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0 pointsarter42y ago0 comments

So you're saying a fridge takes a photo (of itself, essentially... a selfie?), forwards it with certain prompts to a GPT and then gives you the response. But as I said earlier I might not like certain foods, or I may actively avoid certain foods for medical or religious reasons.

Now, if this was an explicit user-GPT interaction, you could prompt the GPT with "hey, I'm Muslim, what can I cook with this stuff?" or "hey, I'm lactose intolerant, what else could I buy?". You do need to trust the OpenAI provider, but not the fridge.

Instead, the fridge automatically talks to GPT. So if you want to avoid "dumb" suggestions you wouldn't be able to follow, you would have to tell your fridge you're Jew or Muslim or lactose intolerant or diabetic. Don't you see an issue with this?

I'm not "tinfoil hat" paranoid, I don't think people are out there to get me. But a certain dose of skepticism when it comes to data usage should be healthy, especially when many companies have been known to mess up this aspect (from Cambridge Analytica to Roomba employers sending pictures of a woman on the toilet to Facebook, and much more). You cannot avoid this 100% unless you go to extreme lengths, but if you can avoid sending data to one more company, why not?

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mewpmewp22y ago

In fridge it takes images from different angles, and different floors to make sure it is possible to identify all the items that exist in that fridge.

If you don't like certain foods, you can just customise the prompt that fridge sends to OpenAI. You can customise it through a web app or mobile app.

> you would have to tell your fridge you're Jew or Muslim or lactose intolerant or diabetic. Don't you see an issue with this?

What's the problem with storing your food preferences somewhere? People use dieting apps all the time on mobile.

> You cannot avoid this 100% unless you go to extreme lengths, but if you can avoid sending data to one more company, why not?

You are already sending your data in thousands of different ways and exposing yourself at any moment. I'm not saying you should do more of it, but food preferences seems like a very minor drop in the bucket of all that you are already exposing.

Most people store their images in a cloud, which already indicate amazing amount about them. Just using a smartphone is 1000x worse than having food preferences stored somewhere.

arter4OP2y ago

Sure but it's something more for barely any actual advantage.

I accept that when I Google something Google and maybe other companies know what I searched, because Googling things is useful. I cannot bring an encyclopaedia and a detailed map of the whole world with me all the time, so it's a tradeoff I can accept.

I accept that, on the rare occasions I turn geolocation, someone will know where I am, because if I do turn it on, it's probably because I got lost. Then I turn it off and off we go.

Divulging food preferences for... an AI that suggests me what I should buy doesn't look like it's worth it. And it's not just food preferences. Remember people store medications in their fridge. A fridge so advanced it can recognize any food is probably capable of reading labels and knowing I bought medication for X,Y and Z. Which is definitely something I'm not explicitly telling people (or things) without a reason.

And don't forget the power of correlating data. Correlating food preferences with other data you could easily understand if someone is ill, pregnant, whether they follow a certain religion (think Ramadan, or not eating meat on Friday,...), whether they are living with someone else (buying twice the amount of stuff they usually buy?) and so on.

This is all stuff I try to avoid telling everyone. Yes, my doctor could be hacked and people could know I'm on medication anyway (hypothetically), but why divulge that voluntarily for essentially no reason?

mewpmewp22y ago

Honestly you are just describing to me more exciting features. The correlations with potential illnesses, etc. Have all of your data piped into single location to use AI to improve your health.

rpxio2y ago

you’re continuing to look at everything from a perspective of an altruistic product to consumer relationship and not the reality the other commenter is trying to describe.

yes it’s an “exciting feature” if your AI fridge can know that you’re pregnant and not recommend recipes that contain certain ingredients. what the other person is alluding to is that the data it has about you specifically will not stay contained between you and your fridge. what if you’re not married and your employer is like dave ramsey and fires women for being pregnant out of wedlock? or you live in a state with much more grim conditions currently around women and miscarriages? what if the meds in your fridge are related to HRT and there are orgs actively buying data to find these people to target them for bullying online (or worse)?

all of your data will inevitably end up in the hands of people that aren’t at all interested in improving your health. they’re interested in extracting value from you and your data or they have ill will towards you.

what starts as “exciting features” leads to your fridge tracking what groceries you purchase and what you consume. then it (or a third party that gets this data) makes determinations about your religion, your lifestyle, if you’re pregnant or not, etc without you knowing.

when every device in your house is collecting and selling off your data as a business model, there’s a significant mental overhead that needs to be expelled to ensure that you are able to keep your life private if you choose to. you may say: “don’t buy the appliances with the feature, then!” once a company can integrate these features effectively and subsidize hardware costs by selling the data, they’ll have other companies competing to offer the same so they can hit those target features and prices. eventually the market is flooded with appliances with these “exciting features” that are just gathering and selling data. in the end, we’ve traded our option to _choose_ privacy for a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist. personally, i don’t believe the public is currently aware enough to understand the consequences.

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mewpmewp22y ago

In fridge it takes images from different angles, and different floors to make sure it is possible to identify all the items that exist in that fridge.

If you don't like certain foods, you can just customise the prompt that fridge sends to OpenAI. You can customise it through a web app or mobile app.

> you would have to tell your fridge you're Jew or Muslim or lactose intolerant or diabetic. Don't you see an issue with this?

What's the problem with storing your food preferences somewhere? People use dieting apps all the time on mobile.

> You cannot avoid this 100% unless you go to extreme lengths, but if you can avoid sending data to one more company, why not?

Most people store their images in a cloud, which already indicate amazing amount about them. Just using a smartphone is 1000x worse than having food preferences stored somewhere.

arter4OP2y ago

Sure but it's something more for barely any actual advantage.

I accept that, on the rare occasions I turn geolocation, someone will know where I am, because if I do turn it on, it's probably because I got lost. Then I turn it off and off we go.

mewpmewp22y ago

Honestly you are just describing to me more exciting features. The correlations with potential illnesses, etc. Have all of your data piped into single location to use AI to improve your health.

rpxio2y ago

you’re continuing to look at everything from a perspective of an altruistic product to consumer relationship and not the reality the other commenter is trying to describe.

2 more replies

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