Illinois has laws against biometrics, which basically can be interpreted as broadly as anything that even looks for a face as a binary classifier. The translation demo uses video, intended to be your face.
Texas has the “Capture or Use of Biometric Identifiers” act. It’s very similar to the Illinois act that requires consent etc. Although it’s been on the books for a long time, Texas AG Paxton really only started enforcing it in 2022, 14 years after the law first appeared. The first target was Meta.
In this case it’s not the patent trolls, but the biometric collection acts shared by Illinois and Texas.
Aside - if you use Clear for airport security in those states, you get an additional consent screen. It seems like about 50% of the time the Clear employee clicks through the consent screen before you can read it. I imagine this does not fulfill the legal requirements when that happens.
This provision is going to throw a monkey wrench into Texas's new Electronic Genital Verification system at the Dallas Forth Worth Airport. I guess they're going to have to go back to the manual genital verification system, and hire thousands of Genital Enforcement Inspectors to hang out in the bathrooms, addressing the biggest problem that threatens society today, by diligently saving the children and protecting the rights of women from trans people and drag queens who need to take a dump and would prefer not to go outside on the lawn or on the windshield of a CyberTruck (so easily confused with a prison toilet). At least that will create many new jobs for ex-cons and unskilled American citizens who can't find work elsewhere because immigrant terrorists took their jobs.
Your genitalia may be photographed electronically during your use of this facility as part of the Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) pilot program at the direction of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. In the future, EGV will help keep Texans safe while protecting your privacy by screening for potentially improper restroom access using machine vision and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in lieu of traditional genital inspections.
At this time images collected will be used solely for model training purposes and will not be used for law enforcement or shared with other entities except as pursuant to a subpoena, court order or as otherwise compelled by legal process.
Your participation in this program is voluntary. You have the right to request the removal of your data by calling the EGV program office at (512) 463-0001 during normal operating hours (Mon-Fri 8AM-5PM).
They don't. The complication -- in both directions -- is "record of hand or face geometry"
If I take a photo of you, that's a record of face geometry.
The Meta FAIR demos turned on my webcam because I didn't notice that was enabled when allowing audio. They grabbed a photo of me without my permission, with no purpose as far as I can tell. That should be illegal.
However, posting a photo of a public space in a news article? That seems to fall under the same provision.
For mobile data, there might not even be an Internet gateway in every state, so this entire idea seems a bit ridiculous. iCloud Private Relay also regularly "crosses state lines" that way.
Of course, if this trend of state-specific restrictions continues, networks might want to invest in actually having per-state IP ranges.
Not accessible if you're in Illinois or Texas.
They must have anti-AI laws, probably with voice conversion moreso than image segmentation and cartoon animation.
Hopefully the lawmakers see beneficial use cases and fix their laws to target abuse instead of a blanket coarse-grained GenAI restriction.