Google Can Tell if Someone Is Looking at Your Phone Over Your Shoulder (qz.com) 75
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.
Wear sunglasses (Score:2)
Re:Wear sunglasses (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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People wearing sunglasses still look like intruders, so the alarm will still go off.
today vs tomorrow (Score:2)
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.
yes... and... how will this be used? (Score:3)
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.
Re: yes... and... how will this be used? (Score:2)
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"Paranoid much? Samsung phones already have a feature called smart stay, which keeps the screen on if you're looking at it. I"
I have an S7 edge, and find that feature is more annoying than useful, because it doesn't work that well. Your right though, I haven't heard of any privacy issues related to that. Doesn't mean there aren't any. Do we know if that's included back in the telemetry sent to samsung... how often you look at the phone, and for how long; or if it fingerprints the faces and reports back how
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You should really learn to use blockquote tags.
They're awesome!
I use them all the time. Sometimes I don't close them properly; and I'm far to lazy to preview posts. ;)
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It may be misused, but it can be used for good things too. If it is local and I can control its activation, I don't see a problem.
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7) To not show your password as you type it?
It may be misused, but it can be used for good things too. If it is local and I can control its activation, I don't see a problem.
More importantly, to tell you not to type your password when someone is watching. Obscuring the letters of the password is standard, but doesn't prevent someone from seeing what letters you press on the onscreen keyboard.
EyesOnU (Score:2)
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it's being run on the phone, rather than sent for processing on the company's powerful cloud servers.
Although I am sure this means: "it's being run on the phone before being sent to the company for further processing".
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Rather than a "vomit rainbow"... (Score:2)
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.
More creepy than the peeping (Score:2)
and the battery-eating continues (Score:2)
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.
Nice. However... (Score:2)
How did we get here (Score:2)
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 rea
Re:How did we get here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You sacrifice a lot, and gain very little.
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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.
You quit Facebook and you're calling others dolts? You should have never signed up!
Keep in mind that the search engines track all your searches. Your internet provider tracks, well, all your internet traffic. So unless you are using a VPN, you're not really showing anyone anything.
The key is just to keep in mind that your online information is online, for all to see. So use it appropriately... but still use it!
Incorporate with Signal (Score:3)
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).
Ya, but ... (Score:2)
[ Oh wait, that's basically always. ]
Will it tell me if the NSA is spying? (Score:2)
What kind of emoji do they get?
Always-on Camera (Score:2)
Because billions of devices with always-on cameras is good. In case someone doesn't respect your privacy and peeks over your shoulder.
And lowfi tech wins again? (Score:2)