Common misconception but this is not true. If you use cookies only for functional purposes (not for tracking for example), you do not need to show any cookie banners. Like if you have a shopping cart and you have a cookie for keeping track of what's in it, it's for functional purposes for the user and hence needs no notice to be used.
The UK's ICO made a handy summary for people who are curious about what the directive actually says: https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1545/co...
Specifically:
> Exceptions from the requirement to provide information and obtain consent
> Activities likely to fall within the exception: [...] Some cookies help ensure that the content of your page loads quickly [...] Certain cookies providing security that is essential to comply with the security requirements [...]
Personally, I would not put a cookie banner of any kind on my website. However, given this text:
The term 'strictly necessary' means that such storage of or access to information should be essential, rather than reasonably necessary, for this exemption to apply. However, it will also be restricted to what is essential to provide the service requested by the user, rather than what might be essential for any other uses the service provider might wish to make of that data. It will also include what is required to comply with any other legislation the person using the cookie might be subject to, for example, the security requirements of the seventh data protection principle.
Where the setting of a cookie is deemed 'important' rather than 'strictly necessary', those collecting the information are still obliged to provide information about the device to the potential service recipient and obtain consent.
I think it's clear why a more risk-conscious organization like Meta might take a more conservative reading of "Strictly necessary" that does not apply to e.g. bandwidth optimizations related to a device's DPI>We use cookies to personalise and improve content and services, deliver relevant advertisements and increase the safety of our users
User agent sovereignty would be nice... except the most used browser and 1/2 of smartphones are controlled by Google, the largest ad tracking company on the planet.
We're way past the 90s.
I heard recently that's actually wrong. We are born helpless, and learning to take control. The helplessness is innate, and we learn to overcome it.
In democracy, the innate helplessness of citizens is overcome by learning to participate in governance - activism, elections, public functions and so on.
The people who say "government does nothing good ever" are the ones who want to keep people in their natural helpless state. It's like telling a student, "you're doing it all wrong and can never be good".
You're knowledge is sound, but rather than condescedingly relegate people to your 'simple' workaround - the ENTIRE premise of cookies and tracking against ones implicit desire to be private, is assinine.
Instead, I just closed the page and clicked on HN comments to see what it was about.
Of course if they don't need consent, then why are they making a song & dance about it having us click an accept button?
Facebook itself use to have this exact banner with no alternative until they were strong-armed to properly comply with GDPR.
Now. Facebook, the company that nobody trusts to do this sort of thing, is going to have to really work hard to demonstrate that they are to be trusted with this data. Apple, and to a lesser extent google, don't.
That cool startup could get away with lots of things, so long as people like the product.
Fortunately for us, AR glasses are limited by power consumption, this means that they can't really do always on realtime streaming of data to the backend for mining. Sure you could have always on mm accurate location, but you can't have video recording at the same time. If you want facial recognition, you'll have to stop the music playing.
Now, what would help is a decent set of privacy laws, ie:
Any cameras smaller than x, must only allow recording of data from persons that expressly allow it, unless in the public domain. People attempting to re-create personally identifiable data from such sensors will be liable to 5 years in jail and or an unlimited fine. (insert carveouts for legitimate research and persons working towards providing evidence for court cases)
This isnt perfect, but its a lot better than what we have now.
I will say that Meta is fairly aware of their reputation. The TOS is clear that they do not upload or share any video capture and they seem committed to it. As it is now, all the scene understanding is done on device.
Rayban stories have a 167mah battery[1] the quest2 has a 3640mah battery[2] even then, it only last 2 hours, more or less, rather than an entire day.
[1]https://beckystern.com/2023/04/30/ray-bans-stories-teardown/
[2]https://www.meta.com/gb/legal/quest/product-information-shee...
This dataset is clearly targeted for research on AR/XR/VR applications.
I’ll “yes and” here…beyond AR/VR a more powerful use case is multi-modal learning (with RL) which is what Meta is probably the leader in IMO.
Example paper here: “ Towards Continual Egocentric Activity Recognition: A Multi-modal Egocentric Activity Dataset for Continual Learning”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10931
This IMO is the pathway to AGI, as it combines all sense-plan-do data into a time coordinated stream and mimics how humans transfer learning to children via demonstration recording and behavior authoring.
If we can create robotics with locomotion and dexterous manipulation, egocentric exploration, and a behavior authoring loop that uses human behavior demonstration and trajectory reinforcement - well, we’ll have the AI we’ve been all talking about.
Probably the most exciting area of research that most people don’t know or care about.
That’s why head mounted all day ego centric AR is so important - it gives eyes ears and sense perception to our learning systems with human directed egocentric behaviors, guiding the whole thing. Just like pushing your kid down the street in the stroller.
That is some B.F. Skinner level future we're aiming for--only this time around, humans become the fully surveilled 'teaching machine'.
Applications of embodied AI very interesting. Additionally a lot of hard problems are increasingly being solved in simulation like this. See Wayve's GAIA world model
Most picture and videos are taken from a camera at arm's length, not attached to someone's face.
so if you want to make AR glasses "see" and "understand" the world from the point of view of a human (ie navigation, where is x, etc etc) then you need to make a dataset with that sensor configuration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vnZCwf5_QE has a simple example from CMU, rather than facebook
If I had a company, which is a for-profit entity, I wouldn't want competitors to use my company's tech for free either.
I'm glad such free datasets exist even if they are restricted to educational/hobby use.
The requirement and boastful nature of this heading is a frightening tell against the company/industry's perceived practices.