Yeah, I hate to be cynical, but I'm not buying the stated use cases as the main motivator here for Google. It's cool they are releasing it. Interested to see what other folks come up with.

I wonder if this could be used to identity people based on hand movements alone? Like some sort of movement 'finger print' or something.

I've got to imagine we all have somewhat different paterns of moving our hands. Is it possible AI could be trained to study existing footage of a person, and identify them this way? Maybe akin to facial recognition, but hand movements instead?

Or maybe they are all too similar to be able to tell one person from another. Hell if I know, but interesting to think about.

Hand identification has been used to convict at least one person:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/stories-45190746/how-a-paedoph...

My thoughts exactly. Ten or 15 years ago I would think "cool, they are going to make something awesome with it".

Three years ago: "they'll shut it down when they get another exciting idea".

Today: "userbinator beat me to it only I am worried they will come up with something worse".

Sorry to all googlers here. I'm trying not picking on you individually but the company you work for has worked long and hard to erode mountains of trust and it is starting to pay off :-/

It’s an open source library, so you can’t “shut it down”, it’s a gift to the community and people can continue to use it if Google doesn’t.

Honestly these kinds of comments are getting silly and applied out of context, it’s almost like there needs to be. Godwin’s law for dredging up Reader’s cancellation or conspiracy theories about how finger tracking is going to be used for ad recommendation.

Edit: upvoted for the point that it is open source.

I never cared about Reader.

For me it was 5 or 10 or even more different other things like

- Killing xmpp through extend, embrace extinguish

- Creating Google+ without making it open

- Killing Google+

- ReCaptcha v2 and v3

- Constantly pushing the boundaries for tracking, now also buying credit card logs

- etc etc

Google did not kill XMPP, the number of people who actually used Google Chat client was tiny. What killed XMPP was ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, and text messaging.

Your comments on federation are mistaken IIRC. Google Chat supported federation from 2005 to 2014, it was dropped in a Google I/O announcement because none of the other players mentioned above who were gobbling up the messaging market reciprocated, they instead took advantage of Googles support of federation to onboard users to their proprietary networks. Google Chats user base was declining and the network effort of the proprietary social networks was pulling everyone in.

A similar thing happened with OpenID. Google initially supported it, and Social networks used it for new user signup account creation, but did not allow it for signin.

Thanks facts always appreciated, you might very well be right about those two. I still think Google has earned their current reputation.

(And don't for a second think I think less of Google than the rest, it is probably just that I used to trust Google somewhat more than the rest.)

I work for Google, I definitely think the behavior of Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and others hurt the idea that "open wins". Google tried hard with XMPP, OpenID, OAuth, ActivityStreams, WebFinger, OpenSearch, FOAF, OpenSocial, et al to build distributed, federated solutions. Even Google Wave was designed with federation support. At some point, even they had to admit, they were losing.

The problem is, tech geeks love it (open), but consumers don't care, and after the smartphone revolution, it's far easier to build siloed apps, and get people into things like iMessage, WeChat, or WhatsApp, than it is to get people to adopt a federated protocol.

If Email had been invented in the modern era with consumers controlling what wins, we would not have SMTP. We'd have proprietary platform specific mailboxes, and people would have to create accounts to send people mail on a platform.

The internet had a brilliant run in the 80s, and early 90s, before the great masses arrived, back when protocols were designed by people interested in technical capabilities, not money, when these things were hashed out at IETF meetups and mailing lists.

Consumer behavior and investment decisions today inherently force centralization I think, and it's hard to build a truly open system these days.