Thanks @GITNE . We did consider shorter grace periods but eventually decided against it. The contributors who would be interested in going through their uploads to look for falsely blurred areas are also often the ones that upload a lot of images which makes it hard to do in a short time window. In the end we decided to put privacy first. To answer your earlier question about what happens to the original imagery, I hope that is clear now. No unblurred copies remain.
A standalone blurring application that contributors can run on their imagery pre-upload is a great idea. We are looking at it and will share any info when we can. cc @eesger
Thank you for the clarification and welcome back to the forums
Have you considered the idea, floated here, to blur in a reversible way - with a secret that would be encrypted with something the original contributor has (their password, perhaps)?
I often see blurs on addresses (housenumbers, flat numbers etc), opening hours and other useful data.
Short grace periods would not help in most cases.
Hey @Richlv !
Any form of reversible solution would mean storing the unblurred image or the part that was blurred, which is what we wanted to get away from. We already in the past had the unblurred copies in encrypted storage but the information is still there and we decided to put privacy first here.
Thinking about that, it have to agree with @jesolem. It would be possible, but very hard to engineer something that is usable and and the same time trusted by the publicā¦
There would always be some sort of secret needed by the original uploader. What if the uploader forgets it? Is it a password? How will the process to unlock look like? And then, what if facebook decided to change its privacy policy? And lets mapillary store it the next time the uploader unlocks anything? Or if they get forced by whatever state agency?
Permanent deletion is also a hedge against that. What is not stored cannot be leaked.
And there are a lot of tasks that are more urgent that this, e.g. fixing the Android app.
Improving number detection is probably a separate task, and it might even be separate from face detection, which I deem much more critical. Not sure if facebook has an interest in that, because they probably already have much more opening hours than osmā¦
I donāt care about intent or what steps are taken. Facebook has proven to be one of the most evil entities on the Internet stealing peoples personal data and ignoring privacy laws. They are still doing it. That data has since been used to influence several elections.
I was on Mapillary since the very early days and has both contributed code and more than 1M images. But not anymore. I will NOT be part of these crimes. I truely feel that I have been betrayed by Mapillary and is only glad that I have kept a copy of most of my images.
Perhaps thereās a way we could use some of the Mapillary tech for blurring in our uploader? We tried baking in a few existing detection/blurring solutions but we never quite got to an accuracy or visual level we weāre happy with.
Of course, we all knew.
As a mapper and photographer I am insulted.
They always told us that our pictures remained ours.
It has become wood photography.
That seems harsh. Authorship of the pictures remains with the contributor (subject to the licence), but Iām not aware of a clause to keep pictures un-altered. While Iād love to see some secure way to view the original images, the challenge with that seems rather real.
Mapillary has not ājoinedā Facebook, the entire project is SOLD. For a ānot disclosedā amount of money.
Take one guess, why fb invests money into Mapl.
To me, it means the end of what has been a great collaboration between the developers team and all volunteer contributors.
The many unanswered complaints since the overtake prove that it is no longer about results or about what we users need.
It is about what the absurdly rich facebook company needs .
Sold to FB - if this is what it takes to keeo the project Mapillary alive, I am fine with that.
So, the ends always justify the means?
Btw, I am aware that this question is not and has not been something that played any role for Mapillaryās seed investors and/or venture capitalists when selling to Facebook. I do not blame them. They have taken a lot of risk initially, and sooner or later they wanted to see a return on their risky investment. Facebook was probably either the only buyer or the only buyer with enough cash to pull off such a potentially big transaction. So, the investors thought to them selves; its now or never.
Nevertheless, I believe that even as a high risk investor your social and ethical responsibility extends beyond paying your fair share of taxes on capital gains, especially after having successfully curated your seed investment into a working company or product. Because, what is your successfully curated investment good for if it is just shut down in order to crush the competition or to be used in an abusive business model like Facebookās? Well surely, my idealistic picture of big money investors must be naive but I would still love to see it happen, for at least in the context and mission of Mapillary.
Imho, a crowed sourced effort like Mapillary just does not and cannot work in the realm of a multi billion dollar corporation whose business model basically revolves around softly or deliberately spying on people.
