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As many others have said, Google isn’t using a cryptographic hash here. It’s using perceptual hashing, which isn’t collision-safe at all.


Did you read the whole thing?

and a more detailed examination of common perceptual hashing algorithms (skip to table 3 for the collision probabilities): https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2904/81.pdf

And there was a whole lot of explanation of how probable cause works and how it's different from programmers' aspirations to perfection.


The table only proves the point. The lowest probability in the table is 1 in 100_000. Most others are 1 in 100.

28 billion photos are uploaded every week to Google Photos[1]. That’s at least 280k false positives per week.

Should we really be performing 30 search warrants on innocent people per second?

[1] https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/


Do you have any evidence that this is happening? You don't think someone would have noticed by now if it were?

And as I pointed out, we're not talking about a search warrant on a person, we're talking about whether it's necessary to get a search warrant to look at a picture to determine if it's an illegal image.




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