Google Arts and Culture app: How to find which famous painting you look like – and why people don't want to

Location locking and concerns about tracking aren't stopping people finding their classical lookalikes

Google is finally offering people the chance to find out whether they look like a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh.

The company's Arts and Culture app – usually a sedate if high-tech way of finding new paintings and design – is sweeping the world after offering people the ability to find their doppelgangers. Trying it out is almost as easy as downloading the app – but not for everyone.

There are two big problems people point to: the app doesn't work in many countries, and people are worried that their face is being secretly transferred into a database. The first is genuine and can't be avoided, the second is probably less of a worry.

Various people expressed concern that Google was using the app to hoover up information about people's faces, and use those pictures for other purposes. Some half-joked that they were being added to an NSA database by inputting their picture, for instance.

Google assures everyone who uses the app that the picture will be stored securely and not used for other things.

"When you take a photo with this feature, your photo is sent to Google to find artworks that look like you," a message reads. "Google won't use data from your photo for any other purpose and will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches."

Whether you believe that depends on how much you trust Google, though it remains the case that there would be very simple and obvious ways for the company to hoover up data about you and your face without matching it with a painting. (That said, this is definitely a sensible concern to have: Google does track your data in other ways, and many viral apps that offer photo analysis don't give the same assurances that Google does.)

Trying out the feature is easy: download the app from your app store, and scroll down until you see the relevant post on the news feed that it opens up to. Once that comes up, everything else is fairly self-explanatory, and when you upload your photo you'll get your lookalike back, though it's questionable whether they actually live up to the name.

Except it's not quite so easy if you live somewhere other than the US, it seems. The feature is region-locked so that people in the UK, for instance, can't actually use it.

Some pointed out that's not quite so bad. Other than the face-matching feature, Google's arts and culture app offers a range of other features, such as the ability to look for other events and locations nearby or explore artefacts using virtual reality.

Either way, the app can be downloaded for free from the app store on iOS and Android.