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Comment by maxpert | Hacker News Reader

At least one company is "trying" keep my photos private. The other day Google Photo told my wife it had prepared an album for our trip to SFO. We were surprised because she already disabled Geo-tagging but whataya know... Google still figured it out!

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If you have location enabled on your phone, Google appears to cross reference your location with your photo timestamps to work out where you were. I know this because when I import my DSLR images to Google Photos it estimates the location, usually very accurately.

I've also seen it geotag things based upon the content of the image alone.

I went to the photo store not long ago and had dozens of rolls of negatives scanned, from a vacation to Europe 20 years ago. I uploaded them into Google Photos and it geotagged many of them automatically.

They have a public API that does the same, it detects landmarks in images and can give you a lat/long position for it as well as a confidence score.

https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/detecting-landmarks

apple cloud did release a lot of celeb pics over the internet...let's not forget that

That was a phishing attack, nothing to do with Apple other than that the people attacked by it were iPhone users.

I discovered the same last week. I made a trip to Amsterdam some 11 years ago, and since then uploaded my entire photo library to Google Photos. Last week I was playing around and searched "Amsterdam" in Google Photos, whaddaya know, (most of my) photos from Amsterdam showed up, at least those with discernible features/buildings/landmarks.

Google Photos uses ML to tag photos and this feature released amidst much fanfare at Google I/O a couple of years ago. They don't need location data to geotag photos anymore.

Thanks for explaining one possible method. It could still mean Google is tracking location "without consent". I suppose it depends on whether they use that location data for anything other than Google Photos.

"Could"? Sounds like they 'did' with OP's SFO album.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600889/google-unveils-neu...

They took 126 million geotagged images from the web, bined them into 26,000 squares, and trained a neural net to predict which square on the earth an image was taken in. That's very poor resolution, but if you see that 20 images taken around the same time are tagged as the square that contains San Francisco, you can be pretty sure they all happened during a trip to San Francisco.

Reminds me of https://geoguessr.com

Did you book a hotel/airbnb/flight and received a confirmation mail in your Google email account?

That is true as well. I will buy something at Costco and I will see ads related to that. Book a hotel and see ads on Facebook (let alone Google). Problem is not the fact that I am looking for these things but the amount of information they steal without my consent.

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