Don't scan your face to buy glasses | Hacker News Reader

Don't scan your face to buy glasses

ognjen.io

12 pointsrognjen10 comments

> Obviously a hasty addition given the font doesn’t match.

This is an assumption though...

> They’re going to use the facial measurements to serve ads and “measure effectiveness”

Also an assumption; where do they mention specifically that they will be serving ads which are using facial measurements?

And then...

> I’m not part of the company so in this section I make assumptions that could very well be wrong.

It seems like there are assumptions throughout the article though. :D This warning should probably be at the top.

> This is an assumption though...

Yep, but not an unreasonable one.

> Also an assumption; where do they mention specifically that they will be serving ads which are using facial measurements?

In the screenshot above that paragraph is a table from their privacy policy that says that.

It doesn't specifically say anything like "we're going to use the facial measurements to serve ads" though, at least that I can see. Which wording in the table?

Edit: Various messages could be implied from what I'm reading--the wording is ambiguous. One cannot discern whether or how ads are involved with biometrics.

"To deliver...advertisements to you" is also vaguely associated with biometrics at best...what does that middle column even mean? There's no indication of relationships between the columns. No column headers and no matching numbers.

Regarding your edit: that's a fair point, I didn't include the headings and the preceding paragraph. I've added them now.

Just FYI, the paragraph before the table says that the table contains all the ways they may use your data.

The headers are "Purpose", "Type of data", and "Lawful basis"

"To deliver relevant website/app content and advertisements to you and measure or understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve to you" in the first column and in the second column is biometric.

As many people know, there is an optical monopoly concerning frames. About 80-90% of frames are made by one company under several brands. They market to optometrists. Ever wonder why one ounce of plastic is $200 or so? Online people are cracking this monopoly. Many opticians do mot want you to measure your eyes and then buy online with the prescription - which is your right. So they hold back the pupillary distance measure to force you to buy the frames where you got measured. Modern plastic lenses cost under $10 as made. Many frames also cost under $10 as made - unless a designer like Pierre Cardin or Oakley adds a brand fee. It had been found that a selfie against a scale makes this measure easy. https://ca.zennioptical.com/printable-pd-ruler-download and a youtube https://ca.zennioptical.com/c/how-to#howto-measure-pd

and some FTC consumer rulings against this monopoly. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2016/05/...

I’m not pretending to know the intent of the company, but what the company ought to do from a technical ideology perspective, and why they ought to do in a practical tech business context aren’t necessarily equivalent.

Admonishing a company for - based on legal notice alone - not using some particular technical approach is unreasonable because it doesn’t consider the practical implications of doing so (systems complexity, data transfer, how good is the downstream software and what sort of preprocessing happens, tech debt and time to market, etc.)

At the end of the day, maybe they are generating training data sets, and if so, don’t use it if that bothers you. If there was evidence of them selling data, that would be something to sound the alarm over, but if it’s just some text a lawyer or ops person wrote, that’s a lot of extrapolation.

While I understand what you mean, I do think it's important to talk about this so that the ideology and business converge. If everyone is just fine with everything business will just keep pushing.

> maybe they are generating training data sets

And they aren't telling their users that they are which I disagree with.

> evidence of them selling data

I think there are many more cases of data being sold that we don't know about and that alarms are not raised about. They do say that they're allowed to if they wish though, which I disagree with.

> Admonishing

I genuinely did not mean to sound like I'm admonishing and if you have specific instances of where it sounds too harsh please let me know and I'll change them.

Your entire post is an admonishment. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to post at all, but I also don’t agree with it.

Why not reach out to them directly and ask them?

Fair enough. I considered emailing them, but it would have just been this post in email form.

What do you think I should have asked them?

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