The Conversational Photo Editing Tool on Google Photos is Illegal in Two States

Google recently unveiled a new photo editing tool that users can control using only their voice. First on the Google Pixel 10 smartphone, and then later expanded the feature to a wider range of Android phones in the United States.

But users in two states — Texas and Illinois — do not have access to the feature on Google Photos, but the company won’t say why. The story was first picked up by the Houston Chronicle, which notes that Google isn’t informing customers in the two states that they won’t have access to conversational editing before purchasing a device — despite the feature being heavily advertised.

Google says that the conversational editing tools aren’t “available in all regions at this time,” but doesn’t specify which ones, and doesn’t explain why they are being withheld.

Legal experts believe the problem is because of Texas’s and Illinois’s strict laws around how data is retained, stored, and used. Conversational editing on Google Photos requires another feature to be enabled: Face Groups. It uses facial recognition to automatically group photos of the same person or pet together, allowing users to easily search their library.

“The common thread in both laws is that they restrict how biometric identifiers such as face geometry or voiceprints can be stored, transmitted, or retained,” Frank Fagan, a professor at the South Texas College of Law, tells CNET.

Fagan speculates that Google might be using images that users are editing to train its Gemini AI model, and doing so would mean keeping a copy of the photo longer than Texas law allows. The Houston Chronicle notes that the same feature is available in other apps, on web browsers, and on iPhone — just not on the Pixel 10’s Photos app.

Earlier this year, Google paid $1.375 billion after it was sued by the Texas Attorney General’s Office for unlawfully capturing and using the biometric data of millions of Texans without obtaining their consent.

“The CUBI law says that biometric data must be destroyed within a reasonable time. If Google’s incentives are to build a database for use in other products, it clearly doesn’t want to destroy the data that it collects,” Fagan tells the Chronicle.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.