I upload photos to Google Photos because I want them to be grouped and categorized so I can easily find them. That is, if I click on a picture of my daughter, or my wife, I want to see ALL pictures of I took of them grouped together.
Looking at the text of the law itself, it seems to exclude photographs, here's the relevant section:
" (740 ILCS 14/10) Sec. 10. Definitions. In this Act: "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs, human biological samples used for valid scientific testing or screening, demographic data, tattoo descriptions, or physical descriptions such as height, weight, hair color, or eye color."
I'm not really sure what they mean by "face geometry" whereas at the same time, excluding photographs. Does this mean if my service measures the distance between the eyes, and the width of the mouth, and clusters photos by that, or by eye or hair color by using say, segmentation or histogram clustering, all of a sudden it's illegal? That would seem to be a fairly absurd and broad definition of biometric security information.
In theory, I suppose, the computation of the features, could be done on the client, and then have the features cloud-synced and replicated to all clients, but this would make for a shitty search experience, especially if the machine learning or feature extraction technique improvements overtime, and all of a sudden, you've got to download 20,000 photos and recompute everything on your phone.