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Google Photos, with all your Android pics, already "automatically analyzes photos, identifying ... People, Places, and Things. Google Photos recognizes faces, grouping similar ones together; geographic landmarks (such as the Eiffel Tower); and subject matter, including birthdays, buildings, animals, food, and more."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Photos



It's much more than that. :) If you have a large collection of photos uploaded to google, you can make some pretty insidious searches that will return extremely accurate results.

Try searching "bikini" if you have any snapshots from your beach vacation uploaded. Even with all location metadata/camera information stripped from the images, Google was able to find 99% of them using keyword searches like that. You can go further and search specific body parts, too. I think that's pretty creepy as well.

The typical HN response is to dismiss arguments like this with, "Well, don't be so careless to upload photos in the first place!" but what happens when laypeople use Google Photos as marketed and as a backup service for their entire lives? I don't think those people would be comfortable knowing that Google can not only accurately identify 1) people and their friends implicitly and 2) identify when those people are scantily clad or nude.

Just imagine a bad actor getting access to your photos via Google and being able to instantly pull up any compromising or sensitive information you may have forgotten about with a simple keyword search because that's something they, for some reason, index.


And even more :)

Someone, sometime, took a party photo with you in background on Android. Google recognized your sorry mug, and stamped it with location, date, time and list of present people. And now it is evidence in court.


You can search for documents and scans too, if I'm not mistaken. Any bills, certificates, other documents etc you may have photographed can be trivially pulled.


Yes, but their reason (at least ostensibly) is so that you can search for photos by their content.

(yeah, yeah, I hear ya.)


I'm amused every time i see Android phone in hands of my tech-literate friends :)


Why?


iPhones today are roughly the same price as top Androids, and are not running Ad company spyware.


Conversely, they're not locked up tight such that there's only One True Browser etc, which kinda matters to power users.


Power users doing exactly what with their browser?


Installing a different one, e.g. because they want a better UX, or some features that the standard one is missing.


Firefox, Edge, Chrome, Opera, and more are available on iOS. Each have their own unique features and UX. The only thing not allowed is a rendering engine other than WebKit via the iOS webview component.


Spyware? Any evidence of this or you are just high on Apple Kool aid / Google hate?




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