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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.
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.
Sunglasses even when I'm using my own phone. It's only a matter of time before we see apps demanding access to the camera so that they can detect "eyes-on-ads". That'll be a sad day.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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).
We got here by you dolts continuing to use those products.
I quit Facebook. I don't use Twitter. I don't use Google Docs. I barely use my Gmail account, and keep really personal stuff out of email and messaging systems in general. I use my phone mostly as a phone and a calculator and install very little on it, I frankly overbought my phone as it was the cheapest way to get non-junk with vanilla Android at the time. I don't rely on Cloud stuff more than I am forced to, rather I keep my stuff local and don't use non-standalone products for anything I care about. I keep hard copy backups of really important stuff like tax records.
It is not hard, but people need to actually vote with their feet. Instead they pine about the fjords every time a new line is crosses and carry on shoveling their personal life details to these unholy behemoths. So frankly we as a society are where we deserve to be.