The wider question is, if this can be avoided at all. But I think we should at least try, because this kind of data can so easily be misused and at one point in time we were already aware of that, but forgot in recent times.
Your brain isn't memorizing billions of people's faces on the scale that Google is. There's a difference. It's a false equivalency.
If Google is learning about 10-20 people per account, and that data never gets combined, then what's the problem?
Google also processes billions of people's e-mails. But they're segregated per-account. So there's no problem. What makes someone's face any different from an e-mail they send?
Again, this lawsuit is not about Google aggregating anything. It's entirely about information that users voluntarily choose to supply, that is used for features desired by those users, and that remains segregated per-account.
Doing things at scale isn't a crime. Can you point out which law google broke?
The law in question:
Whether that's relevant to the law is what the courts will have to decide.
It's important to point out the important difference, which is that fingerprints are considered uniquely identifying for practical purposes, and are commonly used to identify individuals by automated security mechanisms and by law enforcement, whereas faces are considered uniquely identifying for practical purposes, and are commonly used to identify individuals by automated security mechanisms and by law enforcement.
>Mr. Paxton said in a statement. “I will continue to fight Big Tech to ensure the privacy and security of all Texans.”
It's obvious pandering to the masses. This is about Mr.Paxton trying to get some attention.
Not a fan of mass surveillance, but my gut says this is the wrong person to fight this fight. His motives are questionable, and it shows in specifically targeting private business and not working to "ensure the privacy and security of all Texans" from government and law enforcement.
He targeted Google, when Amazon, Facebook, etc. are doing the same. Also, less known companies like Palantir, roam free, just because they don't have the political baggage like Google do.
Worst of all, Paxton doesn't seem to have any issues with police departments having access to Nest or Ring accounts.
This is Paxton's incompetence for those unaware:
> Six of the people indicted last year on allegations that they were involved in a scheme to force teenage girls to “exchange sexual contact for crystal methamphetamine” are now free.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/elections-texas-presidential-elec...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/15/ken-paxton-securitie...
[3]https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/26/texas-attorney-gener...
https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6128838
My google photos has a "photo group" for every person I studied in college with (from a series of photos I took at a dinner with everyone present). It even has barack obama, which it recognized off a shirt a friend was wearing. I tagged none of these poeple.
Let’s say it was done without any kind of special face recognition but was done purely by some funky nearest neighbor algorithm in high dimensional space. Would you still object?
The end result is the same, grouping things by commonality on different axes, one of them being faces. If the underlying algorithm didn’t even know what faces were, would it may a difference?
No. It does not "recognize" a face. If you take a few pictures of another Google user, it won't say - "Hey, here are all the pics of John". It will just allow you to lookup all pictures that match a face. Its clustering and not recognition.
Second, in cases like the Nest camera or Google photos, presumably most of the people it's scanning don't match anything. It sure doesn't feel like a violation of privacy or consent for a computer to say, "I tried, but nope, face/voice not recognized".
Third, everyone being recognized has previously been identified by the user, whether someone tagging their friends in Photos, family members on Nest, or household members for Assistant. If I'm OK with a friend uploading an image of me to their own Google Photos, I don't see why I shouldn't allow them to run a facial detection algorithm to organize all the photos that contain me.
Now if Google were using all of this to build up a database of all the faces in the world matched to identities (as other sketchy companies have already done), then this would all be a problem. But there's zero evidence of anything like that, and that's not what this case is about. This isn't about misusing Street View or anything.
So it's hard to see this as anything but a political stunt? What's Texas's goal here -- to remove the helpful features that alert us when a stranger (as opposed to family member) is at our door, to distinguish voices in Assistant, and find photos of a particular friend in our photo library...? These are all genuinely useful features.
(Ah and I see I've already got a couple of downvotes... but zero comments explaining why.)