Texas sues Google for collecting biometric data without consent
First of all, "biometric data" is a scary-sounding term that sounds like iris or fingerprint scans, when it's just... what people's faces and voices look and sound like. By this measure, <i>my own brain</i> is "collecting biometric data" on thousands of people a day while I walk down the street.<p>Second, in cases like the Nest camera or Google photos, presumably most of the people it's scanning <i>don't match</i> anything. It sure doesn't feel like a violation of privacy or consent for a computer to say, "I tried, but nope, face/voice not recognized".<p>Third, everyone being recognized has <i>previously been identified by the user</i>, whether someone tagging their friends in Photos, family members on Nest, or household members for Assistant. If I'm OK with a friend uploading an image of me to their own Google Photos, I don't see why I shouldn't allow them to run a facial detection algorithm to organize all the photos that contain me.<p>Now <i>if</i> Google were using all of this to build up a database of all the faces in the world matched to identities (as other sketchy companies have already done), then this would all be a problem. But there's zero evidence of anything like that, and that's not what this case is about. This isn't about misusing Street View or anything.<p>So it's hard to see this as anything but a political stunt? What's Texas's goal here -- to remove the helpful features that alert us when a stranger (as opposed to family member) is at our door, to distinguish voices in Assistant, and find photos of a particular friend in our photo library...? These are all genuinely useful features.