Bring Back The Faces

This is a story of how hyper-concerns over privacy are hurting blind people around the world. I personally haven’t had this problem, because I do not use the app Be My Eyes, but other blind people do. This is concerning and repression of thought is wrong, as well as repression of everything else by government and other entities, who rule the world, or at least these parts. I also live in Canada, so any cities mentioned do not apply to me and to the person who had composed this post on Facebook. This will be long, and it is not an exaggeration; it actually borders on cruelty.

If you are blind or know someone who is, share this blog post. The only way we can address bad decisions that hurt us directly is by exposing them. And if you are not blind, go ahead and do the same. Share this post and then, imagine for just a minute how it might feel to see the faces of the people you love. This includes: your wife, your husband, your kids, grandkids, relatives, coworkers, your neighboreven the one that watches through your picture window and gossips about all your bad habits and poor taste in furniture. Imagine being able to see these people, and then being told that because of privacy concerns, you will no longer be allowed to look at them ever again. If that level of societal repression seems wrong to you, then share this.

Recently, blind people began sharing lots of pictures on social media. Now some of us had been doing this for years, but a month or so back, this practice began growing by orders of magnitude, and it happened almost overnight. Oh and we also began providing incredible written descriptions, which meant all our blind friends could also appreciate the pictures we were posting. We began sharing pictures of our homes, our pets, our children, our friends and coworkers. We shared pictures of ourselves at restaurants, in parks, at airports, and on the beach. In short, we began doing what everyone else has been doing on social media forever–sharing the visual images that add so much richness to our lives and to the lives of those around us. In the past, most of us didn’t share that many pictures. After all, we and our friends often could not see them, so why bother? But thanks to a brand-new technology launched by an organization called Be My Eyes, blind people could use their phones to take pictures, and Be My Eyes would use a new AI-derived technology fromn a company called Open AI to describe them. These descriptions were amazing. Be My Eyes AI (as the service is called) could describe faces, hair color, facial expressions, the colors and style of clothes people were wearing, how they were sitting or standing, and where they were sitting or standing when the photos were taken. Be My Eyes AI did not attempt to identify the people whose images it captured; it simply described them. For the first time, my wife Lisa (blind almost from birth) and I (blind for more than 43 years) could know that our 20 year-old daughter had long dark-brown hair, and that she apparently likes casual clothes. For the first time, I could read a description of my younger daughter hugging my guide dog, who, as it turns out, is very expressive and is always smiling. For the first time, we could hear a detailed visual interpretation of how we each look—and we’ve never had this level of visual detail—not in 27 years of marriage. How utterly amazing!

And we were not alone. Blind people were stunned by the world we had all been missing—by the beauty, by the colors, by the visual complexity of riding down a city street on a bus or navigating a crowded airport terminal. It was magical, and the waiting list to download and use this brand-new service doubled by the hour.

And then, today, after hearing my wife’s shocked and sad exclamations and after reading several heartbreaking posts on social media about the loss of this incredible access, I decided to take a picture of myself, in my own home, using my own phone. And here’s what the Be My Eyes AI service returned instead of a description.

“I apologize, but the image you uploaded was blocked because it may contain faces or people. For privacy and security reasons, I’m not able to view or describe images with faces or people in them. If you need assistance with something else, feel free to let me know or upload a different image.”

That was it. After 43 years of total blindness, I finally had the ability to see through the lens of my phone’s camera and this amazing new technology. And two weeks later, Be My Eyes took it back, citing privacy concerns as the reason. (The longer version is that Open AI, the provider of the technology powering Be My Eyes AI, is responsible for taking away the ability to describe images including faces, and supposedly, Open AI’s decision was based on significant concerns about privacy coming from somewhere within the U.S. State of Illinois–I would presume regulatory pressure, but I’m not sure.)

So I’m all down with protecting privacy, but here’s what I don’t understand. Everyone can take pictures, and they can post them anywhere they so choose. Just look at your social media feeds. Hell, that’s all they do on Instagram. So what’s the difference? Why can’t I do the same thing? Or failing that, why can’t I just take the pictures and at least be able to read honest descriptions of what they show? If Be My Eyes had disabled the ability to share the content, I would be disappointed, but I would still be able to use its word pictures to see the world of images that had been unavailable for more than four decades. My wife would still be able to know when her daughter got herself a new haircut, and we could all enjoy the rich beauty around us.

Now to be fair, I can still use Be My Eyes AI to take pictures and to have them described as long as there are no people in those pictures. But what does this mean? It means I can’t use Be My Eyes AI to read signs in the airport—lots of people there. It means no pictures on crowded city streets or on transit. It means no pictures of shirts I’m considering for purchase when another shopper just happens to walk up or is standing behind the shoulder-high rack. It means no ability to take pictures of the Uber that just drove off without me because I’m traveling with a guide dog. Basically, it means I can take pictures of plates of food and rooms in my house—just so long as I make sure my own family members aren’t lurking in the background. I’ve also tested the app with junk mail, and the app will also not interpret any content (including text) on any page that includes a face.

Folks, if this is what we’re doing to protect privacy, then we’ve gone too far. We’re hurting an entire class of people because of a possible concern that could be managed in so many other ways.

I call upon Be My Eyes to reconsider, and I call on everyone—sighted or not, to demand something better from Be My Eyes. It’s a good organization, trying to do the right thing. But this is utterly the wrong and worst thing imaginable. After all, if we can’t figure out how to harness great technology for making the world better, more accessible, and more inclusive for all of us, then why not just burn it all down and crawl back into the caves and holes from whence our ancestors crept 200,000 years back. Come on, Be My Eyes! You can do better. Restore our ability to see the people we love. Bring back the faces.