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Spymarks, not Watermarks

698 points · 171 comments · possibilistic

  1. xp84 · · focus · HN ↗
    These are going to be very popular for intercepting images on their way to a display. Think of the advertising possibilities. Ad attribution can be 'vastly improved' when both the ad and every step in the funnel are all spymarked and all of them are reliably reported on by virtue of their pixels hitting your screen.

    First the low-end laptops and phones (and probably later, most of them) will incorporate some low-level driver that is constantly scanning for these and passing them to a helper app to phone home. I assume this is something Apple will, to their credit, refuse to do[1] but I don't think other OEMs will have any qualms based on what they already do with their TVs.

    [1] (though they don't do this kind of thing out of altruism, but because their cash cow is app store rents and fat hardware margins, not third-party advertising.)

    1. ifh-hn · · focus · HN ↗
      I don't think you can count apple out like that. They will likely implement it themselves though. This would be in addition to their always listening AI watch and intelligence features.
      1. SV_BubbleTime · · focus · HN ↗
        Apple’s always on watch has a declared 15 second buffer for live audio, and a worse scenario of summarizing your conversations for later but.. they tell you about it proudly. They also tell you how they’ve managed to do it while keeping privacy focused.

        It’s your choice if you believe them or not, I like Apple and I wouldn’t use that feature.

        The pretending that this is the same thing, that Apple is sneaking something past you when they’re showing you that they’re trying to do it right is a bad faith argument.

        1. microtonal · · focus · HN ↗
          It’s absolutely not a bad faith argument. They proudly tell you about iMessage being end-to-end encrypted. The part where it’s practically only encryption at rest, because everyone enables iCloud backups without ADP is hidden somewhere in a footnote.
          1. kennyadam · · focus · HN ↗
            Not even able to enable ADP in the UK these days :(
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