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Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

For an explanation, see author's post:

Using decision trees for real-time localization of eye pupils

https://tehnokv.com/posts/puploc-with-trees/

It's actually quite fascinating. I'm too paranoid to enable webcam for any random site, so will be trying it out locally.

For face detection and determining the locations of the eyes, the demo uses picojs, described in another post:

pico.js: a face-detection library in 200 lines of JavaScript

https://tehnokv.com/posts/picojs-intro/

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I'm all for being paranoid but what exactly is the threat model here? Someone is going to have a few seconds of video of you?

Spearfishing family members using a pic and/or some audio of you to generate a fake "help me" video? (I mean, that probably won't happen, just trying to think of something an attacker could do with it.)

Imagine being paranoid to the point of actually entertaining a hypothetical like that, so much that it affects your browsing habits.

In the age of Deep Fakes, I don't think its paranoia at all. Also, having secure browsing habits is healthy for when someone is trying to harm you.

There is actually already a pretty prevalent (lower tech) version of this scam. Grandparents are called by a con artist who attempts to pretend to be a (previously unidentified) grandchild in distress in a foreign country. [1] My grandmother lost a few thousand dollars to it because she thought they were me.

1 - https://www.ag.state.mn.us/Consumer/Publications/GrandParent...

You're using "paranoid" as if it is a bad thing.

Anything like paranoia would be a (clinical) issue only so long as it cripples your life - say if you refuse to browse the Internet at all despite this having detrimental effect on your well-being/lifestyle etc. Being cautious with your browsing habits is magnitudes away.

I’m much more concerned that they might be collecting data and video that is not well secured, and then someone else could come along and use that data for nefarious purposes.

The collector if the data doesn’t need to be nefarious, they only need to be sufficiently careless.

You could always load the page and then turn off your wifi before enabling the webcam, since it's allegedly happening client side.

Yeah, you got a point there, I can't think of a good reason why turning on the webcam on a random site would be a privacy/security risk for a random visitor.

I suppose I used the word "paranoid" to imply that it was not entirely logical/reasonable to think so.

Thinking of it, I acquired this attitude of being overly careful since Facebook, face recognition, machine learning, pervasive privacy invasions became the norm on the web. Who knows, maybe there's a way to combine random webcam snippets with other tracking technology to gather even more data about me.

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