Google app analyzes selfies and finds doppelgangers in museum portraits (2018)
openculture.com
openculture.com
(I'll buy you a beer if you convincingly explain to me that these two analogies are meaningfully different)
PS, not defending google, they generally suck.
Volunteering at a pet shelter is not part of the business of being an angry anonymous internet person.
Not that I disagree with you here just making the argument.
Like parent said, I found that google has decent customer service once you clearly become their client (which I have been on adwords, analytics and on gsuite).
I'd wager that the parent poster doesn't have any sort of direct relationship with the local pet shelter: there's no contract, or handshake agreements, nothing like that.
The lack of a relationship is key.
Google provides services to a large number of people, and while they don't charge (most) consumers directly for those services in dollar-units, Google's user base does pay via other means: nominally by being on the receiving end of hyper-targeted ads.
There's a relationship there. Google provides a service, in exchange for psychological capital, which Google then translates into cashflow via advertisers.
Relationships, good ones at least, require trust. And the fact that I know that there is a server inside of Google which will mercilessly nuke my account from orbit without warning... isn't exactly trust-inspiring.
Moreover, I know that if that does happen, I have effectively zero options to resolve the problem. I'm screwed.
Google could choose to fix this problem, and to invest their rather substantial resources in building trust. But they don't, and instead kick out toy apps like the above. This sends a very strong message to people like the parent poster, in that Google doesn't really value them or their well-being.
Now, Google isn't required to be trustworthy. Plenty of organizations aren't. But there's nothing wrong with customers calling that out and demanding more when they feel Google isn't allocating its resources in their best interests. It's also completely within Google's purview to utterly ignore them.
That's the difference: in one case, there's an established relationship, and that comes with certain expectations. In the other, not so much.
Lots of things originate from google. You can say the exact same thing of all of them. In fact you can plain and simply say "Google has time to do ANYTHING, yet it doesn't have time to provide customer support for that very thing?"
There's a point to be made that Google should be providing support. Do you think this, specifically, is what they should cut for it?
The critical corollary is that if you still feel it is a problem that Google doesn't provide support, and feel that "the market will fix it" is unconvincing in light of the available evidence, then you ought to be in favour of regulation that obligates them to.
Because I would be in favor of such regulations, and yet I'm also not against the project here, so i don't see your point.
The point is that FAANG companies are smart enough to elude a simple Hanlon's razor analysis.
Put more explicitly: 1. Your critique of OP's argument is fundamentally correct. Pointing out that Google could solve the problem if they wanted to is missing the point. Google doesn't want to solve the problem 2. Therefore, we either have to live with the status quo, or we have to change the incentive structure.
It might seem trivial to you, but I think it's an important point. Many members of the hn crowd exhibit this cognitive dissonance where on the one hand, they have a strong moral intuition that a particularly policy of tech giants is wrong (in this case, their choice not to put money in support), but on the other hand, an equally strong knee-jerk resistance to regulation of our industry.
Recognition that Google (or any other giant) are just doing what's best for them (as per their definition of "best") is an important step.
A given company is typically not Capital-G-Good or Capital-E-Evil. They are probably doing some things well, and doing some things poorly. They respond to incentives. When a company is doing things poorly in a way that is hurting consumers, we should ask what incentives they're responding to.
Google has failed at support. They also do plenty of things well. On my view it's weird to take the position that they don't. I regard Google Search as the crown jewel of modern engineering.
This is probably well paid engineers side project while they didn't have anything better to do.
It will prompt me to see if the one they associated with me then has been updated.
Kind of getting a weird celebrity-recognition-part-of-the-brain vibe of that off this story? Except it's AI's dreaming instead of human people?
Mobile extracts facial landmarks “signature” and sends to server only numbers.
Server runs an algorithm to find “neighbors” to those facial landmarks based on signatures collected from museum photos and present the closest match.
Actually pretty simple nowadays. Challenge off course is to collect the museum photos, what google spent some millions doing for other project.
I assume this is more of Google not wanting to put the effort into researching and complying with the law for a one-off arts and culture project, sort of like how the website for Mom & Pops deli in upstate NY started banning European visitors because of fear/misunderstanding of the GDPR.
But, not this particular bit. If they already know the value of a given bit there is minimal possible harm in disclosing it to them again.
All the information is held by private companies and the gov’t gets the info from them voluntarily.
Ditto for the First Amendment. Worthless. Instead of the govt prohibiting speech, the govt just has private companies do it for them.
How many times a week on HackerNews do you see this kind of exchange:
A: Facebook censored this or that and thus infringes on free speech.
B: It’s a private company; it can do what it wants.
A: But, but, there’s something wrong with that!
B: Don’t like it, make your own Facebook. Hur dur...
Etc. Ad nauseum.
Clearly, both (A) and (B) above are trying to reason through something within an outdated and outmoded framework; it’s why both sides sound silly.
Anyway, this is the same thing... but with the 4th amendment.
Same problem.
A private company that holds your data can do with it what it wishes. And, like the first amendment, if the govt makes it clear to these private companies that they ought ‘voluntarily’ cooperate with the govt “if they know what’s good for them,” then then Bill of Rights is worthless.
The 1st and 4th were meant to protect us from a tyrannical govt; not a tyrannical corporation.
Scrap the entire ball of wax and start over.
The Constitution — at this point — is an utter joke.
Businesses on the scale of a Facebook or a Google or Walmart simply did not exist anywhere, at any point in time in human history up to that point. But they rightly left these matters to the civil authorities, and the governed.
So no, the Constitution is not an utter joke. Our politicians and our indolent populace are.
That’s not blindingly obvious.
I believe a typical Founding Father would shudder at the thought of the government having anything whatsoever to say about the manner in which a church administered itself.
Dutch East India Company?
Surely you must be joking.
0: https://www.howtogeek.com/227084/how-to-use-google-photos-to...
1: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/9547620?hl=en-GB#gb...