There is no reason this technology needs to rely on consumers sacrificing privacy. The big players are trying to create that perception in the public so consumers will willingly sacrifice their privacy regardless.
The tech is there so someone could make a box with no external data transferred that could store and analyze video data. I would be a customer for sure for something that had this capability without the privacy concerns.
Google and Amazon say they want this data for quality control, but I suspect each of them have plans (if not active projects) for converting video inside people's homes into actionable marketing data.
> but I suspect each of them have plans (if not active projects) for converting video inside people's homes into actionable marketing data.
I suspect not. Besides the fact that it’s a whole new level of creepy and that alone is a PR mess, I doubt it’s that useful. Sure a camera in your home sounds perfectly useful for marketing but whose camera is positioned like that. Mine is aimed at the entryway door. The best you can get from that is presence. I suspect that’s true for most peoples home.
Beyond the question of actually data quality, data processing would have to be very expensive. You couldn’t run those models locally (because the object detection would be too complex and changing) so you’d need to stream to cloud. That would instantly be the largest and most expensive streaming platform ever, dwarfing YouTube or Netflix or anything. Not to mention the actual ML components of it.
I suspect smarthome companies don’t want the data and begrudgingly accept that some cloud is needed because people are notoriously bad at protecting backups (and remote monitoring is a convenient feature).
I question if the incremental increase in marketing revenue would exceed the technical costs.
The tech is there so someone could make a box with no external data transferred that could store and analyze video data. I would be a customer for sure for something that had this capability without the privacy concerns.
Google and Amazon say they want this data for quality control, but I suspect each of them have plans (if not active projects) for converting video inside people's homes into actionable marketing data.