Incidentally, this is largely why Scots law verdicts of acquittal -- "not guilty" and "not proven" -- reflecting the two standards of not guilty. "Not proven" carries the implication that the jury is not convinced of the defendant's innocent, but there is not enough evidence for conviction.
A hung trial is closer in meaning to not being found guilty or innocent.
Arguably, a semantic difference does apply in that you may still be found liable in a civil case. However, civil cases don't declare people guilty only liable.
It makes me kind of sad, not for the lack of privacy, but for the feeling of getting older and just not caring about fighting the technology to make it do what I want.
If the only thing you care about is backup, Dropbox and other services offer that (e.g. Keepsafe). I use Google Photos because of peace of mind. I know I never have to worry about losing photos, and when I need to find them, it's easy. I've got like 20 years of photos backup. Just yesterday, I wanted to show someone a picture of my daughter from a trip we took in 2012, and I found it in about 5 seconds. When I take photos of my kids, they are automatically shared with my wife, instead of having to constantly manually be asked for them, and manually select them. I focus on just taking pictures and spending time with my kids, I never worry about photo backup, or photo organizing anymore.
Would you still use it if the grouping feature didn't save pictures it could not confidently group?
Pretty useless if it throws away singleton sets.
Analyzing peoples' biometric data from pictures of their faces is a special case.
> I upload photos to Google Photos because I want them to be grouped and categorized so I can easily find them.
So make it opt in. Most people just want to show their images to friends, not have Facebook analyze them.
What's your definition of biometric data? if I cluster by eye-color, is that biometric data? "Show me everyone with green eyes". Have a run afoul?
Fundamental to what, though? This court case is not about somehow criminalizing the existence or the use of this particular tech.
> I upload photos to Google Photos because I want them to be grouped and categorized so I can easily find them. That is, if I click on a picture of my daughter, or my wife, I want to see ALL pictures of I took of them grouped together.
Facebook is not Google Photos. The former is a social network, the latter is a service for storing, organizing and sharing photos. In my opinion, even Google Photos should implement a setting that disables this.
> Does this mean if my service measures the distance between the eyes, and the width of the mouth, and clusters photos by that, or by eye or hair color by using say, segmentation or histogram clustering, all of a sudden it's illegal? That would seem to be a fairly absurd and broad definition of biometric security information.
Come on, if you made the effort to read that part of the law, why did you stop there? No, it's not "suddenly illegal" to measure and gather that information. It's illegal to do without following certain rules about retention, destruction and usage of that information. It's in the very next section, here's an excerpt:
"(740 ILCS 14/15) Sec. 15. Retention; collection; disclosure; destruction.
(a) A private entity in possession of biometric identifiers or biometric information must develop a written policy, made available to the public, establishing a retention schedule and guidelines for permanently destroying biometric identifiers and biometric information when the initial purpose for collecting or obtaining such identifiers or information has been satisfied or within 3 years of the individual's last interaction with the private entity, whichever occurs first. Absent a valid warrant or subpoena issued by a court of competent jurisdiction, a private entity in possession of biometric identifiers or biometric information must comply with its established retention schedule and destruction guidelines."
You need something like CryptoDL: deep learning over homomorphic encryption, that would let the photos stay encrypted in the cloud, but still allow DL computations to be run.
It does work, but it's not nearly as seamless as Google's cloud implementation. I have many tens of thousands of photos in my Apple Photos library and I think it takes over a month to process everything if I start from scratch on a new computer. Somehow it seems much faster on the phone, and I'm not sure if that's because the processing is better hidden from me, it's much more efficient on the custom chip, or maybe a bit of both.
The later, a bit of both. It’s also probable that your phone is turned on and plugged in more often than your computer (especially for laptops).
It doesn't matter how clever you are: if you disallow processing the photos on the server, then any index you have on the client that is cached will be invalidated by an algorithm update, and there is no way to rebuild the index without downloading all the photos once again.
I'm not talking about federated learning, that's a different problem. Let's say we solved that problem using on-device learning and differential privacy. The problem still remains that retrained/updated models on devices require the photos to be processed locally again.
So if for example, you can now detect "hugs" in photos, and I search for "photos of my me hugging my daughter", Google Photos gives me what I want, and your local-only model means I have to wait a long time to redownload and reindex my entire collection. It's a huge user problem.
A workable solution to this problem has to somehow entail homomorphic encryption, if you somehow want to keep the photos encrypted on the server.
But it certainly works on large libraries because it shows me recent photos mixed with cats that died years ago.
Absolutely not. Companies should not be able to do this without explicit opt in. They need to learn that they are not free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, users be damned.
I upload photos to Google Photos because I want them to be grouped and categorized so I can easily find them. That is, if I click on a picture of my daughter, or my wife, I want to see ALL pictures of I took of them grouped together.
Looking at the text of the law itself, it seems to exclude photographs, here's the relevant section:
" (740 ILCS 14/10) Sec. 10. Definitions. In this Act: "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs, human biological samples used for valid scientific testing or screening, demographic data, tattoo descriptions, or physical descriptions such as height, weight, hair color, or eye color."
I'm not really sure what they mean by "face geometry" whereas at the same time, excluding photographs. Does this mean if my service measures the distance between the eyes, and the width of the mouth, and clusters photos by that, or by eye or hair color by using say, segmentation or histogram clustering, all of a sudden it's illegal? That would seem to be a fairly absurd and broad definition of biometric security information.
In theory, I suppose, the computation of the features, could be done on the client, and then have the features cloud-synced and replicated to all clients, but this would make for a shitty search experience, especially if the machine learning or feature extraction technique improvements overtime, and all of a sudden, you've got to download 20,000 photos and recompute everything on your phone.