"The Follower" Creates Privacy Scare With AI Surveillance Scanning
A Belgian artist's project, "The Follower" created a public scare as he found video feeds that matched Instagram posts from around the world. Yahoo called it "horrifying", VICE described it as "intimate but also shameless" and ZME Science declared it "super creepy AI".
But how did it actually work? We believe that the fears are vastly overblown as this implementation depends on the confluence of multiple factors that are very unlikely and easy to avoid.
While a future of entities being able to track private people around the world is a real risk, "The Follower" does not fairly represent that. In this note, we examine the implementation and the limits therein.
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