The Latest Google Scheme

by Karl Denninger, Market-Ticker:

Oh rotten (or, more-likely, mythical) heart of Jesus for not striking the Googleplex with an asteroid…

Google’s Arts & Culture app was first launched in 2016, offering “virtual access” to some of the most famous art collections in the world, and many stories about arts and culture from around the world. The latest update of the app, however, makes use of Google’s extensive knowledge of machine-learning-based facial recognition, and the front camera of your smartphone, to find your fine art doppelganger… just ’cause.

The new feature lets you record a selfie and receive a list of portrait artworks your self-portrait resembles. While the user interface is extremely simple, Google is using highly sophisticated facial recognition algorithms to compare your facial characteristics to the portraits among the 70,000+ works of art in its Google Art Project database.

Uh huh.  Note that this is not available in many other nations.

Why not in, for example, the EU?

Because the EU now has a data protection law that prohibits retention and abuse of personal information and thus such an “app” unless it protects your private data such as your face, while it has it, and then deletes it, is illegal.

So do you really think this is about the virally-taken up “purpose” allegedly put forward — to be the “fun source” of comparing your mug to that of portrait artworks?  Google is really going to expend the storage, transmission and compute resources to do this “for you” for no revenue-generating purpose for them whatsoever?

BULL****!

The most-likely and obvious actual purpose to build a facial recognition database of everyone in the country both for Google’s and the government’s use for whatever the hell they want so that they can sell that to anyone with a camera pointing anywhere, instantly identifying you no matter where you go anywhere in public or, for that matter, in private homes and businesses.

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