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Google collects face data now – what it means and how to opt out

278 points by lelf 7y ago

guyzero 7y ago
"Apple doesn't earn revenue by selling targeted ads" Apple earns billions yearly from their search deal with Google. Apple earns billions from sales of targeted ads.
- cjoelrun 7y ago
  Is the difference the use of unique identifiable info?
- zepto 7y ago
  False. Apple does not earn millions from the sales of targeted ads. Google does. Apple earns millions from selling a link to Google. They also want to provide their customers with access to the best search engine. I’m sure they’d prefer that not to come with ads, but that option is not for sale. Claiming Apple earns the money from targeted ads is like saying Herman Miller or PG&E make money from targeted ads because they sell something to Google. Obvious bad reasoning.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    So if there wasn't ads on Google, Apple would totally still be earning billions on this deal? It's fairly obvious where the cash flows from.
    - zepto 7y ago
      The advertising is Google’s business model - not Apple’s. Google could make its money a different way. It’s true that if they did so they might not be a monopolist. Who knows what the bidding for the default search spot would look like in that case, but it is their choice.
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        Just because you buy something from someone outside your company does not mean you're not benefiting from their business model. Companies don't operate in a vacuum. To put an extreme example, just because Apple pays Foxconn does not mean they don't benefit from what's effectively slave labour. They're not removed from the effects of their transaction. The principal works in reverse too.
        zepto 7y ago
        Sure - but Apple doesn’t control Google’s business model any more than I do. I dislike Google’s business model but I use google search amongst others because they have a monopoly. If a competitor arose that Apple’s customers were happy with, I’m sure they’d prefer to choose a different company.
        samtheprogram 7y ago
        Apple knows exactly where their money is coming from and is complicit. They don't care, because Google has the best user experience, and their users that do care are power users that can opt-out. As much as Apple cares about privacy, nothing matches Google in search quality. Steve Jobs once said in an interview with Wired: > When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. Sadly, I think that quote applies a lot to Google as well. I think a lot of people, and at least anecdotally almost everyone I talk to, just don't/doesn't care about (or maybe understand the threat of) the collection that is happening. In the case of Google, they just want to find stuff on the internet without trying multiple times or adding additional keywords to their search.
        zepto 7y ago
        Apple didn’t design Google’s business model.
- QuadrupleA 7y ago
  I don't think it's crystal clear how much Google makes from targeted vs honest classic "contextual" ads, though they're certainly plowing ahead with the former. I'm dearly hoping this targeted stuff gets enough backlash / blockage that adtech companies give up on it, or that DuckDuckGo and other more privacy-respecting companies end up winning in the end.
larrydag 7y ago
Honest question. Why do we always need to opt out of something that we may or may not have signed up? Shouldn't these organizations be asking us to opt in? I'm beginning to think more and more that we need a data privacy bill of rights. https://epic.org/privacy/white_house_consumer_privacy_.html https://epic.org/privacy/white_house_consumer_privacy_.html Note. I don't know how i feel about EPIC so buyer beware. Yet sounds interesting.
- Kason 7y ago
  Based on the article, it seems that this is actually an opt-in service despite the title.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Defaults matter. Fundamentally speaking, the vast majority of everyone will use whatever is the default. That's why Google pays Apple billions to be default on iPhone. That's why Google made Android and Chrome. Google isn't the top search engine because of how well it searches, it's the top search engine because it's the default search engine. A large part of why Bing has the market share is the same: It's the default on Windows devices and most people won't change it. (I mean, let's be honest, "I want to switch my search to Bing" was said by nobody ever who lives outside Redmond.) Defaults matter. So when you want to use everyone's data, and you make it opt in, you only get a little bit of everyone's data, whereas if you make it opt out, you get most everyone's data. And unfortunately, legal regulation is the only way we can override tech companies desire to default to the best answer for them.
- izacus 7y ago
  The article title is misleading - Face Match feature isn't enabled unless you opt into it and train your face explicitly.
- Despegar 7y ago
  EPIC is much better on privacy than the EFF is, who only has sharp words for government surveillance but otherwise acts as the tech industry's lobbyist. https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/why-arent-privacy-groups-fighting-to-regulate-facebook.html https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/why-arent-privacy-group...
SeeDave 7y ago
I visited the Amazon Go store on Market St. in SF. I really enjoyed the convenience of not waiting in line. With that said, the Richard Stallman in me still regrets giving Amazon the opportunity to capture HD video of me in meatspace that is linked to my customer profile.
- fyfy18 7y ago
  My local supermarket has recently rolled out scan-and-go (is that the proper name?), where you carry a scanner around the store with you and at the checkout just return it and pay. It's funny because at peak times there is a queue of people at the self-service checkouts (which were supposed to make shopping quicker), but with this you can walk straight past them and pay. I just pick something off the shelf (and weigh loose produce), scan it, and put it straight in my bag. I'm surprised it has taken this long to roll out, as I remember in the mid 90s one supermarket trialed it, but then they abandoned it, and twenty years later it's back. IMO this gives most of the benefits (admittedly theft may be easier, but it's no different than regular shopping), but non of the they-are-tracking-everything-I-look-at privacy issues.
  - Qwertystop 7y ago
    A little easier? Seems to me it would make theft a lot easier; it removes the requirement that everything you're buying has to come out of the bag and in front of a cashier. Self-checkout still requires things to come out of your bag, so the person who's there for when a self-checkout machine inevitably needs cashier assistance can be keeping an eye on several stations at a time. With scan-and-go, those eyes need to be moved to the shelves, which is a much larger area and won't all be in one person's line-of-sight at once (and the person can easily obscure vision of the shelf).
    - CobrastanJorji 7y ago
      Also makes accidental theft much easier. I grocery shop with my kids, and I pretty regularly end up handing something weird or an unexpected bag of candy back to the checkout person.
izacus 7y ago
Can we please change the article title in a way that stops implying that Google does that without consent? You need to explicitly enable and train the feature when setting up the device.
- landcoctos 7y ago
  What sort of patterns are used when setting up the device? Does it 'encourage' enabling of this?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- djrogers 7y ago
  You also explicitly enable and train FaceID on an iPhone, yet Apple does not collect or store any biometric data anywhere but on your phone. The issue here is the collection, storage, and potential use of the data by Google. Google should allow you to opt-in to them collecting that data anywhere off-device, but for now they do not.
  - dontblink 7y ago
    Why should they? Don't use it if you don't like the terms.
ses1984 7y ago
"now"? What is Google photos? Isn't half the purpose of Google photos to be food for machine learning?
- himlion 7y ago
  It is, I have been using it because it's very convenient to find specific photos if you have a huge archive. You can type basically any object, name or name + object and you'll get the relevant photos. I am thinking about stopping it because I'm uncomfortable with Google having all that data. I'm going to look into any local and/or open source solutions in this space.
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    > I'm going to look into any local and/or open source solutions in this space. Share if you find anything. The only other solutions I've found so far are: Apple Photos - requires having Apple devices Plex - meets neither the 'local' nor 'open source' requirement as it sends your photos to some other random cloud provider to scan If you can find anything, or if anyone else does know, please do share!
    - robmiller 7y ago
      For those with a Synology, their Photos app has some of this search ability, but Google is much further ahead.
    - mceachen 7y ago
      I'm building that right now, and an looking for more beta testers. https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ Your photos and videos remain on hardware that you own (or rent). It's designed to scale to millions of photos and videos on limited hardware (I run it for my family on a raspberry pi with a big external hard drive that sits next to my router). The browsing experience is fun, both on a 4k display and on my iPhone SE The only cloud service I run is my licensing storefront, and delegate error reporting to Sentry, which you can opt out of. Disclaimer: I'm the founder and developer.
ucaetano 7y ago
TL;DR: > Can I turn Face Match off? > Don't enable the Face Match feature to begin with.
5trokerac3 7y ago
"Hey, Google, use every discernible iota of my personal information to build the foundation of a Chinese-style, authoritarian, digital dystopia, because I'm too lazy to learn basic, self-managed organizational skills."
- bhhaskin 7y ago
  Pretty much this. I think users today are extremely lazy and are unwilling to learn anything. It's to the point where they are the ones being used instead of doing the using.
  - Fwirt 7y ago
    "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
    - partialrecall 7y ago
      "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind." Given that a Butlerian Jihad seems unlikely, what are our options? If we can't stop it, maybe we need to keep pace with it instead. If this is a Red Queen Race, then we need to give people the tools needed to compete.
    - harshreality 7y ago
      Only at the margins are other people with machines enslaving anyone. I think it's mostly an emergent phenomena enslaving everyone into some cultural and behavioral paradigm that nobody intends or particularly wants. But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap), and therefore can't be seriously entertained.
      - partialrecall 7y ago
        > "But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap), and therefore can't be seriously entertained." So the industry is too big to fail?
nottorp 7y ago
Funny that on cnet you get an opt out screen for their tracking that is totally unresponsive on my phone. And they worry about google.
sebastianconcpt 7y ago
TL;DR: Can't opt out. Can I opt out of all of these as well? Unfortunately, not very easily. With Google Photos, you can choose not to run the facial recognition tool on your own photos, but you can't control what other people who may have uploaded photos of you decide to do. Facebook just recently switched to an opt-in setting for allowing its software to suggest friends tag you in their photo posts, meaning the social network will no longer make such suggestions by default. But that doesn't mean Facebook isn't scanning or processing your image, only that it won't share that information with other users unless you choose to allow it. Welcome to the era of living publicly and naked. Enjoy.
- nerdjon 7y ago
  This is what pisses me off the most about companies like Facebook and Google. I can spend all the energy I want to not use their products or limit the amount of data that I have, but the second someone else uses it (that I communicate with, has photos of me, etc) and gives them unlimited access they know more about me than I consent to.
  - pixl97 7y ago
    At one point sharing home wifi with friends was a nice way to save them bandwidth. These days its a nice way for surveillance capitalism to figure out your home IP, and if they take pictures, associate it with individuals.
    - jraph 7y ago
      Ah ah, no need to go to the extra length of sharing your Wi-Fi for that, your friends' phones already know where they are by scanning nearby WiFi access points, cellular towers and using GPS.
  - jackbrookes 7y ago
    How do you realistically expect to prevent a company (that uses facial recognition for perhaps useful features e.g. tagging) from scanning your face? For it to know that the pixels it sees is your face, it has to have a model of your face somewhere. I guess there is no good solution to this problem.
TKWasRight 7y ago
> Welcome to the era of living publicly and naked. Enjoy. You could always just...not use/buy their products
- moate 7y ago
  Without knowing the specifics about how this product works on the engineering side, do you think the following is true: If I, random delivery man, walk up to a Nest user's home, and his camera scans my face to compare to the data stored for facial confirmation, that this information is not used/stored by the recognition software? The system is always on/scanning. It's using my face somehow, and I'm not using or buying their product, I'm just a person going about my day.
  - wwweston 7y ago
    Hey, now. Everyone knows that in a liberty-focused society -- especially one in which we finally get rid of all burdensome regulation which would keep the free enterprise system from ushering in a market-guided utopia -- you are perfectly free to tell anyone whose house you're going to that you will not go anywhere that has a doorbell camera. Or to a business with a security camera. And as for the delivery man angle... sure, that may seem like compulsion, but for one thing, the delivery man can always quit his job (especially in an optimally functioning market which will of course increase labor opportunities and will definitely not reduce wages for labor to its marginal production costs), plus eventually they'll have to quit because we're going to automate delivery anyway.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      you are perfectly free to tell anyone whose house you're going to that you will not go anywhere that has a doorbell camera. Doorbell cameras give perfectly adequate views of many places other than people's porches. If Google wants to put a data-collecting robot on the street with a big sign reading "We're scanning your face to sell to advertisers!" there's nothing I can do about it, but at least it's honest. Google using Nest cameras to scan the activities of people just walking down a nearby street is not cool.
aloknnikhil 7y ago
Whether this is opt-in/opt-out is not clear. What bothers me, though, is how Google won't delete your images used for training automatically. https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9320885?hl=en https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9320885?hl=en > Note: Disabling Face Match will delete your face model from your device but it will not delete the enrollment images used to create your face model. To delete Face Match enrollment images, visit myactivity.google.com. So, the real question is, why do we have to be aware of some gotcha that's deeply embedded somewhere in some support page that majority of us won't look at? This is the case with most of Google's opt-out strategies.
- magashna 7y ago
  If I don't have a Nest or the Google Home app, can I still opt-out or is this even enabled?
  - input_sh 7y ago
    https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols This is a handy link to check from time to time. Note that some of these include degraded experience on Google's services, so I definitely wouldn't recommend turning them all off (or "pausing them", as Google puts it) without understanding what they actually do.
    - magashna 7y ago
      Ok, nothing there about face data. Only thing enabled is youtube history and everything works fine.
      - shakna 7y ago
        You can delete current data here [0], but I haven't seen any "opt out" anywhere. [0] https://myactivity.google.com/page?page=match_enrollment https://myactivity.google.com/page?page=match_enrollment
- craftyguy 7y ago
pavel_lishin 7y ago
Anyone else find it somewhat ironically humorous that a big popup promoting Alexa comes up as you scroll down the page? https://i.imgur.com/guKdbFA.png https://i.imgur.com/guKdbFA.png
strict9 7y ago
No mention of Illinois, which is the state with the only biometric privacy law with teeth. >The Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) was passed by the Illinois General Assembly on October 3, 2008. Codified as 740 ILCS/14 and Public Act 095-994, the BIPA guards against the unlawful collection and storing of biometric information.[1] When Illinois passed the law in 2008, it became the first state to regulate the collection of biometric information.[2] Washington and Texas have since passed similar laws.[3] However, the BIPA remains the only law that allows private individuals to file a lawsuit for damages stemming from a violation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_... Edit: my conspiracy theory is that the tech industry's lobbyists are pushing for legislation on privacy at the federal level because they know such a law would be more watered down than what states would pass. And almost certainly much weaker than IL's current laws in protecting privacy in this regard.
- throwaway184720 7y ago
  Google won against Illinois in a recent case: https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-oks-google-facial-recognition-software/ https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-oks-google-facial-recog...
  - JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
    Heads they win tails you lose. So the IL law supposedly prevents the collection and retention of data but the judge dismissed the case because collecting and storing the data isn't enough to sue them on its own without farther proof of damages...
    - gowld 7y ago
      Apparently the IL Supreme Court issued a ruling contradictory to the District Court's Google Photos ruling, a month later: https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2019/01/illinois-supreme-court https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2019/01/illino... There are legal technicalities about if the Google case is appealable on that basis, and what the result of the next similar lawsuit will be.
scarejunba 7y ago
This is a fucking cool feature. In house, opt-in. I love it.
mxuribe 7y ago
I swear, we need many more people and orgs creating privacy-preserving products like Reflectacles: https://www.reflectacles.com/ https://www.reflectacles.com/ I'm not at all affiliated with Reflectacles, but when i first heard of them (on HN) I loved the idea! Where else beyond Reflectacles can i throw my money at in order to preserve my privacy?
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Well, currently you're not throwing any money at Reflectacles because they aren't expected to ship until next year.
  - mxuribe 7y ago
    Acknowledged... I meant: what other projects exist like Reflectacles that i could (either now or soon) happily pay money for (in order to help preserve privacy)?? For me, privacy is no longer a "nice to have" feature, but rather, a top-most feature for products/services that i pay for.
    - im3w1l 7y ago
      Librem 5 Your own server (physically in your home) running your own services. Enables you to access your data from your phone/laptop/desktop while retaining control.
      - mxuribe 7y ago
        Yep, librem 5 - and other similar products - is exactly what we need more of. As far as my own server, yep, I'm already running services like nextcloud, etc. My challenge is more on the hardware and other non-digital products/services. But thanks for bringing up librem 5 - kudos!
- autoexec 7y ago
  I like the idea of Reflectacles but it's ironic that you can't even view the contents to their site without allowing scripts to run from companies like squarespace and adobe (typekit) which track users and share that data with others.
jason46 7y ago
Well, I can type my daughters name into photos and find her photos, so yes I would agree.
lazyguy2 7y ago
> How can I tell if image data is being uploaded? If you have these devices in your house, they are turned on, and you are using them then they are uploading your data. > Do Google or Apple use my facial data to personalize the advertisements I see? If it makes them money they will. Otherwise they won't. They probably will if they are not doing it already. > Can I turn Face Match off? Yes. Turn the device off. Dispose of the devices in the trash. This will insure it's not spying on you. > Can I opt out of all of these as well? Yes. It's very easy. Don't purchase spyware devices. Stop giving them money. Stop using their products. > Who else is collecting and processing my facial data? Everybody from your local and federal governments to major corporations. Anybody who makes money collecting user data and then selling it is going to be doing it if they haven't already. Your browsing history, credit card usage, legal documents, mortgage documents, driver license photos, and anything and everything they can get their hands on is being used to track you, document you, profile you, and going into optimizing revenue gathering to the best of their abilities.
cryptopeeper 7y ago
New trend, growing your hair long over your face. Sam the sheep dog anyone?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
seamyb88 7y ago
The good old opt out. In order for us to not hold your face we need to hold all sorts of information to identify you as the opter outer. Either way we have to know who you are.
heroprotagonist 7y ago
I am suspicious of the IR/depth capabilities that will allegedly be on the new Pixel 4 for this reason. There's not a huge user demand for depth data, but there are great reasons Google might want to collect and process that data from its users. This, along with the previous changes to make the photo capability be a short video capture that gets sent to Google, make me very suspicious about what they are doing with all of that data. Things like the facial action coding system for microexpression analysis have been around for decades for anyone with a college library card. It's just been very difficult for software to parse from video. I can definitely see the camera changes making this a lot easier.
RyanAF7 7y ago
God forbid they pay people to take photos to upload your data without your consent.
lucb1e 7y ago
> Face Match, introduced on the Google Nest Hub Max If I remember correctly, Nest is a thermostat. Not sure what a camera is for in my thermostat, but so Google is indexing your face only if you bought a device of theirs with a camera and installed it in your home? Not that that makes it much better (imagine your Google Play Services suddenly figured this would be helpful to you and makes it opt-out), but the current title implies it indexes all faces on image search or maybe pictures on their file upload system or something.
- gundmc 7y ago
  The Nest Hub Max is not a thermostat. It's basically a Google Home with a big speaker, a camera for video chat and a screen. In one comment you made an incorrect assumption about what the product is, what Google is doing, proposed an imaginary situation about them doing something even worse and then drew a wild inference based on the title of the article.
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    Goes to show how accurate the title is, which was my point.
fnord77 7y ago
> Apple... acknowledges that it shares some facial data with third-party developers. So much for apple keeping data private.
- djrogers 7y ago
  That’s some inflammatory wording there - what Apple does is allow people to write apps that can use the front camera and a limited depth map - after asking the users permission. How else could a 3rd party app take selfies or use depth mapped filters (Snapchat anyone)? This is completely different from what the article implies - that Apple shares FaceID enrollment data with anyone who asks. If Apple restricted access to that hardware, the internet would flip out and cry foul. So they allow it, with a lot of limitations, and people still try to make an issue of it.. sigh....
jossmexico 7y ago
Reminds of FaceApp. Simple channel to collect Americans face pictures for later use in who knows what...
WMCRUN 7y ago
I like how the pop up I got on this story offers to let me “Do More With Alexa” if I subscribe
xupybd 7y ago
What's really scary is that anyone can be collecting your info from publicly available sources. Tools like this make it really easy https://github.com/Greenwolf/social_mapper https://github.com/Greenwolf/social_mapper. The age of privacy is over.
- 19ylram49 7y ago
  Yikes, my guess is that the linked project most likely isn’t being used for good.

278 points by lelf 7y ago

"Apple doesn't earn revenue by selling targeted ads" Apple earns billions yearly from their search deal with Google. Apple earns billions from sales of targeted ads.

cjoelrun 7y ago
Is the difference the use of unique identifiable info?
zepto 7y ago
False. Apple does not earn millions from the sales of targeted ads. Google does. Apple earns millions from selling a link to Google. They also want to provide their customers with access to the best search engine. I’m sure they’d prefer that not to come with ads, but that option is not for sale. Claiming Apple earns the money from targeted ads is like saying Herman Miller or PG&E make money from targeted ads because they sell something to Google. Obvious bad reasoning.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  So if there wasn't ads on Google, Apple would totally still be earning billions on this deal? It's fairly obvious where the cash flows from.
  - zepto 7y ago
    The advertising is Google’s business model - not Apple’s. Google could make its money a different way. It’s true that if they did so they might not be a monopolist. Who knows what the bidding for the default search spot would look like in that case, but it is their choice.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Just because you buy something from someone outside your company does not mean you're not benefiting from their business model. Companies don't operate in a vacuum. To put an extreme example, just because Apple pays Foxconn does not mean they don't benefit from what's effectively slave labour. They're not removed from the effects of their transaction. The principal works in reverse too.
      - zepto 7y ago
        Sure - but Apple doesn’t control Google’s business model any more than I do. I dislike Google’s business model but I use google search amongst others because they have a monopoly. If a competitor arose that Apple’s customers were happy with, I’m sure they’d prefer to choose a different company.
        samtheprogram 7y ago
        Apple knows exactly where their money is coming from and is complicit. They don't care, because Google has the best user experience, and their users that do care are power users that can opt-out. As much as Apple cares about privacy, nothing matches Google in search quality. Steve Jobs once said in an interview with Wired: > When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. Sadly, I think that quote applies a lot to Google as well. I think a lot of people, and at least anecdotally almost everyone I talk to, just don't/doesn't care about (or maybe understand the threat of) the collection that is happening. In the case of Google, they just want to find stuff on the internet without trying multiple times or adding additional keywords to their search.
        zepto 7y ago
        Apple didn’t design Google’s business model.
QuadrupleA 7y ago
I don't think it's crystal clear how much Google makes from targeted vs honest classic "contextual" ads, though they're certainly plowing ahead with the former. I'm dearly hoping this targeted stuff gets enough backlash / blockage that adtech companies give up on it, or that DuckDuckGo and other more privacy-respecting companies end up winning in the end.

larrydag 7y ago

Honest question. Why do we always need to opt out of something that we may or may not have signed up? Shouldn't these organizations be asking us to opt in? I'm beginning to think more and more that we need a data privacy bill of rights. https://epic.org/privacy/white_house_consumer_privacy_.html https://epic.org/privacy/white_house_consumer_privacy_.html Note. I don't know how i feel about EPIC so buyer beware. Yet sounds interesting.

Kason 7y ago
Based on the article, it seems that this is actually an opt-in service despite the title.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Defaults matter. Fundamentally speaking, the vast majority of everyone will use whatever is the default. That's why Google pays Apple billions to be default on iPhone. That's why Google made Android and Chrome. Google isn't the top search engine because of how well it searches, it's the top search engine because it's the default search engine. A large part of why Bing has the market share is the same: It's the default on Windows devices and most people won't change it. (I mean, let's be honest, "I want to switch my search to Bing" was said by nobody ever who lives outside Redmond.) Defaults matter. So when you want to use everyone's data, and you make it opt in, you only get a little bit of everyone's data, whereas if you make it opt out, you get most everyone's data. And unfortunately, legal regulation is the only way we can override tech companies desire to default to the best answer for them.
izacus 7y ago
The article title is misleading - Face Match feature isn't enabled unless you opt into it and train your face explicitly.
Despegar 7y ago
EPIC is much better on privacy than the EFF is, who only has sharp words for government surveillance but otherwise acts as the tech industry's lobbyist. https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/why-arent-privacy-groups-fighting-to-regulate-facebook.html https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/why-arent-privacy-group...

SeeDave 7y ago

I visited the Amazon Go store on Market St. in SF. I really enjoyed the convenience of not waiting in line. With that said, the Richard Stallman in me still regrets giving Amazon the opportunity to capture HD video of me in meatspace that is linked to my customer profile.

fyfy18 7y ago
My local supermarket has recently rolled out scan-and-go (is that the proper name?), where you carry a scanner around the store with you and at the checkout just return it and pay. It's funny because at peak times there is a queue of people at the self-service checkouts (which were supposed to make shopping quicker), but with this you can walk straight past them and pay. I just pick something off the shelf (and weigh loose produce), scan it, and put it straight in my bag. I'm surprised it has taken this long to roll out, as I remember in the mid 90s one supermarket trialed it, but then they abandoned it, and twenty years later it's back. IMO this gives most of the benefits (admittedly theft may be easier, but it's no different than regular shopping), but non of the they-are-tracking-everything-I-look-at privacy issues.
- Qwertystop 7y ago
  A little easier? Seems to me it would make theft a lot easier; it removes the requirement that everything you're buying has to come out of the bag and in front of a cashier. Self-checkout still requires things to come out of your bag, so the person who's there for when a self-checkout machine inevitably needs cashier assistance can be keeping an eye on several stations at a time. With scan-and-go, those eyes need to be moved to the shelves, which is a much larger area and won't all be in one person's line-of-sight at once (and the person can easily obscure vision of the shelf).
  - CobrastanJorji 7y ago
    Also makes accidental theft much easier. I grocery shop with my kids, and I pretty regularly end up handing something weird or an unexpected bag of candy back to the checkout person.

izacus 7y ago

Can we please change the article title in a way that stops implying that Google does that without consent? You need to explicitly enable and train the feature when setting up the device.

landcoctos 7y ago
What sort of patterns are used when setting up the device? Does it 'encourage' enabling of this?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
djrogers 7y ago
You also explicitly enable and train FaceID on an iPhone, yet Apple does not collect or store any biometric data anywhere but on your phone. The issue here is the collection, storage, and potential use of the data by Google. Google should allow you to opt-in to them collecting that data anywhere off-device, but for now they do not.
- dontblink 7y ago
  Why should they? Don't use it if you don't like the terms.

ses1984 7y ago

"now"? What is Google photos? Isn't half the purpose of Google photos to be food for machine learning?

himlion 7y ago
It is, I have been using it because it's very convenient to find specific photos if you have a huge archive. You can type basically any object, name or name + object and you'll get the relevant photos. I am thinking about stopping it because I'm uncomfortable with Google having all that data. I'm going to look into any local and/or open source solutions in this space.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  > I'm going to look into any local and/or open source solutions in this space. Share if you find anything. The only other solutions I've found so far are: Apple Photos - requires having Apple devices Plex - meets neither the 'local' nor 'open source' requirement as it sends your photos to some other random cloud provider to scan If you can find anything, or if anyone else does know, please do share!
  - robmiller 7y ago
    For those with a Synology, their Photos app has some of this search ability, but Google is much further ahead.
  - mceachen 7y ago
    I'm building that right now, and an looking for more beta testers. https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ Your photos and videos remain on hardware that you own (or rent). It's designed to scale to millions of photos and videos on limited hardware (I run it for my family on a raspberry pi with a big external hard drive that sits next to my router). The browsing experience is fun, both on a 4k display and on my iPhone SE The only cloud service I run is my licensing storefront, and delegate error reporting to Sentry, which you can opt out of. Disclaimer: I'm the founder and developer.

ucaetano 7y ago

TL;DR: > Can I turn Face Match off? > Don't enable the Face Match feature to begin with.

5trokerac3 7y ago

"Hey, Google, use every discernible iota of my personal information to build the foundation of a Chinese-style, authoritarian, digital dystopia, because I'm too lazy to learn basic, self-managed organizational skills."

bhhaskin 7y ago
Pretty much this. I think users today are extremely lazy and are unwilling to learn anything. It's to the point where they are the ones being used instead of doing the using.
- Fwirt 7y ago
  "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
  - partialrecall 7y ago
    "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind." Given that a Butlerian Jihad seems unlikely, what are our options? If we can't stop it, maybe we need to keep pace with it instead. If this is a Red Queen Race, then we need to give people the tools needed to compete.
  - harshreality 7y ago
    Only at the margins are other people with machines enslaving anyone. I think it's mostly an emergent phenomena enslaving everyone into some cultural and behavioral paradigm that nobody intends or particularly wants. But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap), and therefore can't be seriously entertained.
    - partialrecall 7y ago
      > "But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap), and therefore can't be seriously entertained." So the industry is too big to fail?

nottorp 7y ago

Funny that on cnet you get an opt out screen for their tracking that is totally unresponsive on my phone. And they worry about google.

sebastianconcpt 7y ago

TL;DR: Can't opt out. Can I opt out of all of these as well? Unfortunately, not very easily. With Google Photos, you can choose not to run the facial recognition tool on your own photos, but you can't control what other people who may have uploaded photos of you decide to do. Facebook just recently switched to an opt-in setting for allowing its software to suggest friends tag you in their photo posts, meaning the social network will no longer make such suggestions by default. But that doesn't mean Facebook isn't scanning or processing your image, only that it won't share that information with other users unless you choose to allow it. Welcome to the era of living publicly and naked. Enjoy.

nerdjon 7y ago
This is what pisses me off the most about companies like Facebook and Google. I can spend all the energy I want to not use their products or limit the amount of data that I have, but the second someone else uses it (that I communicate with, has photos of me, etc) and gives them unlimited access they know more about me than I consent to.
- pixl97 7y ago
  At one point sharing home wifi with friends was a nice way to save them bandwidth. These days its a nice way for surveillance capitalism to figure out your home IP, and if they take pictures, associate it with individuals.
  - jraph 7y ago
    Ah ah, no need to go to the extra length of sharing your Wi-Fi for that, your friends' phones already know where they are by scanning nearby WiFi access points, cellular towers and using GPS.
- jackbrookes 7y ago
  How do you realistically expect to prevent a company (that uses facial recognition for perhaps useful features e.g. tagging) from scanning your face? For it to know that the pixels it sees is your face, it has to have a model of your face somewhere. I guess there is no good solution to this problem.

TKWasRight 7y ago

> Welcome to the era of living publicly and naked. Enjoy. You could always just...not use/buy their products

moate 7y ago
Without knowing the specifics about how this product works on the engineering side, do you think the following is true: If I, random delivery man, walk up to a Nest user's home, and his camera scans my face to compare to the data stored for facial confirmation, that this information is not used/stored by the recognition software? The system is always on/scanning. It's using my face somehow, and I'm not using or buying their product, I'm just a person going about my day.
- wwweston 7y ago
  Hey, now. Everyone knows that in a liberty-focused society -- especially one in which we finally get rid of all burdensome regulation which would keep the free enterprise system from ushering in a market-guided utopia -- you are perfectly free to tell anyone whose house you're going to that you will not go anywhere that has a doorbell camera. Or to a business with a security camera. And as for the delivery man angle... sure, that may seem like compulsion, but for one thing, the delivery man can always quit his job (especially in an optimally functioning market which will of course increase labor opportunities and will definitely not reduce wages for labor to its marginal production costs), plus eventually they'll have to quit because we're going to automate delivery anyway.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    you are perfectly free to tell anyone whose house you're going to that you will not go anywhere that has a doorbell camera. Doorbell cameras give perfectly adequate views of many places other than people's porches. If Google wants to put a data-collecting robot on the street with a big sign reading "We're scanning your face to sell to advertisers!" there's nothing I can do about it, but at least it's honest. Google using Nest cameras to scan the activities of people just walking down a nearby street is not cool.

aloknnikhil 7y ago

Whether this is opt-in/opt-out is not clear. What bothers me, though, is how Google won't delete your images used for training automatically. https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9320885?hl=en https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9320885?hl=en > Note: Disabling Face Match will delete your face model from your device but it will not delete the enrollment images used to create your face model. To delete Face Match enrollment images, visit myactivity.google.com. So, the real question is, why do we have to be aware of some gotcha that's deeply embedded somewhere in some support page that majority of us won't look at? This is the case with most of Google's opt-out strategies.

magashna 7y ago
If I don't have a Nest or the Google Home app, can I still opt-out or is this even enabled?
- input_sh 7y ago
  https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols This is a handy link to check from time to time. Note that some of these include degraded experience on Google's services, so I definitely wouldn't recommend turning them all off (or "pausing them", as Google puts it) without understanding what they actually do.
  - magashna 7y ago
    Ok, nothing there about face data. Only thing enabled is youtube history and everything works fine.
    - shakna 7y ago
      You can delete current data here [0], but I haven't seen any "opt out" anywhere. [0] https://myactivity.google.com/page?page=match_enrollment https://myactivity.google.com/page?page=match_enrollment
craftyguy 7y ago

pavel_lishin 7y ago

Anyone else find it somewhat ironically humorous that a big popup promoting Alexa comes up as you scroll down the page? https://i.imgur.com/guKdbFA.png https://i.imgur.com/guKdbFA.png

strict9 7y ago

No mention of Illinois, which is the state with the only biometric privacy law with teeth. >The Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) was passed by the Illinois General Assembly on October 3, 2008. Codified as 740 ILCS/14 and Public Act 095-994, the BIPA guards against the unlawful collection and storing of biometric information.[1] When Illinois passed the law in 2008, it became the first state to regulate the collection of biometric information.[2] Washington and Texas have since passed similar laws.[3] However, the BIPA remains the only law that allows private individuals to file a lawsuit for damages stemming from a violation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_... Edit: my conspiracy theory is that the tech industry's lobbyists are pushing for legislation on privacy at the federal level because they know such a law would be more watered down than what states would pass. And almost certainly much weaker than IL's current laws in protecting privacy in this regard.

throwaway184720 7y ago
Google won against Illinois in a recent case: https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-oks-google-facial-recognition-software/ https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-oks-google-facial-recog...
- JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
  Heads they win tails you lose. So the IL law supposedly prevents the collection and retention of data but the judge dismissed the case because collecting and storing the data isn't enough to sue them on its own without farther proof of damages...
  - gowld 7y ago
    Apparently the IL Supreme Court issued a ruling contradictory to the District Court's Google Photos ruling, a month later: https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2019/01/illinois-supreme-court https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2019/01/illino... There are legal technicalities about if the Google case is appealable on that basis, and what the result of the next similar lawsuit will be.

scarejunba 7y ago

This is a fucking cool feature. In house, opt-in. I love it.

mxuribe 7y ago

I swear, we need many more people and orgs creating privacy-preserving products like Reflectacles: https://www.reflectacles.com/ https://www.reflectacles.com/ I'm not at all affiliated with Reflectacles, but when i first heard of them (on HN) I loved the idea! Where else beyond Reflectacles can i throw my money at in order to preserve my privacy?

reaperducer 7y ago
Well, currently you're not throwing any money at Reflectacles because they aren't expected to ship until next year.
- mxuribe 7y ago
  Acknowledged... I meant: what other projects exist like Reflectacles that i could (either now or soon) happily pay money for (in order to help preserve privacy)?? For me, privacy is no longer a "nice to have" feature, but rather, a top-most feature for products/services that i pay for.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    Librem 5 Your own server (physically in your home) running your own services. Enables you to access your data from your phone/laptop/desktop while retaining control.
    - mxuribe 7y ago
      Yep, librem 5 - and other similar products - is exactly what we need more of. As far as my own server, yep, I'm already running services like nextcloud, etc. My challenge is more on the hardware and other non-digital products/services. But thanks for bringing up librem 5 - kudos!
autoexec 7y ago
I like the idea of Reflectacles but it's ironic that you can't even view the contents to their site without allowing scripts to run from companies like squarespace and adobe (typekit) which track users and share that data with others.

jason46 7y ago

Well, I can type my daughters name into photos and find her photos, so yes I would agree.

lazyguy2 7y ago

> How can I tell if image data is being uploaded? If you have these devices in your house, they are turned on, and you are using them then they are uploading your data. > Do Google or Apple use my facial data to personalize the advertisements I see? If it makes them money they will. Otherwise they won't. They probably will if they are not doing it already. > Can I turn Face Match off? Yes. Turn the device off. Dispose of the devices in the trash. This will insure it's not spying on you. > Can I opt out of all of these as well? Yes. It's very easy. Don't purchase spyware devices. Stop giving them money. Stop using their products. > Who else is collecting and processing my facial data? Everybody from your local and federal governments to major corporations. Anybody who makes money collecting user data and then selling it is going to be doing it if they haven't already. Your browsing history, credit card usage, legal documents, mortgage documents, driver license photos, and anything and everything they can get their hands on is being used to track you, document you, profile you, and going into optimizing revenue gathering to the best of their abilities.

cryptopeeper 7y ago

New trend, growing your hair long over your face. Sam the sheep dog anyone?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

seamyb88 7y ago

The good old opt out. In order for us to not hold your face we need to hold all sorts of information to identify you as the opter outer. Either way we have to know who you are.

heroprotagonist 7y ago

I am suspicious of the IR/depth capabilities that will allegedly be on the new Pixel 4 for this reason. There's not a huge user demand for depth data, but there are great reasons Google might want to collect and process that data from its users. This, along with the previous changes to make the photo capability be a short video capture that gets sent to Google, make me very suspicious about what they are doing with all of that data. Things like the facial action coding system for microexpression analysis have been around for decades for anyone with a college library card. It's just been very difficult for software to parse from video. I can definitely see the camera changes making this a lot easier.

RyanAF7 7y ago

God forbid they pay people to take photos to upload your data without your consent.

lucb1e 7y ago

> Face Match, introduced on the Google Nest Hub Max If I remember correctly, Nest is a thermostat. Not sure what a camera is for in my thermostat, but so Google is indexing your face only if you bought a device of theirs with a camera and installed it in your home? Not that that makes it much better (imagine your Google Play Services suddenly figured this would be helpful to you and makes it opt-out), but the current title implies it indexes all faces on image search or maybe pictures on their file upload system or something.

gundmc 7y ago
The Nest Hub Max is not a thermostat. It's basically a Google Home with a big speaker, a camera for video chat and a screen. In one comment you made an incorrect assumption about what the product is, what Google is doing, proposed an imaginary situation about them doing something even worse and then drew a wild inference based on the title of the article.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  Goes to show how accurate the title is, which was my point.

fnord77 7y ago

> Apple... acknowledges that it shares some facial data with third-party developers. So much for apple keeping data private.

djrogers 7y ago
That’s some inflammatory wording there - what Apple does is allow people to write apps that can use the front camera and a limited depth map - after asking the users permission. How else could a 3rd party app take selfies or use depth mapped filters (Snapchat anyone)? This is completely different from what the article implies - that Apple shares FaceID enrollment data with anyone who asks. If Apple restricted access to that hardware, the internet would flip out and cry foul. So they allow it, with a lot of limitations, and people still try to make an issue of it.. sigh....

jossmexico 7y ago

Reminds of FaceApp. Simple channel to collect Americans face pictures for later use in who knows what...

WMCRUN 7y ago

I like how the pop up I got on this story offers to let me “Do More With Alexa” if I subscribe

xupybd 7y ago

What's really scary is that anyone can be collecting your info from publicly available sources. Tools like this make it really easy https://github.com/Greenwolf/social_mapper https://github.com/Greenwolf/social_mapper. The age of privacy is over.

19ylram49 7y ago
Yikes, my guess is that the linked project most likely isn’t being used for good.