NOTICE: Facebook And Google Indexing Your Firearm Serial Numbers
Google and Facebook have now made it possible to find photos of firearms by simply typing a serial number into the search box. Earlier today, the automotive website Jalopnik published a story 8 showing how license plate numbers are evidently scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) on Google images, allowing them to be searchable using text queries. Using the OCR hypothesis, TFB wondered if this image data mining technique might be able to be used to search for firearm serial numbers. Using images posted previously on TFB with serial numbers displayed on firearms, we tested the serial number search technique. As you can see from the results below, firearm serial numbers are in fact part of this apparent large-scale data mining operation by companies like Google and Facebook.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/10/22/google-firearm-serial-numbers/
The guys at TFB went through their image library and found images of various firearms and silencers where the serial number is clearly visible. They then typed it into Google and voila! Every image from their website showed up in the image results.
Although it is unlikely for a random person to have the serial number on your firearms, it is dangerous for social media giants to have this information. Facebook and Instagram are both owned by the same company. Same with YouTube and Google. When these platforms data mine this information, this creates an extremely dangerous situation.
Gun owners have worried about firearm registries because they inevitably lead to confiscation. If the government has tabs on every single gun in America, it makes it easier for them to come beating on our doors, demanding that we hand them over (just as Beto has proposed). These social media giants and their owners are lefties. For all we know, these private organizations can willingly hand over a person’s name and the serial numbers on their firearms to the government. And before anyone says this is an invasion of privacy, just remember: when you signed up for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and every other social networking website out there, you agreed to their terms and conditions. Anything you put on their website becomes their property , meaning they can decide how to use that information against you.