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  • Hacker News
  • Respectfully, John and Claire, what do they have you guys doing? Please blink twice in your selfies if you're okay.
  • That's Google in a nutshell - "the more personal data you give us, the more access you can have to Google services".
  • Google already have 5,000 odd photos of me anyway in Google photos. I'm screwed either way.
  • Sure, but that's not the same thing. How they use the data is the important part. The google photos are not to be used for security for example. Different ToS. We should try and not have a defeatist attitude and fight back as much as we can
    by onel
  • Plus friends and family inadvertently give Google/Facebook (etc) your personal info via tagged photos, contacts, DMs without your consent and they gather/link/sell this collateral info to the highest bidder without anyone being the wiser.
  • That attitude is exactly what got you into that mess.

    There's no reason to believe the mess couldn't get any deeper, so backing out now doesn't have to be useless.

  • This already exists and is called FaceID and doesn't have the same privacy risks since the face check is done locally to allow the user to use the passkey to authenticate.

    >Your selfie video is encrypted at rest

    All data nowadays is encrypted at rest. That doesn't really matter since someone stealing a hard drive from Google with your information on it will never happen. The more likely risk is Google decrypts it and then sends it somewhere it shouldn't go and potentially trained into some AI system.

  • The fact that most people will love this is depressing.
  • I wonder. I know a lot of people who hate this kind of thing, but because they don't want to be "tinfoil hat oddballs" they just keep quiet.

    I think it would be nice to applaud or support people who think this way.

    Instead of ridiculing these folks, or using semi-apologist "you're not the target market" type comments, it would be nice to say "good for you" or support them in some other way.

    by m463
  • Can you please explain why it is depressing? This feature is widely celebrated in the accessibility user groups in India, since the traditional sign-in methods have been proven to be a major friction point for users with special needs.
  • If there were a Doomsday Clock for how close we are to "please drink verification can" (https://files.catbox.moe/eqg0b2.png), scientists would now move it to 3 minutes to midnight.
    by xnx
  • We're zero minutes away from "some scammer said they were google and I had to show them my butthole to login".
  • I would love to know how they are going to handle deepfakes.

    Also, doesn't this give law enforcement an easier avenue to compel access to someone's accounts?

  • They or the government is going to make deepfakes using this.
  • > Also, doesn't this give law enforcement an easier avenue to compel access to someone's accounts?

    It does.

  • Yes it does. Biometric information (e.g a picture of your face) is famously not nearly as protected under the 4th amendment compared to things like passwords.

    Anyone opting into this feature is effectively giving any US law enforcement (including ICE, local law enforcement, etc) free reign over their data.

  • Meanwhile google has been locking out and closing the gmail accounts of people, myself included, that signed up before a phone number was required. If you don't log into your account for ~a year or so they will lock it and demand you log in. Which you can do, and you can even input the 2FA code, but it still won't let you log in because it says "there's not enough information to prove this is your account" despite having all the information ever associated with it. The only way to prevent deletion is to add a completely new, never before there phone number. I couldn't do that so they deleted mine saying I never logged in despite logging in literally dozens of times.
  • > The only way to prevent deletion is to add a completely new, never before there phone number.

    Just happened to me. They "confirmed" it was me by getting a phone number they'd never seen before, that didn't belong to the false name on the account, and that I'd refused to give them for like 20 years. If anything, the fact that I eventually agreed to give them a phone number under duress was evidence that it wasn't me.

    > despite logging in literally dozens of times.

    Despite logging in literally thousands of times. I went in and deleted almost everything. Email now considered harmful. I'll feel better once they're locking me out of an empty account.

    The problem is that everything in life requires a persistent email address, and hates email addresses that aren't on a whitelisted domain. The choice is between having some major provider, or not being able to pay your taxes online or log into your health insurance website. The fence is closing.

  • I'm waiting for the new killer feature where "Sign In With Google" popup overlay dialogs go away forever and never come back.
  • Guess what, there are browser settings for that!
  • uBlock Origin with the EasyList Annoyances filter is better than anything that Google can ever provide. I haven't seen Google popups in my desktop browser for a long time.
  • Ironically it was DuckDuckGo's AI that gave me the magic string for uBlock origin:

    accounts.google.com/gsi/*

    Put that in your config and enjoy.

  • Fucking hell, they modified Chrome/ium to pop up an application dialog (it's not just somr HTML inside the web page) to "log-in using Google".. fuck Google!

    Maybe next they'll get Chrome to automatically turn on your webcam, capture your face and say "Thanks for logging in!"

  • by pzxc
  • this should be the top comment
  • why are so many websites called title-of-the-article-dot-com ai-generated?

    I suppose the kind of people making them just don't have a blog or something

  • >If you've violated a Google policy, we may save your selfie video for a longer period of time to enforce our policies.
  • Is this a quote? I don't see it on the page.
    by dang
  •   Your Google Account holds a lot of valuable information, from cherished photos to important emails and documents.
    
    Stuff like this is why I and many other people are going out of our way to make this no longer the case.
  • I’m not sure I understand why this particular line bothers you. They seem to just be emphasising that your Google account has a lot of information and therefore they are providing another way to secure it?

    Whether this is a good method or not is a different discussion and I probably will not use this method