Hacker News Reader

Comment by rock_hard | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has worked on systems like these let me translate:

“You stuff will be private but in return accuracy will be so bad that the UX is gonna suck!”

That’s the key piece people miss when they wanna do anything with ML…that’s it’s a different problem compared to writing code because it’s not about the code anymore, it’s about having great training data!

View on HN

Apple Photos seems to be using just Core ML[1] for on-device recognition and it does a pretty good job. As for Android, we plan to use tflite, but the accuracy is yet to be measured. And if customers do install our desktop app, we will be able to improve the indexes by re-indexing data with the extra bit of compute available.

We don't feel that the entire UX of a photo storage app will "suck" because of a reduced accuracy in search results, and we think that for some of us the reduced accuracy might not be a deal breaker.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml

Up until recently I’ve used Apple Photos happily since it provided a good combination of convenience plus the privacy of on-device recognition. You have a compelling product if you can convince customers you are as reliable and more trustworthy than Apple. You do face the disadvantage of not being the default option for iOS/macOS but that should be balanced by being available cross-platform in Android, Linux, Windows.

Core ML and TFlite are just tools for running ML models. Generating the models is the hard part, and that is what encryption will make more difficult.

Bingo!

We will resort to models that are available in the public domain.

To be honest, that wasn't a concern with my question. I think most people on HN understand this aspect. My question was more about how you improve your models when you don't have the same feedback mechanisms as non-privacy preserving apps. Google can look at your photos and see what photos fail and collect the biased statistics. In a privacy preserving version you won't be able to do this. Sure, you can on an internal dataset, but then there are lots of questions about that dataset's bias and if it is representative of the real world. I mean how many people think ImageNet is representative of real world images? A surprising number.

As someone else who works on systems like these, I agree training data is the whole problem. However you can use some techniques like homomorphic encryption and gradient pooling to collect training data from client code while remaining end-to-end encryption. It's hard, but it's not impossible.

Really? Have we had a revolution in homomorphic encryption such that it can be used for anything other than 1-million-times-slower proofs-of-concept?

I know IBM has released something lately, but given the source..

Does anyone use HE for the type of ML application you are describing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com