Why Google Won't Search for Art Look-Alike in Some States
January 17 2018 - 07:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Jack Nicas
Millions of people across the U.S. downloaded an app over the
holiday weekend to see how a Google algorithm matched their selfies
to historical artwork. But for many residents of Illinois and
Texas, the selfie tool was missing.
The reason? State laws there ban the collection of biometric
data, including a record of "face geometry," without a user's
consent. Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., is blocking the selfie
service in its arts and culture app in Illinois and Texas because
of the laws, according to a person familiar with the company.
Google Arts & Culture, which became the No. 1 free app on
the Apple Inc. and Google Play app stores over the weekend, is
among a growing wave of tech products using software that can
recognize faces, from doorbells that identify guests to security
cameras that recognize shoplifters to iPhones that unlock with a
glance.
Biometric laws pose a challenge to those technologies. In
Illinois, dozens of lawsuits related to the biometric law have been
filed since it passed in 2008, including one against Google that
challenges its Google Photos service, which allows users to search
photos by a person's face. Facebook Inc. and Snap Inc. have faced
similar lawsuits.
A Google spokesman said the Arts & Culture app uses selfies
"only for art matching and nothing else."
The company said 12.8 million people had downloaded the app as
of Monday night, with the vast majority occurring over the weekend,
when users were taking 450,000 selfies an hour. About 30 Google
employees in Paris who built the app were surprised by its sudden
success and worked through the weekend to keep it running smoothly,
the spokesman said.
Suits have spiked in Illinois because its law lets individuals
sue, said Julia Jacobson, a partner at law firm K&L Gates LLP.
Texas and Washington state, which passed a less strict biometric
law last year, limit that power to their attorneys general.
The pace of litigation in Illinois has quickened with tech
companies' adoption of facial-recognition technology, Ms. Jacobson
said. More than 50 such lawsuits have been filed in Illinois since
June last year, according to a K&L analysis.
"It's simply because the technology is getting better and more
commercialized," she said. "It used to be just government
technology."
Still, Google's decision to block the art look-alike tool in
Illinois and Texas is bizarre because the app requires users'
consent just as the states' laws require, said Alvaro Bedoya,
executive director of the Center for Privacy & Technology at
Georgetown University. It "is a very strange decision," he
said.
Before users take a selfie, the Google app requires them to
accept its terms, which say that the app matches the user's photo
with artwork and that "Google won't use data from your photo for
any other purpose and will only store your photo for the time it
takes to search for matches."
Google hasn't blocked its Google Photos service in Illinois,
although it uses facial recognition and is subject to a lawsuit
there. Google also doesn't appear to have blocked the Arts &
Culture app's selfie function in Washington. The feature isn't yet
available outside the U.S.
Tech firms have argued such biometric laws are overly
restrictive. Others say the growing use of biometric data--which
can also include things like fingerprints and iris scans--pose a
risk for consumers.
Adam Schwartz, a staff attorney at the digital-privacy group the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, said "biometrics are a menace to
privacy" because "it's very easy for strangers to capture your
biometrics and it's very hard for us to do anything about it."
Credit-card numbers can be changed, but faces and fingerprints
can't, he noted.
China uses facial-recognition in security cameras to track its
citizens, and an app in Russia enables users to find the
social-media profiles of strangers they photograph.
For now, some users in Illinois, Texas and abroad are trying to
get around the ban. Videos posted on YouTube instruct users to use
a VPN, or virtual private network, that makes it appear as if their
web traffic is coming from somewhere else.
Megan Vo, a 26-year-old mobile-app designer in Chicago, said she
downloaded the app over the weekend after friends in New York
posted their art doppelgängers. But when she opened it, she said
she found art-related articles and interactive programs, but not
the art look-alike tool.
"I kept scrolling," she said. "It's a great app with a lot of
great resources, but I wanted to take a selfie."
Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 17, 2018 08:14 ET (13:14 GMT)
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