Your windows photos app has over 122 tables [0] of analysis on every picture on your machine. It does facial recognition and more and likely reports a lot of this back to ms. That’s just one app!
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/8zk1yy/a_simple_...
I’d also like to think we could have a better discussion on HN than “big number scary”. 122 tables sounds like a lot, sure. They could denormalise the whole dataset and keep it in one table, key/value store style. Would that be better? It’s a photo app with facial recognition. Stands to reason that it needs to store facial recognition data.
The link you cite though was careful to avoid making claims that couldn't be substantiated. It lists only what is in the database locally and the telemetry section doesn't include image content/metadata but user interactions with the app itself.
Isn’t this the literal definition of FUD? Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
I would like to hope the orange site approaches this topic with more substance. Do the analysis of network traffic to see what gets sent home. Decompile the binary to check it out for these sorts of things. Don’t just write your anti-MS fanfic and pretend that it’s something meaningful.
People and object detection are pretty baseline features for a photo management app these days IMHO. I like that my photos app automatically finds all the photos of my dog.
That requires facial detection.
I use it, my family uses it, my friends use it. Anecdotal data to be sure. But I think if barely anyone used it you wouldn’t see it as a base feature in almost every photo sharing app.
You won't find that here if Microsoft/Windows is in the title. HN will default to FUD on anything from Redmond.
How many here complaining about analysis in the photos app on Windows also sync all their photos to iCloud or Google Photos, which does the exact same thing? I bet it's a lot.