Comment by gojomo
1 month ago
My thoughts exactly: "we've got this crafty image fingerprinting, the CSAM detection use proved too controversial to roll out, but let's get the core flows into something that sounds useful for users, so the code atays alive, improving, & ready for future expansion."
Whether such fingerprinting can reliably be limited to public "landmarks" is an interesting question, dependent on unclear implementation details.
Even if the user-visible search is limited to 'landmarks', does the process pre-create (even if only on-device) fingerprints of many other things as well? If so, it suddenly becomes possible for briefly-active non-persistent malware to instantly find images of interest without the wider access & additional processing it'd otherwise take.
> let's get the core flows into something that sounds useful for users
is it even that?
I don't see the benefit of this whatsoever
The search feature is useful at times, and while local processing is good enough to find (some of the) photos I've taken that match a search term like "table", it can't currently find a photo from a search term of "specific neighbourhood in my city" or "name of specific mountain I climbed years ago" - so if by processing on their servers allows them to do that then it would be genuinely beneficial.
But not beneficial enough to make up for the loss of privacy, so I've disabled it without finding out how useful or not the functionality is.