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While governments worldwide are starting to add facial recognition software to public cameras, Facebook has settled its long-term legal dispute concerning its use of this technology to tag people in photos uploaded to its platform. The company has agreed to pay $550 million to a group of plaintiffs from Illinois who argued the network didn't seek their consent when it first started the practice in 2011.
According to a report by Reuters, the European Union Commission is considering a ban on facial recognition technology in public areas for up to five years. The measure is intended to curb privacy violations, give lawmakers time to protect citizens from being cataloged illegally, and oppose the recent push by companies to enhance and improve-upon recognition tech.
A few months ago, Google Photos product lead, David Lieb, told us that manually tagging faces was on the app's update roadmap. We didn't hear anything about the feature until last week, when XDA developers managed to find it hidden inside Photos v4.32 and enable it. Now, it's going live for some users, though there's an important asterisk to keep in mind.
The facial recognition software built directly into Google Photos is already fantastically accurate, distinguishing your friends and family from even the blurriest of pixels. However, like any AI-driven tool, it's not perfect, and sometimes it just doesn't know who's actually in your pictures. Thanks to our friends over at XDA Developers, we now have our first look at an upcoming manual facial tagging feature that's currently hidden away within Google Photos 4.32.
Google Photos' facial recognition and grouping algorithms are impressive. Each time a new person or pet shows up in your images, it creates a new profile for them and puts all their pics together. However, this is still a computer software and some things might trip it. A statue, a face in a book cover or poster, similar-looking people, and other factors may lead it to incorrectly tag persons, and that's where you usually intervene to manually fix things. Previously, Google didn't ask you to explain why you were removing a pic from a profile, but now it does, hopefully as a way to improve its algorithms.
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- Two more variants just landed at the FCC, going by the identifier G020MN and G020PQ. Supported frequencies appear to be slightly different (one supports Band 41 while at least one of the others doesn't), so this could be a carrier variant. As a point of comparison, the Pixel 3a has several different regional and carrier variants, so this wouldn't be unusual.
FCC IDs for several new Google-made devices just landed, and although the product's identifying model numbers fit more closely with the Pixel 3a and 3a XL, both the timing and some key differences in the application make it clear we're looking at something new: specifically, these are probably the Pixel 4 and 4 XL.
If you're working on any kind of software that utilizes facial recognition — a secure Face ID camera system for a phone is just one example that comes to mind — you need a good amount of data in order to train the AI that powers it. Google isn't exactly new to the data collection game, but you might be surprised to learn that it's been doing so via such an old-fashioned method.
Google appears to be tired of the endless cycle of leaks and speculation when it comes to the Pixel 4. The company today has published a blog post and video showing off the upcoming phone's facial recognition tech, as well as gesture controls. We also get a tearaway view of the top of the Pixel 4 (pictured above) showing what that gap in previous leaks was for — a lot of things, it turns out.
Yesterday, Google Photos' product lead, David Lieb, took to Twitter to ask users for direct feedback about the app. The goal, as he said, was to be made aware of outstanding bugs, possible performance improvements, and most importantly feature requests. The conversation lasted for many hours, during which David replied to many of the messages sent, confirmed a few features are coming, and heard what everyone had to say.
Google's plans for better face recognition have been known for a while. After all, Apple's Face ID is so good that Google has to do something to play catch-up. According to teardowns by both 9to5Google and XDA Developers, new "face authentication" labels (strings) for settings options are hidden in Android Q Beta 4, and a search of the Settings app is showing related settings for some.
Facial grouping in Google Photos is one of the most impressive features of the service. Not only can you see all pics and videos you've taken of a person or pet, you can also use that in search to find specific snaps like "me in Vienna" or "[person] and [other person/cat/dog]" or "[person] and food" for example. But Google's algorithms aren't infallible and there are instances when you have to remove certain pics for wrong identification, or merge what it thinks are two different faces. Photos is aware of that and has been asking users on the web to help it improve its facial recognition. A similar feature has been showing up on Android over the past month or so.
Both XDA Developers and 9to5Google have spotted another upcoming feature in Android Q: more secure native facial recognition. Think Apple's Face ID rather than Android's existing Trusted Face system. Other OEMs like Xiaomi and Huawei have already shoehorned in their own facial recognition solutions, but now Google is bringing the feature to the (literal) source.
We've seen our mobile devices evolve from novelties to ubiquitous, do-it-all pocket supercomputers in just a few decades. Lately, though, there's been a sense of fatigue about the progression of mobile technology: the breakneck pace of big-ticket advancements has slowed, and even devices which we can't find fault with just seem kind of meh. Smartphones have matured, and the days of the next big thing actually being something big are largely behind us, but that doesn't mean improvements have stopped altogether. Here are a few of the noteworthy innovations and trends we've seen over the past 12 months.
Despite the advent of jumbo-sized smartphones, and a slow but steady drop in global tablet sales reported over the last few years, Samsung is seemingly keeping the faith in the Galaxy Tab family. It’s no longer a secret that there are at least two new models in the works, both of which are expected to trim their bezels down and leave out the physical home button.
Google's cute little robo-camera has received a substantial update. Clips has become better at recognizing and capturing "interesting facial expressions," and will learn which photos you keep and which you delete to better highlight content you'll want to hang on to. Perhaps most excitingly, though, Clips can now record timelapses.
2018 has not been kind to Facebook thus far. The Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal continues to haunt Mark Zuckerberg and his company, which is trying desperately to right wrongs with policy clarifications, changes to the way ads are handled, and even a rewards program for data abuse reporting.
With their fingerprint sensors, iris scanners, and facial recognition tech, Samsung phones feature more methods of biometric authentication than most, if not all, of their competitors. However, the Korean company is now being sued by a US-based "data security firm," PACid Technologies, for infringing on two US patents and one Korean patent with its biometric features.
As the Galaxy S9's launch date of February 25th creeps closer, we're learning more and more about the upcoming flagship. Just two days ago, we even got a peek at the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 plus in press render form. Now, after some digging around in Samsung's settings app, a developer and AP reader reached out to us about his discovery of something called 'Intelligent Scan,' something we've never heard of.
Everyone has a camera in their pocket now, and they all have places to post those photos on the internet. If you're a little sensitive about how often you show up in pics on the internet, Facebook has a new privacy tool that may interest you. Using facial recognition technology, Facebook can alert you to any photos in which you're visible regardless of whether or not you've been tagged.
The latest update to Google Photos is starting to roll out to users, bringing the version up to 3.6. A run through the app hasn't turned up any brand new features, but there are some interesting things in the teardown. We can look forward to maximum cuteness as facial detection may be expanding to encompass our pets, even mixing them in with the faces of other people. There's also a new feature called Motion that promises to bring life to our images. And finally, there's a firm clue that Google Lens may actually turn out to be a temporary Pixel exclusive.