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Google Can Tell if Someone Is Looking at Your Phone Over Your Shoulder (qz.com)
Dave Gershgorn, writing for Quartz: At the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Long Beach, California, next week, Google researchers Hee Jung Ryu and Florian Schroff will present a project they're calling an electronic screen protector, where a Google Pixel phone uses its front-facing camera and eye-detecting artificial intelligence to detect whether more than one person is looking at the screen. An unlisted, but public video by Ryu shows the software interrupting a Google messaging app to display a camera view, with the peeking perpetrator identified and given a Snapchat-esque vomit rainbow. Ryu and Schroff claim the system works with different lighting conditions and poses, and can recognize a person's gaze in 2 milliseconds. Ostensibly, this AI software is able to work so quickly because it's being run on the phone, rather than sent for processing on the company's powerful cloud servers.
Wow that was hard.
1) to charge extra when more than one person watches netflix?
2) to do targeted advertising based on who is looking?
3) to pause commercials if I look away until I face the screen again?
4) to pause ads if the other person looks away, to make sure they see the ads too?
5) to pause the video if I look away.
6) to black out your screen any time someone else happens to look at it. great if you to don't want your bf/gf/wife/husband to see the text messages your sending... not so great if you are trying to *show* him/her the text messages your sending. And truly annoying the moment your kids and friends figure out they can black your phone out by glancing at the screen, and start doing it just to mess with you.
Why is the camera even on? Camera should only be on, when I turn it on. Yet another feature from google I don't want.
Meanwhile, it won't tell if I'm being recorded by 40 other cameras. So its a false sense of security at best.
So, what they're really saying is what we already suspected - google devices are always spying on you, now it's visual and they are identifying what's happening in the background.
Maybe blurring the screen? The example in the TFA isn't great and it implies when there is an eavesdropper, a view of the user and the highlighted image of the person looking over their shoulder comes into view.
I'm thinking that if the display is truly horrific and/or ruins the user experience, the phone's owner will probably disable the feature.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Like we need more facial recognition in the world... Just wait until people realize that devices like this involuntarily collect biometrics on everyone in things like group selfies and family photos. No fancy Facebook code required this time, just a new smart phone. It's not coincidence that Apple made a new video and image format. They'll have facial recognition exif data in key frames inside videos based on what it knows from your photos. Then, your YouTube and Facebook uploads get to collect that data.
Another problem that 1% had, and that no one wanted solved, especially by a solution with a huge cost: no one will be looking over my shoulder when my battery is dead.
I can think of several low-tech approaches that will accomplish the same thing, just as fast, as probably more reliably. This is mostly one of that we-are-doing-it-because-we-can kind of things.
How did we get here, I wonder?
I can remember when GMail first came out and they were scanning the messages for spam. Everyone thought it was creepy, and an invasion of privacy, and maybe we shouldn't be using GMail for our personal messages...
Fast forward and we have Twitter and Facebook reading our feeds and automatically banning people. With no warnings, no explanation or identification of what caused the ban, just "you were saying inappropriate things, you're gone".
And of course their system can't be everywhere all the time, so they have "report this post" links where people can helpfully alert the companies about posts that should be examined.
(This, of course, gets abused in so many ways for political spite.)
Google is now scanning peoples' documents stored online, and simply banning access to the docs if the topics are deemed "unnecessary " (as in: "needlessly graphic or violent content". You didn't *need* to have that, so we're banning your short story.)
They don't give warnings or even explanation of what was detected, simply remove the person's 1st amendment right: you can't share the document with others. Or, apparently, copy it back to your local system.
Now they look over your shoulder, helpfully telling you that someone is snooping on your video chat.
Great. Wonderful. Completely useful feature, helps us keep our privacy. It's creepy, but for a good cause.
How did we get here again?
This is the sort of thing you would want to have included with encrypted messaging apps like Signal. Of course, it should be a configurable option, and when it detects other eyes on the screen, it should display an option to override the privacy (perhaps you want to show a message to a friend). But for reading possibly sensitive messages in a public place, this is a great idea.
Though I agree that there are a lot of cases where you don't want this, and it could be used to your disadvantage. That's why I want to see a phone where access to any given hardware can be controlled, with the option to provide simulated hardware in cases where you want the app to think it's using the real camera, GPS, motion sensor, or whatever. And that should include the network (which happens to be down all the time for certain apps, or only up when I'm viewing them).
And it can detect when a third person is watching at your phone, besides you and Google. Isn't it neat?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
[ Oh wait, that's basically always. ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What kind of emoji do they get?
Corporatism != Free Market
Because billions of devices with always-on cameras is good. In case someone doesn't respect your privacy and peeks over your shoulder.
Real lawyers write in C++
Maybe that's still working today. But if the progresses of Facebook's face recognition is used as a benchmark, very soon, the only way to escape google's detection would be to wear dazzle make-up.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Use a mirror. #REKT