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To everyone remarking about privacy, the app does say that the photo won't be sent anywhere. I wonder if everything is done on-device.

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Face has landmarks which can form a unique signature, like a fingerprint.

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.

Conceptually, this is rather like lossy compression with a shared dictionary. In practice your likeness has still been trasmitted. Jpeg files are after all just numbers too, merely less specialized.

Agreed. But you’ll only be able to reconstruct the original face if you have a photo from it. Which google probably has anyway.

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