alt Hacker NewsThese are going to be very popular for intercepting images on their way to a display. Think of the advertising possibilities. Ad attribution can be 'vastly improved' when both the ad and every step in the funnel are all spymarked and all of them are reliably reported on by virtue of their pixels hitting your screen.
First the low-end laptops and phones (and probably later, most of them) will incorporate some low-level driver that is constantly scanning for these and passing them to a helper app to phone home. I assume this is something Apple will, to their credit, refuse to do[1] but I don't think other OEMs will have any qualms based on what they already do with their TVs.
[1] (though they don't do this kind of thing out of altruism, but because their cash cow is app store rents and fat hardware margins, not third-party advertising.)
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I don't think you can count apple out like that. They will likely implement it themselves though. This would be in addition to their always listening AI watch and intelligence features.
Apples largest area of growth is literally services and advertising. They even make a huge deal of it in their investor calls. Have for at least the past 3 years.
I think you may have an outdated view here
“Next we just need to mark the consumer’s retina and brain to ensure our ads truly went through”
As synthetic image fidelity gets closer and closer to indistinguishable from genuine pictures, what, exactly can one do to tell the difference absent something like SynthID?
Who, exactly, is the "[email protected]" whose only attributable contribution is FUD regarding SynthID (and what are their motives)?
Apple is just Stockholm Syndrome at scale. I wouldn't trust anything they say about privacy, especially given how closed their ecosystem and hardware is.