Comment by monknomo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monknomo | Hacker News Reader

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I might be tweaked if you published a bunch of pictures of me sitting at my desk at work or whatever (because you would be a creepy stalker), but I would not be unhappy in the least if you developed a timemachine, went back in time, made friends with my parents and started posting my baby pictures to future-facebook.

The things that babies and children do vs. the things that adults do are not comparable. Leaving aside, it's darn hard to reliably recognize people from their high school photos when looking at their older selves and next to impossible for babies.

Further, if that parental photos and publishing those photos somehow violates the child's rights, I would say that children have virtually no rights and what rights they do have their parents can exercise on their behalf, regardless of the child's opinion.

Even further, what plausible harm could come from a picture of a kid in a tub, for example?

"Even further, what plausible harm could come from a picture of a kid in a tub, for example?"

Knowing the kind of data mining that occurs with text, one would only expect that future mining would occur with images as well. So what happens when all public images of you from birth to present are indexed and used to make decisions about you? For example, what would happen if you tried to get health coverage and the company could look into these indexed images for all contact with known carcinogens to determine your ability or cost for health coverage?

If your insurance company is image-mining and unable to pin down your past risks they will simply do the same thing they do today. Assume the worst and place you in the high risk pool until they have enough data to prove otherwise.

I think your specific example is likely to end up so heavily regulated as to be impossible. I'll go so far as to say that most harmful uses of data mining will end up with laws to mitigate the harm.

I think the likeliest 'harm' is that companies will be able to tailor really effective ads targeting people at earlier ages.

Besides, the information asymmetry between private people and entities with large amounts of data already exists. Your kid's pictures are a matter of degree and will likely not make a difference.

Heck, I'll argue from the other direction. In the future, having large amounts of harvestable data will make most people better credit risks. Those with heavily censored profiles will be analogous to present day people who only use cash - unable to get loans or what have you.

How is this remotely as likely or important is genetic testing? We don't need to make up new things to be worried about, really.

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