Google’s ‘Ask Photos’ Missing in Some States Due to Face Grouping
▼ Summary
– Google’s Ask Photos and conversational editing features are unavailable to some users in Illinois and Texas despite meeting other requirements.
– These AI features require face grouping, which stores facial geometry data to identify and organize people in photo galleries.
– Google has blocked these tools in Illinois and Texas due to legal restrictions involving biometric data privacy laws.
– Lawsuits in both states challenged Google’s face grouping for violating biometric privacy laws regarding data collection and consent.
– Google confirms the features are region-restricted and states it’s working to expand availability while complying with local regulations.
Google’s new Ask Photos feature, an AI-powered tool designed to answer questions about your photo library, is currently unavailable for some users in Illinois and Texas. This absence appears directly linked to Google’s face grouping functionality, which is also missing in these states. Alongside Ask Photos, the conversational editing feature, which allows users to describe desired edits for Gemini to execute, is similarly affected.
Reports indicate that residents of these two states who otherwise meet all of Google’s stated requirements are finding the features missing from their Google Photos apps. The prerequisites for accessing these AI tools include being at least 18 years old, residing in the United States, and having the face grouping option enabled.
The core of the issue seems to be face grouping, an opt-in feature that uses facial geometry data to identify and organize people across a user’s photo collection. While this technology significantly enhances the gallery experience by making it easier to find pictures of specific individuals, it relies on collecting biometric data. This data is crucial for the advanced AI features; conversational editing uses it to intelligently enhance portraits, and Ask Photos utilizes it to accurately identify people when answering user queries about their photos.
Google has officially confirmed that face groups are not available in Illinois and Texas. When contacted, the company provided a statement acknowledging that the ability to ask Photos to edit images is not currently available to users in those states and that they are working on a solution to make it more widely accessible.
The unavailability stems from legal challenges related to biometric privacy. Texas settled a lawsuit with Google in 2022 concerning its face grouping practices. In Illinois, a lawsuit alleged that the feature violated the state’s stringent Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). A central challenge under BIPA is that the law requires informed consent from individuals whose biometric data is collected. Since photos often contain people other than the device owner who took the picture, Google cannot reasonably obtain consent from every person whose face appears in a user’s library.
Because of these legal constraints, Google’s systems can block access to Ask Photos and conversational editing even for users who have enabled face grouping, based solely on the device’s detected location being within a restricted state. This situation is not an isolated incident for Google; varying international privacy regulations in places like Europe and Canada have also previously led to the absence of other key features for Pixel and Android users in those regions. As Google continues to integrate AI more deeply into its products, navigating these complex and differing legal landscapes remains a significant challenge.
(Source: 9to5 Google)
