
Google collects face data now – what it means and how to opt out - lelf
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/google-collects-face-data-now-heres-what-it-means-and-how-to-opt-out/
======
strict9
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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_Act)

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
Google won against Illinois in a recent case:
[https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-oks-google-facial-
recog...](https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-oks-google-facial-recognition-
software/)

~~~
autoexec
> "But a ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang on Saturday found
> that the law cannot be used to protect users from the non-consensual
> collection of information about what many consider to be private"

If the law can't be used to protect us what measures remain available?
Storming Google's data centers by force? The legal system is supposed to be
the acceptable option so mobs and violence aren't all we have. Eliminate legal
recourse and what's left?

~~~
zorpner
> If the law can't be used to protect us what measures remain available?

"Google" is not an entity -- it's composed of people, who make decisions and
enable the things that Google does.

Don't hire them. Don't associate with them.

They're working for a company that, at this point, is obviously doing harm to
the world. That's a choice they have the freedom to make. We have the freedom
not to associate with people who make that choice.

Note that this advice is specific to non-visa-limited people in high-demand
occupations, like other software engineers. They have a choice.

~~~
autoexec
> "Google" is not an entity

It is. It's a legal entity called a corporation

> Don't hire them. Don't associate with them.

You no longer have a choice to opt out of google invading your privacy. The
websites you visit everyday are letting google track you. The websites I use
for my work are tracking me via google. My employer also requires chrome for
some tasks which allows google to track what I do. I've even seen government
websites using google trackers. You just can't escape google on the internet.
Google is so pervasive even ARIN is allowing google to track people who go to
their site.

Google is quickly intruding on offline public spaces as well.

When a user-hostile company becomes impossible to escape the only option left
is to regulate it to limit the damage, but Illinois made a solid effort to do
just that and it made zero difference

~~~
wolco
You do have a choice. You are allowing them to track you. Use protection.

------
aloknnikhil
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.

~~~
ssss11
This is the only basis that tech co’s have been convinced to provide ways to
opt out and appear to care for your privacy. They make it difficult so the
majority don’t do it. In my opinion laws should be in place to ensure stuff
like this is OPT IN only. The current situation is madness.

~~~
Xelbair
GDPR was supposed to do that.

Sadly looking at reality it is too watered down.

------
5trokerac3
"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
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
"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."

~~~
harshreality
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.

~~~
autoexec
> But the costs of shutting down all these
> incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of
> the tech sector (by market cap)

I couldn't care less if predatory companies collapse. None of the tech itself
is inherently evil, its only being used against us instead of working for us.
If google were disbanded or broken up today new companies would rise up
continue to do what they do now under more responsible terms. Those companies
can continue to provide cell phones and email accounts without using those
things to build dossiers on the people who just want to communicate with
friends and family.

Many people today think it's impossible to offer anything if you aren't
abusing your users because that's all they know, but I remember when there
were hundreds of free email providers long before it became technically
feasible to read every last email stored on the server to spy on users.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _new companies would rise up continue to do what they do now under more
> responsible terms._

I think that's a naive position to take. People are people, and human nature
really is hard to fight. It's a virtual certainty that anything replacing
google, will be violating your security and privacy. Especially if it's
"free".

~~~
autoexec
I think it'd end up like what happened when Ma Bell was broken up. Over time
the companies have merged back into just a few and not everything got better,
and tech evolved rapidly which complicates direct comparisons but at the same
time, I've got several phones in my home and none of them have "property of
AT&T" engraved into them. Some things improved.

Companies are amoral monsters who care about nothing but making money and
there will always be a struggle with regulation followed by deregulation
followed by more regulation as people push back against abuse, but that cycle
has kept things in relative order. Companies have gotten very good at
inserting themselves into government, directly and indirectly, to stand in the
way and prevent the people from keeping them in line, but I don't think it's
entirely hopeless yet.

------
guyzero
"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.

~~~
zepto
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
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
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
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
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
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
Apple didn’t design Google’s business model.

~~~
partialrecall
They chose to associate themselves with it.

------
heroprotagonist
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.

------
izacus
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.

~~~
djrogers
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
Why should they? Don't use it if you don't like the terms.

------
seamyb88
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.

------
pavel_lishin
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)

------
SeeDave
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
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.

~~~
partialrecall
> _" self-service checkouts (which were supposed to make shopping quicker),"_

I don't see how that could ever have been the case. Self-service replaces
skilled labor (employee cashier) with unskilled labor (customer cashier.) Why
would that ever be more efficient? When you throw in matters like needing to
wait for an employee every time somebody buys liquor or cough syrup, it's
clear self-service is doomed to be much slower.

It seems to me, self-service is actually designed to reduce labor costs for
the store.

~~~
djrogers
Self service checkout does not speed up the time it takes you to check out,
but it can (and usually does IME) dramatically reduce the amount of time you
wait in line to begin checking out.

~~~
partialrecall
When a store has a single full-service line staffed and four self-service
lines open, the presence of those self-service lines certainly seems to
improve the situation, vs a single full-service line. But what if it were
instead compared to five full-service lines? The five full-service lines would
doubtlessly be the fastest.

~~~
kelnos
Sure, but the supermarket would have to pay to staff those other four lines,
and they've decided they'd rather pay to maintain self-service machines
instead.

~~~
partialrecall
I'd consider using those machines if they gave me a discount. But as it is,
they're slower, exploit my labor, and are used to suppress the wages stores
pay out to members of the community (making regional wealth extraction more
efficient.) And worse than any of that, the machines are pedantic and finicky.

I see no conceivable upside. I totally get why companies are installing them;
it's plain old greed. There is nothing complicated about that. But knowing
that doesn't make me want to use them.

------
fnord77
> Apple... acknowledges that it shares some facial data with third-party
> developers.

So much for apple keeping data private.

~~~
djrogers
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....

------
larrydag
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.

~~~
VikingCoder
When you buy a Fitbit, do you want to opt-in to it checking your heart rate?

Serious question.

I don't know how you draw the line between what would have to be opt-in and
what would have to be opt-out.

~~~
justaguyhere
Not your parent commenter.

Yes, I want to opt-in explicitly, even for heart rate when I buy Fitbit. The
default should be _do not track, do not do anything without explicit
permission from user_. This includes even harmless features and core features
of a product (like heart rate monitor for fitbit).

This wouldn't be the case if companies played nice. We are well past that now.
We can't believe pretty much any company online, not to sell data, mess with
their users' privacy etc.

Explicitly opting in is a minor inconvenience compared to destroying
everyone's privacy.

~~~
lallysingh
Agreed! This is a quick checklist in the setup of the device. Worth the 30
seconds.

------
mxuribe
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
Well, currently you're not throwing any money at Reflectacles because they
aren't expected to ship until next year.

~~~
mxuribe
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
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
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!

------
xupybd
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
Yikes, my guess is that the linked project most likely isn’t being used for
good.

------
ses1984
"now"?

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

~~~
himlion
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.

~~~
regnerba
I wanted to show a friend a picture of our cat sitting on top of our TV (which
is hanging on the wall). I spent a few minutes scrolling through my photos
unable to find it. Ended up searching for "TV cat" and it came up right away.
Wish I had started with that.

I just don't trust myself enough to not fuck up and lose all my photos if I
self hosted something that was equal. I run a small home lab and I never store
anything on it I cannot afford to lose.

~~~
reaperducer
I do such searches on my iPhone all the time. Especially cat photos. According
to the Photos app, my recent searches include "cowboys," "april 2019,"
"colorado," "trains," "canyons," and "cat."

The iPhone was able to complete all of those searches without sending my data
to Apple. When companies like Google say they have to have a copy of your
pictures, they are lying.

~~~
chaz
That's only useful if all of the photos that I want to search are already on
my iPhone. I can't search from a different device, and I can't search the
hundreds of GB of photos from years ago because they don't fit.

> When companies like Google say they have to have a copy of your pictures,
> they are lying.

Did Google actually say that? I think they just built a product with different
trade-offs than Apple Photos.

~~~
reaperducer
If I need to search hundreds of GB of photos, I can with an iPhone, too.

The phone automatically offloads the full-resolution images to iCloud while
retaining thumbnails and metadata. The photos on iCloud are encrypted so that
even Apple can't see them.

Moving the goalposts doesn't change the fact that everything you want can be
done on-device, with none of the privacy-destroying methods that Google has
imposed on the world.

------
TKWasRight
> Welcome to the era of living publicly and naked. Enjoy.

You could always just...not use/buy their products

~~~
moate
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
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
_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.

~~~
moate
I believe OP was being sarcastic. We're all on team "FOH Nest" in this thread
so far.

~~~
wwweston
Confirmed. I was hoping phrases like "market-guided utopia" would give it
away, but I do realize Poe's law can make it hard.

~~~
reaperducer
That, and I was trying to read while on a train, so my attention wasn't fully
on the task at hand.

------
lucb1e
> 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
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
Goes to show how accurate the title is, which was my point.

------
jason46
Well, I can type my daughters name into photos and find her photos, so yes I
would agree.

------
nottorp
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.

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

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

------
sebastianconcpt
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
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.

~~~
jackbrookes
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.

~~~
nerdjon
For me, I have less issue with the fact that the technology exists.

My biggest issue comes from where the processing is being done. If it was 100%
on device I would be more ok with it. Same for processing photos and anything
else that needs to be done with my data.

But most companies instead ship all of your (and other people's data you
happen to have) to their servers.

~~~
mav3rick
That is not possible on every device given memory and battery restrictions.

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

