Posted October 25, 2019 10:00 am by Comments

By Tom Knighton

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

It’s a common enough thing. People pick up a new firearm and they snap a picture to share on Facebook, either on their profile or in one of the hundreds of firearm-focused groups on the platform. They want to show their friends what they got. You know, before it gets lost in a tragic boating accident.

However, according to the good folks over at The Firearm Blog, there’s a problem with that practice.

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 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 …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms

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