesthetics uses artificial intelligence to tell you whether or not humans will think your photo is awesome. Its created to scan your stock photos to help you choose what to use for your designs but is it a stepping stone to using AI to define beauty?

     

     

     

     

    While this photo of me scored 100% on the awesomeness scale (and labeled me a Young Adult) I don’t feel as if most of us would put a lot of credit on an AI and it’s opinion of our photo. I do, however, wonder about our young teens. As discussed in an earlier post about the adolescent brain and another post about the narcism of the Instagram selfie taker, our young people can sometimes have poor judgement when it comes to self esteem. With apps like Tinder, After School, and Wishbone our kids are letting their photos or photos of what they love be judged and voted on by a simple tap of a screen or swipe. This level of constant scrutiny can give our kids some very serious identity issues. What feelings could the opinion of an artificially intelligent bot cause to rise up in our kids?

    What Parents Should Know

    (The opinion is strong in this one.)

    Everypixel Aesthetics is in beta. It’s not a widely known service and it’s intended to rate stock photos, not to judge your looks. My apprehension is about what can result from giving AI the ability to rate someone’s photo. What about sites/apps like PrettyScale that will tell you if you’re pretty or not based on some pre-designated programing? What will something like that do to our kids’ self image? While that sort of app is always intended for entertainment it’s important to know our children and give them the confidence that can only come from knowing truly who they are. Helping our sons and daughters know that their beauty is based on more than their outside appearance is a major job of the parent. 

    I recommend learning all you can about what your child may consider beautiful or ugly. Keep them from using silly image rating apps and websites until you know they can truly see it as entertainment and laugh off a potential negative result. Everypixel Aesthetics gave some pretty interesting looking photos very low scores. I don’t know why or what institutes an “awesome” picture but imagine your daughter uploading a picture of herself and getting a low score. How could that make her feel? I think we should take an active role in helping our children develop a high self esteem while protecting them from influences on the outside that will hinder that progress. What do you think?