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Comment by jakecopp | Hacker News Reader

I feel that it is intentionally bad so people don't realize how much Google knows about them.

Meanwhile their image recognition gets better and better. For those of you who use Google Photos backup, try a keyword image search in Google Drive sometime of your untagged photos ("beach", "face," etc.) You'll be creepily surprised on what Google is indexing, even against what they claim they don't (try some sketchier words).

I can one up that: I was living in Dubai a few years ago and have a number of photos of fancy cars I could never even dream of affording. If I search for “Lamborghini” or “Rolls Royce” it gives me the photos of those cars. I’ve never tagged them and I’m not an Android user, so they aren’t reading my messages.

https://imgur.com/caz8D2Y

I even have four photos I took at night, in burst mode, as a Bughatti Veyron zoomed passed, and yes, it can recognise those...

iOS photos app does this as well.

Samsung gallery app does this as well. You can even search for stuff like "selfie".

Maybe every photo using the front camera is a selfie?

Didn't think of that obvious solution!

It does generic terms like "cars", but it doesn't work for specific brands (at least on my 5S).

All modern gallery apps have some rudimentary photo recognition, but I haven't found any but Google's that will allow you to search terms like "topless/nude" and find accurate results. I would never store photos like that with Google, but I've confirmed it works, and with how many promotions Google has run offering free photo storage with their latest phones there are undoubtedly thousands and thousands of unwitting users who have sensitive photos not just automatically backed up in some Google server, but categorized. Just imagine if these servers were to be hacked and that information was conveniently pre-arranged for extortion.

I understand image recognition searching for generic terms like "cars", but my point is this can even recognise brands. And it only returns photos matching that brand, so it isn't replacing "Rolls Royce" with "cars" to do the search.

I guess it makes sense to do this, given that most things they do is based selling ads, I'm just surprised it is this accurate.

That's not a sneaky feature; it was the primary selling point when Google launched the new Photos product in 2015.

Where has Google claimed they don't index certain terms?

I searched for "paper" today and one of the results was a toilet :P But yes I agree, it has been getting better.

Was there toilet paper in the picture? :P

Just had a look, turns out there was haha. Guess that's why then.

Maybe, but it's also incredibly poor at the same time. When I search my photos for "dog" I get many many pictures of cats. But that's sort of understandable, since they are both 4-legged animals, right? Well, then I don't know why searching for "dog" also brings up pictures of birds I have in my google photos. It's great about 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% it's hilariously and completely wrong.

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