Vivek’s Soapbox

Srijith commented on my earlier post about trying out Riya, and pointed out that people had been raising privacy concerns about the product.

Ben says: what if Riya recognizes and tags pictures of me in public that other people have taken, that I don’t necessarily want to be associated with? He uses the example of visiting an erotica event.

To which Munjal, one of Riya’s founders, replies:

Riya doesn’t look for you or tag you in another’s photo unless they train us and have you in their friends list. Even if they do, it is not public unless they make it public.

I think that’s a fair enough reply.

I am not a  lawyer, but my perspective on this: when you’re in public (on the street, at an erotica expo etc) you don’t really have any reasonable expectation of privacy, so you can’t say “my privacy was violated” if someone recognizes you.

My only concern about Riya doesn’t even have anything to do with facial recognition — it’s just that (to me, at least) my photos are rather personal things, and I do feel a little queasy about uploading all of them to a server that I don’t control. But this is pattern that comes up again and again, with any hosted service — Gmail, online calendaring, online file storage etc. If only there was a way for me to encrypt everything with a key that I own, and then upload everything, that would be great. But in general, this is a hard problem — how is the remote service going to work on your data if its encrypted?

Waiting in my inbox this morning was an invitation to try out the beta of Riya. So I signed up, downloaded their uploading tool, and started uploading.

The uploading tool not only transfers the photos to Riya, but also performs the actual recognition of faces. When the pictures are uploaded, you can log into the web site and start attaching names to recognized faces. Once you give it 20-30 samples of a specific person, it does a pretty good job of recognizing more pictures of the same person — at least for frontal shots. Later, you can go pick out the pictures it recognized incorrectly.

Another nice touch — it does OCR on text in pictures. But this seems to work only with more or less horizontal text, and with fonts that are common.

I never thought I’d use an online service for storing all my pictures because I just love having them locally, to browse whenever I like. But this is compelling enough that I think I’m going to start slowly uploading all my pictures to Riya.

Number one wish for Riya: have a local client that allows offline browsing of your photo collection, with facial recognition. Or better still, standardize a format for specifying regions within a picture, and metadata associated with it (e.g. the rectangle from (x1, y1) to (x2, y2) has Vivek’s face), so that multiple clients can use it. Not sure how well that’s going to work with their business model, though.

Overall, I think this has the potential to be something really great!

Ever wanted to find a place where all the shops you wanted to go to were close together so that you could drive to one place and be done with it? Ever gone out to lunch with friends, only one wants to go to Subway, another to Quiznos, and another to Carls Jr, and wanted to find a place where all three were next to each other?

Then Shop Finder is for you. Enter two or more shops, or restaurants or any business at all, and a location, and it will go and tell you where you can find all of them close to each other.

This is a quick and dirty early release, and there’s still plenty of stuff I want to do with this if I have some spare time on my hands:

• Brush up the interface — show links to the shops, present clusters in a way that doesn’t look like debug output etc.
• Let the user tweak the cluster radius — that’s how close two shops should be to be considered as part of the same cluster.

In the meanwhile, I hope someone finds this useful. Feedback is most welcome. Leave comments here, or email vh@vivekhaldar.com
This is what I was getting at with a couple of earlier posts.

OK, take me to Shop Finder already!!