Thursday, September 18, 2014

Google Patents Technology to Actively Watch, Track, Identify People in a Room

9/18/2014

Meet your biggest enemy....

Google has come up with some pretty cool products over the years, but sometimes the company is downright creepy. One new patent that the search giant has come up with regards actively watching on people surrounding a device.


The company already has voice search available for Android users, including an “always listening” feature that enables them to say “Ok Google” from any menu of the phone and get the search screen pop up, Phandroid reports.

While this in itself sends shivers down the backs of some people, the latest patent that was filed on September 4 regards “detecting the end of a user question.” Basically, Google could add active watching technology to help advance Google Search and bring users even more relevant information, at the cost of people’s privacy.

It seems, however, that the plans don’t just include phones. “The digital capture device may be a digital video recorder, digital camera, a webcam, etc. The visual capture device may capture visuals and represent the visuals as a stream of images that may form a video,” reads the patent.

The company included an illustration indicating that Google would be listening only when it detects that a person is speaking to it with the help of audio and visual indicators. The visual analyzer can determine the number of people in an area “represented by the visual data, the identity of the people, the vertical and horizontal angles of the heads of the people, and lip movement of the people.”

This is, perhaps, one of the creepiest lines in the entire patent. Basically, it says that it not only watches people, but it also identifies them and reads their lips on top of listening to their voice.

Information can get stored to user profiles

The system can be used to analyze the audio and visual data, but also to store information obtained from there in a user profile. This is basically what Google does when people use its search engine while logged into their accounts. When it is applied to the audio and visual data, the whole thing seems even creepier.

That being said, Google notes that users would have some settings to fiddle with, allowing them to choose whether or not their personal information is stored.

Of course, this is just a patent at this point and it aims to protect Google’s intellectual property. The company has not made any announcement regarding the possible implementation of such a technology in its devices or in Android or Chrome OS.



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