7 ms·

Texas sues Google for collecting biometric data without consent

178 points by fortran77 4y ago

shagie 4y ago
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/technology/texas-google-privacy-lawsuit.html?unlocked_article_code=yrsoSmf8HEyeunaUqzAcb7AmXKPersdHa2n23a_qpOY5kk9N5HegUUbNXf6yO5ofEKVo8XmpCRhjhmXTBC1rH7oWLp5wvp3jUcJYRFkZThBdD0-VGXzfo-Ks42YDy43kmSCh92Ix3HGpvrAqqsXf7vSmqtcMEy20wFeqI73HwmjLfV-9SPJC5p1u71ZHtGUHvn6eyq7Rl1MIIc0IUYW3eL2RYWugd4zzE_2c9RnQUH-u2ia3I73DrxVyqC-CLSiZJ1BLy6KlqKowJ0d2uJKs1aeSpjOaH6ACuuEG9HPB69UWaMFvOxc_kEtSy3JJYIGjl8Fq5fUvjQaHqf4kY6wNPd6C3c68AHkMHw&smid=share-url https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/technology/texas-google-p...
VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
> The complaint targets the Google Photos app, which allows people to search for photos they took of a particular person; Google’s Nest camera, which can send alerts when it recognizes (or fails to recognize) a visitor at the door; and the voice-activated Google Assistant, which can learn to recognize up to six users’ voices to give them personalized answers to their questions. Mr. Paxton said the products violated the rights of both users and nonusers, whose faces and voices were scanned or processed without their understanding or consent. It would be great if they could actually stop Google and everyone else from doing face recognition on random people in photos without them knowing or having any way to stop it.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Just keep in mind that the "they" in question is definitely not going to stop themselves from using it to comb crowd images for perpetrators of potential crimes and other wanted individuals.
  - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
    We can care about more than one thing at once. This article is about attempts to stop Google from doing it. That's what we're talking about.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      It's about attempts by the people who will do the other thing to stop Google from doing it. I'm sure Texas law enforcement wouldn't mind if cops could operate in neighborhoods with less worry about what people's Ring cameras will show them doing.
      - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
        you're trying to derail this conversation with some whataboutism
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        It's not a whataboutism to look one step forward to the consequences if Texas bans Google from offering these tools to consumers (which is: an arrangement where the tools are in the hands of only the government, not the government and private individuals). Texas's ban is in the business and commerce code; it's a ban for the commoners but not the government. We should be looking at attempts to exercise it with suspicion and concern.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  > face recognition on random people in photos Except they're not. They just match faces to itself and the user has to tell Google photos who it is. Google Photos isn't running faces against a database to ID people, it only matches like faces within your own albums.
  - 8ytecoder 4y ago
    I avoid Google products. But even to me it’s obvious that they’re not doing a global match. All facial recognition - if you could even call it that - is simply within the users photos. Kinda like a categorisation algorithm. Now, if they took this data and used it elsewhere Texas might have a case. Otherwise it should be thrown out.
  - monksy 4y ago
    They are doing face recognition but not detection. It's always amusing when I go through google photos and it shows me complete strangers that I have in my photographs.
- theptip 4y ago
  It's really simple (not easy): pass a US equivalent of GDPR, and make sure biometrics count as "personal data" as they do in the EU. CCPA gets you a lot of the way there (indeed I suspect you can request to have Google delete all your biometric data under the "right to be forgotten" clause), but I think CCPA doesn't prevent collection/processing of data without an agreement in place as the GDPR does. (Basically, GDPR requires you to have an agreement in place before storing any of my Personal Data, since it's that agreement that then binds who you can share it with, and how. If I don't use Google, then Google can't process my biometric data. I wonder if they get around this by approximately everyone using Google in some capacity, and having a "I also agree that you can process my biometric data" term in the ToS?) Interested in any lawyers' opinions on the above; my read of e.g. https://www.bakerlaw.com/webfiles/Privacy/2018/Articles/CCPA-GDPR-Chart.pdf https://www.bakerlaw.com/webfiles/Privacy/2018/Articles/CCPA... is that Google cannot (i.e. would be forbidden to) do biometric recognition on people that have requested for their data to be deleted. Where I'd like to see CCPA go further is that it doesn't strongly restrict transfers of data; under GDPR you explicitly approve a set of Processors and Sub-Processors, and must be informed when that changes. CCPA does seem to restrict sales of data, but doesn't tightly control where it is shared without sale.
  - mindslight 4y ago
    A direct analog of the GDPR is exactly what the US needs, especially with its framing of consent that doesn't allow the standard dance of nullification-via-nonconsentual-contract. I fear that all of these half-baked state privacy laws are going to force a move for overriding federal legislation, at which time the surveillance companies will lobby hard for all sorts of loopholes that effectively neuter the protections, and the totalitarian status quo will be set in stone. It's unfortunate the Internet surveillance industry wasn't nipped in the bud 15 years ago, now Surveillance Valley is held up as a bastion of "innovation" and most of the people who should know better are happily on the take.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      On the other hand, given that the GDPR is the source of the now-near-ubiquitous cookie-consent noise, perhaps it's better if the US not mirror that law. There are probably good parts of it that can be lifted, but it may tilt too hard in the direction of personal ownership of other people's perception of you. In any case, we can be confident that nothing will pass at the Federal level that would make credit scores illegal.
- amf12 4y ago
  The complaint is a farce. > Google Photos app, which allows people to search for photos they took of a particular person; All Google Photos does is group pictures by matching faces in pics to allow you to click on a face and lookup all pictures which have that face. It does not "recognize" who the picture belongs to. > Google’s Nest camera, which can send alerts when it recognizes (or fails to recognize) a visitor at the door; All the processing happens on the device locally. It will only "recognize" by name if you name a face. This is a premium feature and the tagged names are wiped when you stop the premium subscription. > voice-activated Google Assistant, which can learn to recognize up to six users’ voices to give them personalized answers to their questions. Users have to enroll their voice to access this feature.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    It might not be the case the complaint is a farce as per the law. On the other hand, it might be the case Texas passed an ill-thought-out "Don't collect biometric data" law that makes it illegal to do anything interesting with privately-taken photographs for personal use without the express consent of every individual in every photograph.
hirundo 4y ago
If I look at you and recognize you I don't feel that I have violated your rights, whether I use cybernetic augmentation or not.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  What if I pay someone who knows you to find and list every picture you've ever been in together with the location it was taken in, and I started tracking who and where you hang out with the most? Maybe every once in a while send you lists of things your friends have bought (I'm also doing this to them) just in case you might want to buy it as well. Genuinely curious if that feels violating to you
  - pc86 4y ago
    No, that doesn't sound like genuine curiosity.
    - thatguy0900 4y ago
      How so? Where is the line drawn? He's comfortable recognizing people's faces, we all are. That's not really what Googles doing though, mine is closer. I would draw the comfort line at amortizing what they know about my pictures with data they've only gained through other people's uploads, I think.
- petilon 4y ago
  You may not have, but the company that provided you cybernetic augmentation probably did, if they collected info without consent and rented it to you.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- boplicity 4y ago
  Yes, but you don't have literally millions of vision inputs that are constantly scanning for me.
crazygringo 4y ago
First of all, "biometric data" is a scary-sounding term that sounds like iris or fingerprint scans, when it's just... what people's faces and voices look and sound like. By this measure, my own brain is "collecting biometric data" on thousands of people a day while I walk down the street. 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.
- AnonCoward42 4y ago
  It is always a matter of scale. You can get the fingerprint of anyone (relatively) easily, but not everyone. So the problem only arises when it is done in mass or more generally when it can be used by centralized entities of any sort. 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.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  People always come in here with the same comment like "my brain memorizes people's faces too! Should that be illegal???" 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.
heisenbit 4y ago
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Broken clock I guess.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    We should keep a close eye on this concern. Brin's "The Transparent Society" notes that once ubiquitous, automated, cheap surveillance becomes widely available, the genie is out of the bottle... There isn't a scenario where nobody uses it, there are merely scenarios where we decide who may use it and what contexts. Is the same power structure that's going to attempt to ban it for private use going to refrain from use by, say, the police? Because it's not Google but will ultimately absorb the consequences of having these technologies suppressed... It's individuals who can now no longer identify who just walked into their property as easily as the police can identify who just walked into an abortion clinic.
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
  I fail to see the connection.
  - colpabar 4y ago
- detaro 4y ago
  > handing out DNA and fingerprint kits That the state is neither mandating nor collecting. Seems a fairly rights-compatible way of doing it. (Although I'd also question if its really worth doing overall)
- infecto 4y ago
  I cannot argue with optics and timing but its important to note that this is only part of the https://childidprogram.com https://childidprogram.com National Child Identification Program. Its not as nefarious as some of the news articles made it seem. So I hardly see this comment relevant to the discussion of the OP.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
Texas is a one-party consent state, meaning that you can store any sort of recording you have been involved in, without seeking consent from the other parties involved. Texas police departments have also been trying to partner with camera manufacturers like Ring or Google, to access their customer records [0]. I must be missing something here, then. Either that, or this is just another political stunt directed against "big tech", while it ignores the bigger picture. [0] https://www.dallasjustice.com/ring-cameras-and-police-surveillance-growing-police-power-privacy-concerns/ https://www.dallasjustice.com/ring-cameras-and-police-survei...
- phrz 4y ago
  Yes, you're thinking of recordings. This suit is brought under the Texas Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act (Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 503.001 et seq.) [0]. At issue is the alleged unauthorized collection of face and fingerprint biometric data. https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/BC/htm/BC.503.htm https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/BC/htm/BC.503.htm
  - manuelabeledo 4y ago
    Thing is, outside purely legal statuses, I don't see why collection of "faces" done by a company on my behalf, is less dangerous than the police tapping in my account to retrieve pictures of alleged criminals. In other words, I highly doubt that anyone wanting to enter my home would object to Google scanning their face, but I cannot say the same about the police collecting information on them.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > Texas is a one-party consent state, meaning that you can store any sort of recording you have been involved in, without seeking consent from the other parties involved. Seems unlikely to apply. 1. "one-party consent" applies only to "wiretap" laws i.e. audio recording. It looks like a lot of this case is about photo and video data. 2. "one-part consent" refers to people in conversation. That definitely doesn't apply to Google here.
r3trohack3r 4y ago
I think many comments here are missing a bigger picture context of how this data is problematic. Not speaking law here, speaking my personal mental model of evaluating the risk/ethics of facial recognition in personal security devices. Building a local profile of faces observed on a single person’s property isn’t problematic for me. In order for the police to search it, they have to issue a very specific warrant for a specific addresses’ surveillance data. Its also anonymous by default - while you have the face, the data is local and isn’t attached to any “network” of facial recognition software. Its not being used to track people moving from house to house, or business to business, to build a “model” of their behavior to manipulate them. It’s specifically “what footage do I have locally of this face?” which can be extremely helpful when securing a home. This is in stark contrast to what I worry companies like Google do (Facebook has been caught doing it): building shadow profiles of non-users that track behaviors across all places their face shows up (surveillance footage, personal photos of other users, etc.). This is a network of information consolidated into a single point. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public, but I do believe you should have a reasonable expectation that people aren’t stalking your every move across many properties and aggregating that data into a single source law enforcement can get access to with a single warrant.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I think they're more similar than you think, definitely along the same continuum. This isn't an argument for why this data collection is ok however, I'll actually take the more radical stance that even the local face recording is unethical or at least pointless and possibly harmful. > “what footage do I have locally of this face?” which can be extremely helpful when securing a home. How? What mechanism of security is strengthened here? Almost certainly your only use case for this data is handing it over to the police to apply their facial recognition systems to it. Which they have because of homeowners like you, I guess. It's the same surveillance apparatus as in your google case except more manual and less efficient. If it shouldn't exist at all, a bad version of it also shouldn't exist.
  - r3trohack3r 4y ago
    “Send me a push notification for every novel face detected” “Alarm if any face other than these 5 are detected on an indoor camera between the hours of 10pm and 8am” “I want to review all footage of the nanny from the past week since they spend time alone with my children” “Show me all footage of myself inside the house in the last 15 minutes because I have no idea where I set my keys down” “I just heard a window break at 2am, which cameras are detecting motion so my wife can avoid them to get the kids out while I do the opposite to buy them some time”
gzer0 4y ago
I find this hysterical, especially since Texas was "hacked" and all 28 million residents at the time had their entire Driver License info stolen (Name, address, DL #, age, height). Nothing was done [1]. [1] https://www.fox26houston.com/news/nearly-28-million-licensed-texas-drivers-hit-by-data-breach https://www.fox26houston.com/news/nearly-28-million-licensed...
- TehCorwiz 4y ago
  I think the major distinction between your example and the article is: voluntary vs involuntary. Texas did not intentionally give away their data, it was exposed due to an attack from a third-party. Google is willfully collecting cross-referenced location, image/video, and personal profile data.
  - jonas21 4y ago
    Google has not given their data away at all, voluntarily or involuntarily, except when compelled to by court order. Texas did voluntarily give their data to a third-party, the insurance software company Vertafore, who then inadvertently exposed it publicly.
  - prvit 4y ago
    Texas does indeed intentionally sell this data to a number of companies.
- calculatte 4y ago
  I don't find that hysterical. Both cases are wrong and should not happen. People turning such stories into political issues is how they keep getting away with it.
advisedwang 4y ago
The article mentions Washington having a biometric privacy law too, but it explicitly excludes facial recognition: RCW 19.375.010 (1) ... "Biometric identifier" does not include a physical or digital photograph, video or audio recording or data generated therefrom...
chatterhead 4y ago
I thought you had to show actual damages to sue in this context? How does a state assume the role of the people transgressed and then not pass any money from the suit onto the people impacted? So tired of governments using people as a means of attacking corporations only to not provide the people with relief. Otherwise, it needs to be criminal. But, they can't unless a specific individual is found to have broken the law, but that's what the layers of separation and plausible deniability are for. How does any of this benefit the people?
balderdash 4y ago
Personal opinion: While I don’t expect much in the way of privacy in public I do have a general expectation of anonymity. E.g. if I leave my home walk down to the local cafe, pay cash for a coffee, put me my head into the local bookshop for a browse, and walk home, while people can see me and judge my actions, I can complete this journey in an anonymous way, if I misbehave (don’t pay for my coffee) I expect my actions to come under scrutiny. But the thought of the coffee shop, book shop, and all my neighbors logging my comings and goings is terrifying .
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/DKfRd https://archive.ph/DKfRd
cestith 4y ago
Ken Paxton is up for reelection and is still under federal indictment for multiple felonies. This is a state right of action and if this election stunt works, don't look for any reimbursement to the wronged parties.
uncletammy 4y ago
As a Texan, it's nice seeing Ken Paxton, our crook of an attorney general who has been under indictment for multiple years for multiple crimes, finally do something positive for the people. I still won't vote for the fascist criminal but I'm glad he's finally doing his job.
gerash 4y ago
is this AG arguing that door bell cameras and indoor cameras (eg. Nest cam) are all illegal in Texas now?
monksy 4y ago
I think a bigger isn't isn't just collecting consent for this, but it's questioning is the data neccessary to perform the business need they're asking for it and is it coerced consent. GDPR is great, however phone companies still collect biometic data and claim that it's "necessary" (It's not) They do so and claim it's neccessary, when it's the copy of the passport that is necessary. Additionally forcing the collection of it otherwise you can't get a phone number is not exactly consent. That's coerced. This is the case of Telefonica in Spain (Where I went to the store and they didn't warn me but coerced me into going through this with a store rep right there) This is also the case in Sounder apartments where they want pictures of your id and of you to rent from them. https://www.sonder.com/ https://www.sonder.com/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

178 points by fortran77 4y ago

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/technology/texas-google-privacy-lawsuit.html?unlocked_article_code=yrsoSmf8HEyeunaUqzAcb7AmXKPersdHa2n23a_qpOY5kk9N5HegUUbNXf6yO5ofEKVo8XmpCRhjhmXTBC1rH7oWLp5wvp3jUcJYRFkZThBdD0-VGXzfo-Ks42YDy43kmSCh92Ix3HGpvrAqqsXf7vSmqtcMEy20wFeqI73HwmjLfV-9SPJC5p1u71ZHtGUHvn6eyq7Rl1MIIc0IUYW3eL2RYWugd4zzE_2c9RnQUH-u2ia3I73DrxVyqC-CLSiZJ1BLy6KlqKowJ0d2uJKs1aeSpjOaH6ACuuEG9HPB69UWaMFvOxc_kEtSy3JJYIGjl8Fq5fUvjQaHqf4kY6wNPd6C3c68AHkMHw&smid=share-url https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/technology/texas-google-p...

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago

> The complaint targets the Google Photos app, which allows people to search for photos they took of a particular person; Google’s Nest camera, which can send alerts when it recognizes (or fails to recognize) a visitor at the door; and the voice-activated Google Assistant, which can learn to recognize up to six users’ voices to give them personalized answers to their questions. Mr. Paxton said the products violated the rights of both users and nonusers, whose faces and voices were scanned or processed without their understanding or consent. It would be great if they could actually stop Google and everyone else from doing face recognition on random people in photos without them knowing or having any way to stop it.

shadowgovt 4y ago
Just keep in mind that the "they" in question is definitely not going to stop themselves from using it to comb crowd images for perpetrators of potential crimes and other wanted individuals.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  We can care about more than one thing at once. This article is about attempts to stop Google from doing it. That's what we're talking about.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    It's about attempts by the people who will do the other thing to stop Google from doing it. I'm sure Texas law enforcement wouldn't mind if cops could operate in neighborhoods with less worry about what people's Ring cameras will show them doing.
    - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
      you're trying to derail this conversation with some whataboutism
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        It's not a whataboutism to look one step forward to the consequences if Texas bans Google from offering these tools to consumers (which is: an arrangement where the tools are in the hands of only the government, not the government and private individuals). Texas's ban is in the business and commerce code; it's a ban for the commoners but not the government. We should be looking at attempts to exercise it with suspicion and concern.
Mikeb85 4y ago
> face recognition on random people in photos Except they're not. They just match faces to itself and the user has to tell Google photos who it is. Google Photos isn't running faces against a database to ID people, it only matches like faces within your own albums.
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  I avoid Google products. But even to me it’s obvious that they’re not doing a global match. All facial recognition - if you could even call it that - is simply within the users photos. Kinda like a categorisation algorithm. Now, if they took this data and used it elsewhere Texas might have a case. Otherwise it should be thrown out.
- monksy 4y ago
  They are doing face recognition but not detection. It's always amusing when I go through google photos and it shows me complete strangers that I have in my photographs.
theptip 4y ago
It's really simple (not easy): pass a US equivalent of GDPR, and make sure biometrics count as "personal data" as they do in the EU. CCPA gets you a lot of the way there (indeed I suspect you can request to have Google delete all your biometric data under the "right to be forgotten" clause), but I think CCPA doesn't prevent collection/processing of data without an agreement in place as the GDPR does. (Basically, GDPR requires you to have an agreement in place before storing any of my Personal Data, since it's that agreement that then binds who you can share it with, and how. If I don't use Google, then Google can't process my biometric data. I wonder if they get around this by approximately everyone using Google in some capacity, and having a "I also agree that you can process my biometric data" term in the ToS?) Interested in any lawyers' opinions on the above; my read of e.g. https://www.bakerlaw.com/webfiles/Privacy/2018/Articles/CCPA-GDPR-Chart.pdf https://www.bakerlaw.com/webfiles/Privacy/2018/Articles/CCPA... is that Google cannot (i.e. would be forbidden to) do biometric recognition on people that have requested for their data to be deleted. Where I'd like to see CCPA go further is that it doesn't strongly restrict transfers of data; under GDPR you explicitly approve a set of Processors and Sub-Processors, and must be informed when that changes. CCPA does seem to restrict sales of data, but doesn't tightly control where it is shared without sale.
- mindslight 4y ago
  A direct analog of the GDPR is exactly what the US needs, especially with its framing of consent that doesn't allow the standard dance of nullification-via-nonconsentual-contract. I fear that all of these half-baked state privacy laws are going to force a move for overriding federal legislation, at which time the surveillance companies will lobby hard for all sorts of loopholes that effectively neuter the protections, and the totalitarian status quo will be set in stone. It's unfortunate the Internet surveillance industry wasn't nipped in the bud 15 years ago, now Surveillance Valley is held up as a bastion of "innovation" and most of the people who should know better are happily on the take.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    On the other hand, given that the GDPR is the source of the now-near-ubiquitous cookie-consent noise, perhaps it's better if the US not mirror that law. There are probably good parts of it that can be lifted, but it may tilt too hard in the direction of personal ownership of other people's perception of you. In any case, we can be confident that nothing will pass at the Federal level that would make credit scores illegal.
amf12 4y ago
The complaint is a farce. > Google Photos app, which allows people to search for photos they took of a particular person; All Google Photos does is group pictures by matching faces in pics to allow you to click on a face and lookup all pictures which have that face. It does not "recognize" who the picture belongs to. > Google’s Nest camera, which can send alerts when it recognizes (or fails to recognize) a visitor at the door; All the processing happens on the device locally. It will only "recognize" by name if you name a face. This is a premium feature and the tagged names are wiped when you stop the premium subscription. > voice-activated Google Assistant, which can learn to recognize up to six users’ voices to give them personalized answers to their questions. Users have to enroll their voice to access this feature.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It might not be the case the complaint is a farce as per the law. On the other hand, it might be the case Texas passed an ill-thought-out "Don't collect biometric data" law that makes it illegal to do anything interesting with privately-taken photographs for personal use without the express consent of every individual in every photograph.

hirundo 4y ago

If I look at you and recognize you I don't feel that I have violated your rights, whether I use cybernetic augmentation or not.

thatguy0900 4y ago
What if I pay someone who knows you to find and list every picture you've ever been in together with the location it was taken in, and I started tracking who and where you hang out with the most? Maybe every once in a while send you lists of things your friends have bought (I'm also doing this to them) just in case you might want to buy it as well. Genuinely curious if that feels violating to you
- pc86 4y ago
  No, that doesn't sound like genuine curiosity.
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    How so? Where is the line drawn? He's comfortable recognizing people's faces, we all are. That's not really what Googles doing though, mine is closer. I would draw the comfort line at amortizing what they know about my pictures with data they've only gained through other people's uploads, I think.
petilon 4y ago
You may not have, but the company that provided you cybernetic augmentation probably did, if they collected info without consent and rented it to you.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
boplicity 4y ago
Yes, but you don't have literally millions of vision inputs that are constantly scanning for me.

crazygringo 4y ago

First of all, "biometric data" is a scary-sounding term that sounds like iris or fingerprint scans, when it's just... what people's faces and voices look and sound like. By this measure, my own brain is "collecting biometric data" on thousands of people a day while I walk down the street. 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.

AnonCoward42 4y ago
It is always a matter of scale. You can get the fingerprint of anyone (relatively) easily, but not everyone. So the problem only arises when it is done in mass or more generally when it can be used by centralized entities of any sort. 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.
VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
People always come in here with the same comment like "my brain memorizes people's faces too! Should that be illegal???" 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.

heisenbit 4y ago

bee_rider 4y ago
Broken clock I guess.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  We should keep a close eye on this concern. Brin's "The Transparent Society" notes that once ubiquitous, automated, cheap surveillance becomes widely available, the genie is out of the bottle... There isn't a scenario where nobody uses it, there are merely scenarios where we decide who may use it and what contexts. Is the same power structure that's going to attempt to ban it for private use going to refrain from use by, say, the police? Because it's not Google but will ultimately absorb the consequences of having these technologies suppressed... It's individuals who can now no longer identify who just walked into their property as easily as the police can identify who just walked into an abortion clinic.
mechanical_bear 4y ago
I fail to see the connection.
- colpabar 4y ago
detaro 4y ago
> handing out DNA and fingerprint kits That the state is neither mandating nor collecting. Seems a fairly rights-compatible way of doing it. (Although I'd also question if its really worth doing overall)
infecto 4y ago
I cannot argue with optics and timing but its important to note that this is only part of the https://childidprogram.com https://childidprogram.com National Child Identification Program. Its not as nefarious as some of the news articles made it seem. So I hardly see this comment relevant to the discussion of the OP.

manuelabeledo 4y ago

Texas is a one-party consent state, meaning that you can store any sort of recording you have been involved in, without seeking consent from the other parties involved. Texas police departments have also been trying to partner with camera manufacturers like Ring or Google, to access their customer records [0]. I must be missing something here, then. Either that, or this is just another political stunt directed against "big tech", while it ignores the bigger picture. [0] https://www.dallasjustice.com/ring-cameras-and-police-surveillance-growing-police-power-privacy-concerns/ https://www.dallasjustice.com/ring-cameras-and-police-survei...

phrz 4y ago
Yes, you're thinking of recordings. This suit is brought under the Texas Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act (Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 503.001 et seq.) [0]. At issue is the alleged unauthorized collection of face and fingerprint biometric data. https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/BC/htm/BC.503.htm https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/BC/htm/BC.503.htm
- manuelabeledo 4y ago
  Thing is, outside purely legal statuses, I don't see why collection of "faces" done by a company on my behalf, is less dangerous than the police tapping in my account to retrieve pictures of alleged criminals. In other words, I highly doubt that anyone wanting to enter my home would object to Google scanning their face, but I cannot say the same about the police collecting information on them.
nordsieck 4y ago
> Texas is a one-party consent state, meaning that you can store any sort of recording you have been involved in, without seeking consent from the other parties involved. Seems unlikely to apply. 1. "one-party consent" applies only to "wiretap" laws i.e. audio recording. It looks like a lot of this case is about photo and video data. 2. "one-part consent" refers to people in conversation. That definitely doesn't apply to Google here.

r3trohack3r 4y ago

I think many comments here are missing a bigger picture context of how this data is problematic. Not speaking law here, speaking my personal mental model of evaluating the risk/ethics of facial recognition in personal security devices. Building a local profile of faces observed on a single person’s property isn’t problematic for me. In order for the police to search it, they have to issue a very specific warrant for a specific addresses’ surveillance data. Its also anonymous by default - while you have the face, the data is local and isn’t attached to any “network” of facial recognition software. Its not being used to track people moving from house to house, or business to business, to build a “model” of their behavior to manipulate them. It’s specifically “what footage do I have locally of this face?” which can be extremely helpful when securing a home. This is in stark contrast to what I worry companies like Google do (Facebook has been caught doing it): building shadow profiles of non-users that track behaviors across all places their face shows up (surveillance footage, personal photos of other users, etc.). This is a network of information consolidated into a single point. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public, but I do believe you should have a reasonable expectation that people aren’t stalking your every move across many properties and aggregating that data into a single source law enforcement can get access to with a single warrant.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
I think they're more similar than you think, definitely along the same continuum. This isn't an argument for why this data collection is ok however, I'll actually take the more radical stance that even the local face recording is unethical or at least pointless and possibly harmful. > “what footage do I have locally of this face?” which can be extremely helpful when securing a home. How? What mechanism of security is strengthened here? Almost certainly your only use case for this data is handing it over to the police to apply their facial recognition systems to it. Which they have because of homeowners like you, I guess. It's the same surveillance apparatus as in your google case except more manual and less efficient. If it shouldn't exist at all, a bad version of it also shouldn't exist.
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  “Send me a push notification for every novel face detected” “Alarm if any face other than these 5 are detected on an indoor camera between the hours of 10pm and 8am” “I want to review all footage of the nanny from the past week since they spend time alone with my children” “Show me all footage of myself inside the house in the last 15 minutes because I have no idea where I set my keys down” “I just heard a window break at 2am, which cameras are detecting motion so my wife can avoid them to get the kids out while I do the opposite to buy them some time”

gzer0 4y ago

I find this hysterical, especially since Texas was "hacked" and all 28 million residents at the time had their entire Driver License info stolen (Name, address, DL #, age, height). Nothing was done [1]. [1] https://www.fox26houston.com/news/nearly-28-million-licensed-texas-drivers-hit-by-data-breach https://www.fox26houston.com/news/nearly-28-million-licensed...

TehCorwiz 4y ago
I think the major distinction between your example and the article is: voluntary vs involuntary. Texas did not intentionally give away their data, it was exposed due to an attack from a third-party. Google is willfully collecting cross-referenced location, image/video, and personal profile data.
- jonas21 4y ago
  Google has not given their data away at all, voluntarily or involuntarily, except when compelled to by court order. Texas did voluntarily give their data to a third-party, the insurance software company Vertafore, who then inadvertently exposed it publicly.
- prvit 4y ago
  Texas does indeed intentionally sell this data to a number of companies.
calculatte 4y ago
I don't find that hysterical. Both cases are wrong and should not happen. People turning such stories into political issues is how they keep getting away with it.

advisedwang 4y ago

The article mentions Washington having a biometric privacy law too, but it explicitly excludes facial recognition: RCW 19.375.010 (1) ... "Biometric identifier" does not include a physical or digital photograph, video or audio recording or data generated therefrom...

chatterhead 4y ago

I thought you had to show actual damages to sue in this context? How does a state assume the role of the people transgressed and then not pass any money from the suit onto the people impacted? So tired of governments using people as a means of attacking corporations only to not provide the people with relief. Otherwise, it needs to be criminal. But, they can't unless a specific individual is found to have broken the law, but that's what the layers of separation and plausible deniability are for. How does any of this benefit the people?

balderdash 4y ago

Personal opinion: While I don’t expect much in the way of privacy in public I do have a general expectation of anonymity. E.g. if I leave my home walk down to the local cafe, pay cash for a coffee, put me my head into the local bookshop for a browse, and walk home, while people can see me and judge my actions, I can complete this journey in an anonymous way, if I misbehave (don’t pay for my coffee) I expect my actions to come under scrutiny. But the thought of the coffee shop, book shop, and all my neighbors logging my comings and goings is terrifying .

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/DKfRd https://archive.ph/DKfRd

cestith 4y ago

Ken Paxton is up for reelection and is still under federal indictment for multiple felonies. This is a state right of action and if this election stunt works, don't look for any reimbursement to the wronged parties.

uncletammy 4y ago

As a Texan, it's nice seeing Ken Paxton, our crook of an attorney general who has been under indictment for multiple years for multiple crimes, finally do something positive for the people. I still won't vote for the fascist criminal but I'm glad he's finally doing his job.

gerash 4y ago

is this AG arguing that door bell cameras and indoor cameras (eg. Nest cam) are all illegal in Texas now?

monksy 4y ago

I think a bigger isn't isn't just collecting consent for this, but it's questioning is the data neccessary to perform the business need they're asking for it and is it coerced consent. GDPR is great, however phone companies still collect biometic data and claim that it's "necessary" (It's not) They do so and claim it's neccessary, when it's the copy of the passport that is necessary. Additionally forcing the collection of it otherwise you can't get a phone number is not exactly consent. That's coerced. This is the case of Telefonica in Spain (Where I went to the store and they didn't warn me but coerced me into going through this with a store rep right there) This is also the case in Sounder apartments where they want pictures of your id and of you to rent from them. https://www.sonder.com/ https://www.sonder.com/

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