Google Photos shows how well Google knows you
The algorithms have spoken: I am an anti-social homebody who spends a great deal of his free time photographing the same few cats, meals and sunsets. I travel occasionally, but mostly along the East Coast near where I live. And I spend almost all of my time with a small group of half a dozen people — rarely at the same time.
That, at least, is my takeaway after a weekend of studying (or perhaps overstudying) the groupings and trends in Google Photos. The application, easily the most buzzed-about announcement from Google's big developer conference last week, automatically scans, backs up and organizes the massive heap of photos kept on your smartphone.
The stated goal: the app will make it easier to "find that photo" you want, according to Google's team. The actual effect: Google is so good at categorizing your photos that it offers an unnervingly accurate picture of your life. It's eerie to see the visual proof of Google's Big Data applied to the faces of your father, mother and grandfather — which it can recognize across decades with uncanny ease.
The social network of one
We already knew Google was good at some of this. Google Photos expands upon the already advanced work done with photos in Google+. (As Alexis Madrigal wrote in The Atlantic a year ago, "One can poke fun at Google+'s foibles, but they nailed photos.") Like that earlier effort, it automatically arranges similar photos into stories or collections. It also uses facial recognition technology to group together photos of each individual in your life and landmark recognition technology to figure out locations — even if you turned off the geotagging option for some.
Unlike the original Google+ photos product, however, the sole purpose for Google Photos is to organize your many, many pictures privately for yourself, rather than share them with the world. Unlike the faux bonhomie of Facebook or Instagram, which are public performances based on curating the most enviable scenes of your life for The Jealous People Who Follow Your Stream, Google Photos is Google's announcement of its own close relationship with you, the user. The surprise is that maybe you didn't think you and Google were that close.
This is a raw and surprisingly comprehensive data set that we have intentionally or not collected about our lives — now made clear. The application has the potential to shed an honest light on your interests, social connections and travel history both to yourself — and, potentially, to Google. Google Photos correctly noted (and curated into collections) my editor's interests: Skyscrapers, sunsets, Paris, flowers, New York.
The real me comes into focus
At first, I was unimpressed by Google Photos. Shortly after downloading the application on Friday, I did a cursory search for one of my favorite categories, "food," which turned up nothing. So much for Google's smart algorithms.
Then I realized the application had only just begun to back up my pictures. A few hours later, I checked again and my whole life was there.
Google Photos had magically created a visual list of all the people in my life, based on who I feel comfortable enough with to photograph. The first half dozen were close friends and family members. The next half dozen were friends I see from time to time. In total, this proved to be a more honest network of my contacts — minus a cameo by Eliot Spitzer, who was in there thanks to my photos of a couple New York Post covers.
Just by scrolling down, I could see a kind of timelapse of my life: watch my dad age or see how my fiancée and I have grown together.
Even the mistakes had some truth to them: Two photos of my dad are lumped together with the Spitzer pictures, seemingly confirming my dad's long-held belief that he resembles the former New York governor. Google somehow recognized my grandfather as the same man from pictures in his 20s through his 70s, but it believes my mom looked like one person when she was in her 20s and another person in her 50s, echoing our own family's narrative.
The locations were similarly revealing. The list included the two trips abroad I'd taken in recent years (and which I'd promptly shared to every social network possible), but it was dominated more by albums grouped by my everyday haunts in New York City, where I currently live, and Long Island, where I grew up and visit often.
Likewise, my banal day-to-day hobbies shown in the Things section — group into categories like food, cats and skylines. It's important to remember this is version 1.0 of the app. There's no reason Google Photos couldn't get more granular: "Burgers" and "salads" instead of "food." Specific buildings instead of "skyscrapers." Actual names inputed by the user for each of the people recognized in the photos. Your life broken down, sliced up and labeled with taxonomic efficiency.
For someone like me, who has steadfastly avoided lifehacking activity trackers, meal logs and location services like Foursquare — this was a reminder that for all my digital dodging, I've been tracking much of that same information myself for years anyway. It's just been lost somewhere in the digital equivalent of a disorganized shoebox. (Google is also developing "sophisticated deep learning algorithms" to figure out the number of calories from all our #foodporn pictures.)
IMAGE: FLICKR, KURMANSTAFF
It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Google could create such effective automated features. This is the company that indexed the world wide web, scanned millions of books, mapped the world and is now developing self-driving vehicles. But none of that brings the point home quite as much as looking at a photo album that somehow can recognize my grandfather's face through the years — better than I can.
That incredible ability to grasp the nuances of our personal lives could prove to be a powerful pivot point for Google, which has tried and failed repeatedly over the years to build social products that would help it compete against Facebook for marketing dollars. If Google wanted, it could presumably factor in details about my travel habits and interests gleaned from the photos to better target ads to me, which is after all the vast majority of its business. But Google says it has no plans to go that route — not yet anyway.
"Google Photos will not use images or videos uploaded onto Google Photos commercially for any promotional purposes, unless we ask for the user's explicit permission," a spokesperson for Google said in a statement provided to Mashable. "Our first priority — as with most products that Google builds — is to get the user experience right. So we have no monetization plans at this time."
At this time, Google's focus appears to be on spinning out the most useful elements of the failed Google+ social network and building a powerful photo application that keeps Google front and center in the lives of Internet users as they move to mobile — even if it's searching for memories rather than information online.
For now, the application has shown me at least one thing about myself: I need to spend a little less time looking at burgers and a little more time looking at people.
Source :Mashable
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