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The odds are you can't make out the PIN of that guy with the sun glaring obliquely off his iPad's screen across the coffee shop. But if he's wearing Google Glass or a smartwatch, he probably can see yours.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell found they could use video from wearables like Google Glass and the Samsung smartwatch to surreptitiously pick up four-digit PIN codes typed onto an iPad from almost 10 feet away-and from nearly 150 feet with a high-def camcorder. Their software, which used a custom-coded video recognition algorithm that tracks the shadows from finger taps, could spot the codes even when the video didn't capture any images on the target devices' displays.
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Google Glass Snoopers can Steal Your Passcode with a Glance
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What I tell you three times is true.
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(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday June 25 2014, @07:54AM
The problem is not unique to GG. However while pen-cams, hat-cams, and glasses-cams are available, nobody in his right mind is rushing to buy them. Why? Because they are single purpose devices. They only do surveillance. Too few people would want to spend big bucks on a niche device. GG breaks this mold; Google is advertising GG as a product that can do other things that a common man may find useful. GG is not bought as a spy cam; it is bought as a Twitting/Facebooking thingy; the spy aspect is a free bonus. Nobody expects pen-cams to become fashion items; however GG explicitly strives for that.
If you want a bit more emotional example, here is one: guns. Anyone who is a hoplophobe believes that guns are evil because they have only one purpose: to kill people. Perhaps; it doesn't matter in this example. But from this POV you can argue that you don't need to take your gun to a restaurant, unless you plan to murder someone. (Again, we are ignoring examples from recent history.) However imagine that someone invents a fashionable dining accessory that also can be used as a gun. What are the chances that you, who never intended to carry your Glock to the restaurant, will be having this new and wondrous automatic fork with you at the table?
What GG does is it lowers the barrier of entry. A potentially unwelcome product is delivered inside a bundle, which acts as the Trojan horse. That's why GG is seeing so much opposition. Removal of camera would be an easy way to alleviate those concerns. The camera in GG is just as unwelcome as the camera in a pen.
There is yet another aspect of GG that makes it worse than pen cameras. Pen cameras are owned and used by a single person. There is zero chance that its recordings will ever be processed by supercomputers and results sent to the government. However GG does exactly that.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:19PM
It doesn't really lower the bar for entry; you could do the same thing with your cell phone camera and nobody would even look twice at you.
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Wednesday June 25 2014, @05:57PM
FWIW, shortly after I got my first paying job, I rushed to buy a pen-camera. However, this doesn't refute your claim that nobody in his right mind was rushing to buy them, because I was a teenage boy with a sudden influx of discretionary funds, and thus definitely not in my right mind. ;) No, I didn't have any planned use for it, it was just so cool that I had to have it. I suspect that purchases like that are what keep the quantities high enough to enable the ridiculously low prices on what should be niche gear.
I understand your argument, but I don't buy its significance. To me, the fact that most people don't buy spy cameras mostly suggests that people simply aren't interested in spying on others, not that they are interested, but not enough to spend money on it. Are there some people who want to spy, but not badly enough to buy a $15 pen-cam, and who thus will use wearables like Glass or a smartwatch that way? Sure, but $15 vs. $0 is not a big difference to anyone who can afford a wearable in the first place, so I think very few people fall into that gap.
While the big data thing strikes me as a very reasonable concern, I don't see any connection between that and this passcode-reading attack -- even if Google/NSA (or some rogue Google/NSA employee, or anyone else who gained access to their data by any means) wants to use this attack to read everyone's passcode, they need an actual video clip of the entire passcode entry process. This is unlikely to show up in the background of some video taken for innocuous reasons, so for an on-demand recorder like Glass, there doesn't seem to be a significant problem involving this attack. In some hypothetical future, when cameras and radio transmitters take much less power to run, we could see some kind of always-on wearable camera with the ability to continuously stream to the cloud (something like the "grain" in that episode of Black Mirror), and then this attack would be useful on the resulting enormous stockpile of video. But right now, that problem with Glass has nothing to do with this article.