Google Sued Under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act
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Re: Google Sued Under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act
#2To save y'all a click: The alleged biometrics in question are the use of facial-recognition software on photos uploaded to Google Photos (without informed consent from the user).
Re: Google Sued Under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act
#3Profiteering lawyers as middlemen to technology application is what these overly strict privacy laws are trying to establish and that's a shame.
Re: Google Sued Under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act
#4To save y'all a click: The alleged biometrics in question are the use of facial-recognition software on photos uploaded to Google Photos (without informed consent from the user).
I remember google popping up a consent to store the AI models for the facial recognition locally on my phone (not in the cloud)! If this is the case, the lawyers are wasting their time, I guess.
Re: Google Sued Under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act
#5Profiteering lawyers as middlemen to technology application is what these overly strict privacy laws are trying to establish and that's a shame.
That’s what all this stuff inevitably becomes unfortunately. It’s a shame that lawyers have to mediate our access to our rights. I sincerely believe if we replaced high school with law school we’d all be much better off.
Re: Google Sued Under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act
#6Whose consent is needed, according to the law? The person who took the photos, or the person being photographed? And is the consent required only if the product is used in Illinois? Or if the photo is taken in Illinois? Or if the person photographed is a resident of Illinois?
(I read the law, and it appears to cover the person being photographed, if the photograph is taken in Illinois. So basically according to the law Google ought not build face models from photographs taken in Illinois, except of people who have consented.)
I wonder if in the broadest configuration (basically any configuration other than "consent of the user, who is a resident of Illinois"), this law would probably be struck down as an unconstitutional restraint on interstate commerce? I guess we'll see! Should be exciting.
Re: Google Sued Under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act
#7If a friend clicks a photo of me and uploads it to Google Photos, IMO, it's not okay for Google to use my face to train models without explicit permission from me.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with technology, laws have not kept up with the lastest developments, and likely will not in my country for several more decades. Welp.
Re: Google Sued Under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act
#8Profiteering lawyers as middlemen to technology application is what these overly strict privacy laws are trying to establish and that's a shame.
That’s what all this stuff inevitably becomes unfortunately. It’s a shame that lawyers have to mediate our access to our rights. I sincerely believe if we replaced high school with law school we’d all be much better off.
The barrier here isn't really the need for a law degree. Prosecuting these kinds of cases against deep-pocketed defendants like Google doesn't only take expertise in the law, but the resources to review millions of pages of Google emails to establish how the system works and what Google's intentions were, as well as experts to opine on technical aspects as well as calculation of damages. There is no practical way for individuals without significant resources to prove up this sort of case on their own.
The realistic alternative is having government agencies prosecute these sorts of cases. It's a very good alternative, and is used in most other countries. It's an odd confluence of factors that results in private class action litigation being more popular in the U.S. (From the left, trial lawyers are major supporters of Democrats. From the right, Republicans would rather have these class actions than new government agencies.)
Re: Google Sued Under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act
#9If a friend clicks a photo of me and uploads it to Google Photos, IMO, it's not okay for Google to use my face to train models without explicit permission from me. Unfortunately, as is often the case with technology, laws have not kept up with the lastest developments, and likely will not in my country for several more decades. Welp.
How do you even start to write a law for something like this? And I mean a law that makes sense and takes in account the reality of the situation, not one used as grandstanding.
It becomes really messy really fast. A law is established at some local level (local to a borough, state/canton, country), it will surely contradicts with laws from other places while overlapping with them.
From a very abstract view, companies will need to identify the person uploading the picture, the person in the picture, somehow determine which law to follow in the given circumstances (which depends on the context), determine if a consent exists at the correct local level for each person in the picture, then and only then they can train a model.
Re: Google Sued Under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act
#10If a friend clicks a photo of me and uploads it to Google Photos, IMO, it's not okay for Google to use my face to train models without explicit permission from me. Unfortunately, as is often the case with technology, laws have not kept up with the lastest developments, and likely will not in my country for several more decades. Welp.
Just to be pedantic in the spirit of HN. Google isn't training models w/your face from your photo library. The way face recognition works is that Google would collect a dataset somehow and label that for the various feature and train a model for face recognition. Usually this is done with a carefully curated dataset that would be sure to include various ages, genders, ethnicities, lighting conditions, angles, and camera types.
When you use Google Photos, it is using that pre-trained model to determine the features of the faces it finds in your library and it builds a vector, which is just a long string of numbers (also known as a face template or feature vector) that represents each face. Through various machine learning techniques it is able to compare 2 vectors to see how close those 2 faces are alike. If the confidence score it finds is higher than some predetermined threshold (say 70%), it is assumed they are the same person. Running these comparisons over and over through all the photo pairs, the software can group or cluster faces so that it knows all these photos have person 1 and these photos have person 2. Google never knows who those people are, unless you tag those images with a name.
The images in your camera roll aren't used for re-training the original model because Google doesn't know the ground truth about your photos. Google can guess that these 3 faces are the same, but it doesn't know for certain that they are, so they can't use that to retrain the model that would be used in the Photos app because they have no way to judge the accuracy.
Another interesting point is that the vector is also unique to the specific model that was used to create it. So, if in the future they do retrain the model, the vectors that had been created with previous models would be 100% incompatible with the new model and would need to be recreated from the source image.
Note: I have no inside knowledge of Google, but as the former CTO of a facial recognition company, I have a good idea how these systems work in general.