I’ve just read on CanonWatch (article) about this new Canon camera that should be available on the market in the next weeks (and it’s already available for preorders). And I think anyone should boycott this thing but I also think that -fortunately- it will have no success and it will end up in the oblivion.
The camera is not a true camera, is more like CCTV camera, it stays on every time (well I hope the battery last the least possible, 2.5hours from the specs) and it should follow the faces in the area, and also a big area due to the large field of view: Pans 170° — Tilt of 110° and take a shot when it think it find an interesting subject/expression/smiley/dunno.
And it’s not all, the Canon engineerings put an effort on the fact “You can also keep it around your neck and walk somewhere and it will take photos when it find new subjects”.
So what exactly does the Canon PowerShot pick do? According to DC Watch, it “finds a person’s face, notices changes in the image, and automatically determines a photo opportunity to shoot.” This is apparently all based on face recognition, with the camera able to automatically rotate up, down, left and right.
Thanks to its zoom powers, which have previously been rated as 4x optical zoom in earlier leaks, the PowerShot Pick should also be able to manage automatic close-ups too.
Damn! Do you remember what happened to the first Google Glass? Google Glass: Expect widespread usage bans over privacy concerns
But hey, the Google Glass was not a camera, it wasn’t made to take pictures, it can also did it, but this thing is made specifically to take photo of the people with a very large field of view and a zoom, and this is a privacy nightmare.
Is not enought? No! Last but not least, the camera as “Both Wifi and Bluetooth connectivity” plus an SD Card where to store all the pictures/faces, so I’m pretty sure it will also something like a “Canon Cloud” to upload the pictures from it to phone to the cloud.
This is unacceptable, just a data leak or someone who will not put a strong password for wifi-bluetooth and everyone in the public spaces can connect to it and see the photos it’s taking and it has took alone, not without you that press the button! Also the photos of the children, because this thing will not exclude them, instead it’s created to shoot them, and probabibly the algorithm behind the face recognition is trained just on the children faces. Totally crazy!
I hope this article will leave some question marks, because you can view if someone is taking a picture of you with the phone, but not if someone has a spy camera that can tilt and zoom to capture your face and put it somewhere on the phone (and cloud) of a unknow guy. And an unknown guy is not the governament or a private company that has some CCTV in the public space, the CCTVs don’t have “WiFi and Blueetooth” and don’t store the photos on a phone of an unknow private guy!
Terrible idea Canon.
