https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/10/22/google-firearm-serial-numbers/NOTICE: Facebook And Google Indexing Your Firearm Serial NumbersGoogle 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 (OCC) on Google images, allowing them to be searchable using text queries. Using the OCC 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.
It appears Google, with the help of Facebook, is archiving this information and making it easier to aggregate. In order to further test this theory, I tried a different serial number, this time from a silencer review. Placing the search term in quotes, Google is forced to search for only that specific character string. Here are the results.
lot's of pics and more at the link
