Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Tech companies use photo recognition algorithms to learn about you. They sell this information to advertisers, and the rest is history.

It is with humble apologies to the professors who ushered me into research in computer vision and image processing that I present this post.

Google and others are constantly improving their algorithms that recognize the people and things in photographs. They are becoming pretty darn good at it. They can recognize emotion, gender, age, and other attributes of people. They can recognize if you are next to food or cars or tourists attractions.

Pass these recognitions to advertisers who put 1 and 1 together to make 27. Viola, you start receiving ads that fit you and your lifestyle.

What happened? How did that travel agent know about my trip to Alaska and my love for chocolate ice cream?