Hi Andras, I found your comment in /chat/dev about Samsung and mining photos for faces very interesting. Do you have time to discuss here? I answer in a private chat as it doesn't seem on particularly on topic for an Unix chat room (but I would be happy to continue it there, if you find this weird ;-)!

@shellter hello, sure, although I'm a noob in these matters

I don't have much "time" at the moment but since chat is async this shouldn't be a problem

yes, I just a retired banking unix hack, but annoyed by how much my GalaxyS10 is intruding in my life, vs my prevoious Galaxy S3 ;-)

I'm in Evanston, IL, USA, may I as where you live?

Hmm, I found options to disable the same feature for the larger S numbers I think

@shellter Hungary

Are you covered by the EU privacy rules?

yup :)

I haven't bothered to read their privacy policy yet, but it is easy to find

wow, I'm surprised that is allowed in EU.

Yes, I tried to find the setting in Galaxy to turn it off, couldn't find it, and then started to read the privacy notice, which is very sleep inducing

I'll have another look when we are done.

I don't think GDPR prevents shitty privacy practices from being opt-out

And there's no evidence that the phone sends any of the data off-site...and it might comply with GDPR to do local data mining within the phone

(If I use too many Americanism in my speed, please feel free to ask me to rephrase the idea);

@shellter I'm also not a lawyer :) The usual concept seems to be that users must be informed how their data is used (when and by whom), they must have the option to query all data stored on them by service providers, and delete them all if requested.

But there's the catch that some amount of data is necessary to provide services, so if I tell Samsung to delete all my data they might respond that I have to throw my phone away to do that :P

I'm in academia, at a university. GDPR allows students to request obliteration of all their data; but this implies that they will be expelled from the university if they ever request this while studying there.

Yes, I have the same understanding about privacy notices. That is why I call it "lack-of-privacy" notice ;-)

And I don't know whether alumni could have their "yes, you got a diploma here" checkbox deleted :D

Wow, interesting! Hadn't heard about that situation.

@shellter which one? :)

Should have said "those situations" meaning possible expelling of students your case of throwing your phone away, although I'm guessing you are saying that as a worst case scenario, not you you know it does/will happen.

@shellter the threads I found said the setting should be in the gallery app's local settings

@shellter I was told that it would happen. No sane student will ask for their data to be purged while they study, of course

This is just to say that there's a thing as "data necessary to provide the service". I could tell google to delete all my data, and then they'd tell me to stop using gmail first.

But GDPR is all-encompassing and causes huge pain to a lot of innocent bystanders. University is one example in my opinion.

Yes, I did look in gallery's local settings, but I often have to look at such things 3-4 times before I really understand which lead to sub-menus, and which are just sliding toggle switches.

How/why do you believe such scanning is taking place, is it the existance of an option to turn it off?

Another one is medical services. There used to be a grey zone where if someone in your family got in an accident you could in practice ask for info (which hospital they're in, mostly) by phone. It could still be abused (famous people and paparazzi, for instance), but it was vital in a lot of legit cases. This is now expressly forbidden due to GDPR. If someone you know gets in an accident, it's not trivial to find out where they are (or so I've heard concerns)

@shellter I came across the results of the feature. Found a photo of my wife, scrolled up to see the photo details, and there she was being tagged as a "person" in the photo. No name of course, just an avatar. Clicking on the avatar brought up dozens of other photos she was in. In the original photo there were 5 other family members and myself, but only she got tagged. Because she's the only one who appears prominently in my gallery.

wow, it's amazing how much stuff gets ignored by american press. As usual, there are 2 sides to a story and there are trades-offs that don't become apparent until a law is enforced.

Wow, my wife is very camera shy, but I have hunderds of pictures of our dog! ;-) I'll have to check that out!

@shellter well there's been plenty of controversy around GDPR. The main things I've heard is crazy burden on service providers, having to track EU vs non-EU users, and that many sites just shut down for EU residents. Like how this is what I see at gamestop.com:

But yes, it seems like the processing is happening locally. I guess as we only take ocasional pictures, it doesn't take up that much CPU to that.

@shellter same. Dog didn't get tagged :P

!!! woof !!!

I think I had heard something about blocked services due to GDPR, but didn't think services would actually shut down.

Thanks very much for sharing all of this. it is very interesting, and doubles my resolve to read all the pricvacy notices, delete/turn off as much as I can on Google. etc!

If you have questions about shell scripting, be sure to ping me ;-)

@shellter I can only guess that's the reason. Been like that for years

@shellter no worries :) And thanks for the offer