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Comment by conmarap | Hacker News Reader

There's a number of things that are alarming me about this, but I'll focus on one thing: the privacy implications. Not just for the user, but for those who will appear in the pictures that Google will be - for sure - ingesting for the purpose of crowdsourcing street view imagery. Suddenly we have this platform that will be capturing millions of faces and potentially know where people have been even if they don't use the app.

Not to mention that this type of app is treating people as incapable of following directions and it opens up the possibility of new avenues of advertising. Google already keeps an archive of your whereabouts and can even tell when you get in and out of a car. Just imagine wielding your phone around and getting "special offers" for that store you go by but never walk into.

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> There's a number of things that are alarming me about this, but I'll focus on one thing: the privacy implications. Not just for the user, but for those who will appear in the pictures that Google will be - for sure - ingesting for the purpose of crowdsourcing street view imagery. Suddenly we have this platform that will be capturing millions of faces and potentially know where people have been even if they don't use the app.

Umm, the camera stream of AR isn't transmitted from your phone. The 3D objects are rendered on top of detected features on device.

How do you know? And even if it doesn't for starters, there's no telling it'll stay that way.

Very legitimate concern.

Couldn’t you say the same thing about the standard camera app on Android and iOS? People have it open all the time.

> How do you know? And even if it doesn't for starters, there's no telling it'll stay that way.

Same way I know there's no pagan god hiding in my phone whispering my secrets to evil aliens: by actually working with the technology, observing the behaviour of my device and reading the privacy policies and activity log published by Google and not finding any proof.

Of course you can argue that Google might lie for whatever reason... but then you probably shouldn't be using Google Maps at all. Or any product built by a corporation.

Also by watching the upload bandwidth. If it streams the live video feed off the device at anywhere near being useful for facial recognition it would be very noticeable.

It doesn't have to be the entire video feed. it could be snapshots from a specific direction. If millions use it, there's a good chance even a handful of snapshots from each user at a location that thousands of people pass by could get it mapped better than how they currently do.

Sundar repeatedly stated in this Google I/O 2019 presentation how they were condensing and bringing AI and ML techniques onboard to phones to provide better responsiveness and lower the security issues of taking private data into their cloud.

A very good result from all the bad press they've gotten lately. If Google can improve its stance on privacy then I think it solves it's biggest problem.

> Not to mention that this type of app is treating people as incapable of following directions

Seems like a legit solution to the common problem of people standing around trying to work out which direction they're actually pointing.

Lets split this into three:

1)ingesting for the purpose of crowdsourcing street view imagery

If they are doing that(Which I strongly suggest they are not, well at least not yet), then having multiple views allows google to remove things that move (people/cars)

2) Depending on how they do this, if its using "visual landmarks" then people are a massive pain. They move, and cause all sorts of problems when doing positioning. So they'll need to be removed for the system to work properly.

3) The actual scary part is not the faces, persay. Its the fact that any picture where google has streetview is now able to be precisely located, regardless of who, when or how it was taken.

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