Getting locked out of an account is no fun. Google has a few ways to help you regain access if you happen to forget your password or lose an authenticator, including recovery contacts and backup codes. Now, Google has a completely new option: your face. You can now give Google a video record of your face and sign into your account with a selfie, which sounds like something people are going to just love.
You will have to set this feature up ahead of time if you want the option of regaining account access with a selfie later on. To get started, verify your account type is supported. You won't be able to configure selfie sign-ins for Workspace accounts, child accounts, or any account enrolled in Google's Advanced Protection Program.
Configuring selfie sign-in requires you to record a video, which Google will store on its servers. Google's selfie sign-in landing page includes the typical disclaimers about privacy and data access, promising that the company will keep the video encrypted and won't use it for any other purposes unless you opt in.
Getting locked out of an account is no fun. Google has a few ways to help you regain access if you happen to forget your password or lose an authenticator, including recovery contacts and backup codes. Now, Google has a completely new option: your face. You can now give Google a video record of your face and sign into your account with a selfie, which sounds like something people are going to just love.
You will have to set this feature up ahead of time if you want the option of regaining account access with a selfie later on. To get started, verify your account type is supported. You won't be able to configure selfie sign-ins for Workspace accounts, child accounts, or any account enrolled in Google's Advanced Protection Program.
Configuring selfie sign-in requires you to record a video, which Google will store on its servers. Google's selfie sign-in landing page includes the typical disclaimers about privacy and data access, promising that the company will keep the video encrypted and won't use it for any other purposes unless you opt in.
Meta executives claimed that a controversial facial recognition feature didn’t “exist.” Fast forward a few weeks later, and they’re describing the feature in public — and in detail.
In June, a Wired investigation revealed that Meta had quietly infused unreleased facial recognition tech into its “AI Glasses,” the tech giant’s chatbot and camera-equipped smart glasses. While the feature, dubbed NameTag, was inaccessible to consumers, it was designed to register faces encountered by Meta glasses wearers “into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user’s phone,” according to the magazine.
Andy Stone, the tech giant’s spokesperson and VP of communications, declared on X that Wired’s reporting was “intellectually dishonest” and “advocacy-driven click bait.” What’s more, according to Stone, NameTag was fully nonexistent.
“Here’s a thing: Wired reports Meta didn’t answer several questions about how this will work,” Stone added in a follow-up post. “How could we? The feature doesn’t exist!”
In response to Stone, another Meta executive, chief technology officer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, jumped in.
“Incredibly misleading from Wired,” he wrote. “Absolutely dishonest.”
Yet despite company leaders reassuring us that the feature doesn’t exist, Bosworth discussed it in detail during an interview with The Atlantic CEO and podcaster Nick Thompson. Bosworth’s comments in the interview, which was published last week, seemingly contradicted his fellow executives, revealing that the feature did indeed exist.
NameTag, Bosworth told Thompson, would be “encrypted locally to your device,” and would catalog people who smart glasses wearers “met in person, with your glasses on, who introduced themselves, or you said, ‘okay, this is David, remember this person.'”
This information is “only available to you, when you are wearing your glasses,” Bosworth added. He emphasized that the data captured by NameTag wouldn’t be stored in a centralized database.
“This is a person you’ve met before. Here’s their name. They’re right in front of you. That’s… what we call a NameTags feature,” said Bosworth. “I think people get confused because they hear face recognition and they think, ‘oh, there’s a central face database that everyone’s being scanned constantly into.’ It’s not that.”
In addition to supporting blind or low-vision smart glasses wearers, said Bosworth, NameTag could solve what Meta calls “the cocktail party problem,” saving wearers from any awkwardness that may arise when encountering people at parties who they’re sure they’ve met before, but can’t quite place.
“It’s a very universally human problem,” Bosworth said. “Nearly every human I talk to, no matter what their status of their vision or their memory, understands that this is a problem that would help them feel more comfortable in social situations if they had it.”
To be clear, Wired never suggested that the facial recognition feature it uncovered was being used to build a “central face database” by way of Meta’s smart glasses. Indeed, in line with what Bosworth said in the podcast appearance, Wired reported that “code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called ‘NameTag,’ identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when activated, alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone.” The story also repeatedly noted that the feature was unreleased and inaccessible to glasses wearers.
When journalists and others called out the contradiction between Meta’s past and recent statements, Stone — the comms executive who said that Wired couldn’t answer questions about the feature because it “doesn’t exist” — jumped back in the comments section.
“We have said for months we’re exploring such features, even as nothing has shipped to consumers,” the spokesperson said in response to a post by The Intercept journalist Sam Biddle. “No secret there despite the conspiratorial thinking.”
There’s a big difference between a feature not existing and a feature that exists — if still unfinished — and has yet to be released. Meta appears to be arguing that if a feature remains inaccessible to consumers, it’s technically nonexistent, even if the company has gone as far as to issue multiple updates inserting code for the feature into products that are already in consumers’ hands. (Meta quietly deleted the NameTag code after its existence was made public.)
During the podcast interview, Bosworth took care to emphasize that Meta is considering the privacy implications of a facial recognition-powered feature like NameTag. He noted that it’s likely illegal in states like Illinois and Texas, and that it “has to be done in a way that people feel comfortable.”
Meanwhile, Meta continues to fight an ongoing consumer harm lawsuit, prompted by an investigation by a pair of Swedish newspapers. The publications found that Meta collected recordings by smart glasses wearers and passed them along to human data labelers, despite promising consumers that their recordings would be stored only on their devices.
“Designed for privacy,” reads a webpage for Meta’s smart glasses, “controlled by you.”
Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy
As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend.
Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.
One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.
The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.
Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”
Believers are sealed by the Holy Spirit for redemption. The mark of God signifies salvation, contrasting with Satan's mark, which represents servitude and slavery. The coming digital ID system potentially fulfills the mark of the beast prophecy. Don't accept any digital ID!
The Digital ID Act 2024 in Australia is a vehicle for extensive surveillance, potentially linking personal data such as biometrics to financial accounts and digital currency. Governmental assurances of voluntary participation do not help, fearing that such measures may become mandatory, leading to total control and loss of individual freedoms.
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