Why Google Is Suddenly Obsessed With Your Photos – The Ringer

Google tends to throw lots of ideas at the wall, and then harvest the data from what sticks. Right now the company is feasting on photos and videos being uploaded through its surprisingly popular app Google Photos. The cloud-storage service, salvaged from the husk of the struggling social network Google in 2015, now has 500 million monthly active users adding 1.2 billion photos per day. No one is quite sure what Google plans to do with all of these pictures in the long run, and it's possible the company hasn't even figured that out. But in a landscape fast becoming dominated by artificial intelligence, data -- in this case, your photos -- has become its own reward.