There’s been a lot of talk in the last couple of days when it comes to Qualcomm’s newly announced always-on camera feature. Privacy-mined folks are concerned that the new feature might be a step back, and that’s understandable. You don’t want your phone always looking, watching, waiting, recording from a camera, all to do who-knows-what, right? Intuitively, it just feels like a violation. But honestly, once you get how it all works, I’d rather have it than not. Not to drink Qualcomm’s marketing kool-aid, but it’s important to remember your phone is already doing things like this all the time. Frankly, you’re better off if it’s done securely than not, and Qualcomm’s solution is more secure than even hotword detection.
In case you missed it, the new Snapdragon chip has an “always-on camera.” It’s a big, scary term that people have been inflating into meaning something other than it is by assuming all sorts of functionality it doesn’t actually have. You might think it’s for biometrics or something like that, but the truth is much more pedestrian: Right now, this snazzy new always-on camera tech can’t even recognize faces in a way that distinguishes between them. It can just say a face (any face) is present, period. But the mere fact that it’s always looking seems to have people upset in some kind of anthropomorphized way — as if “always-on” means “always-watching,” assigning a sense of agency that just isn’t there once you know how it works.
First, it’s key to remember what your phone is already doing. If you have the Google Assistant fully set up and enabled, your phone is constantly listening to you, too. But, very importantly, it’s the way that it’s listening to you that matters. Your phone isn’t just continuously recording and sending everything that happens to you off to Google’s servers. There’s a kind of closed loop running in a secure low-power system that’s simply waiting for a recognizable sound: The hotword. Until that’s detected, the loop just runs continuously in the background. If you consider a closed and secure system having short-term knowledge of your sounds as a privacy violation, it is, but that’s a very narrow definition, right? I think most of us have moved on from that one.
This new system, as it’s been explained to me here at Qualcomm’s summit by Judd Heape (Vice President of product management for camera, computer vision, and video), works sort of like that — in fact, if anything, it’s more secure. It’s not a video feed that Google, or Qualcomm, or Samsung can access; it’s another of these loop systems waiting for specific triggers to send out actions. When it sees something it recognizes as a trigger (right now, all it can see is faces, but QR codes are planned), then it is able to break that loop and send out a sort of alert to the rest of the system that it has recognized something, kicking it into gear to perform an action or take a proper look through that camera.
Apps and services on your phone don’t have access to any of this logic or data, even if that loop breaks and a trigger happens. There won’t be any “rogue apps” accessing this, the entire system is running separately from anywhere apps can see or access. Short of a major security vulnerability, this isolated system only talks to the rest of the phone when it has something to say. And even then, it only gets what that low-power system passes to it, and that’s not actually even a recording or photo of you. This closed-loop secure system literally just passes a binary yes/no to the system that it has detected something it’s able to detect (again: right now, a face). Even hotword detection passes the system a recording of sounds (presumably, commands) it heard together with the hotword, where they might later be uploaded and leave the device. This is doing even less.
Also, quite significantly, the phone you’re reading these very words on might be looking at you through your front-facing camera, all without these privacy protections. Remember those features that keep your phone’s screen on while you’re looking at it? Things like the Pixel’s Screen Attention or Samsung’s ”keep screen on while viewing” (née Smart Stay)? In those cases, the phone is waking that camera up regularly to check and see if you’re still looking at it and you don’t have the benefits of a fully isolated and secure hardware system to handle all that.
This is kind of key, and the functional difference is huge. Under Qualcomm’s new model, the system can just be told a straight yes or no by a black box when checking if you’re looking. You could be juggling rubber chickens in a clear vinyl tank top, and the rest of your phone and all the apps on it wouldn’t have any idea, while the old model would have passed a straight video feed of that maneuver right to the Android system itself when it checks to, say, keep your screen on. Admittedly, we all trusted that old way to be secure for years (in the absence of malware or a compromised system), so why are we up in arms over a solution that’s even more secure and respects your privacy even better?
I can’t answer that question for you, but I can say that I’m not worried. And even ignoring the sort of individual features Qualcomm is further highlighting as privacy enhancements (like your phone knowing if someone else has it or is looking over your shoulder), this new system is an improvement to customer privacy if anything.
The concept of an always-on camera is a scary idea in the abstract: Some future Snapdragon-powered phone might be looking back at you the whole time you’re using it — and worse, even if you aren’t. Given all the other privacy indignities we’ve been forced to endure over the years, we’re right to feel paranoid that this digital eye could be silently and not-so-secretly watching you in a 1984-like Big Brother sense. But it’s not actually that simple. This is actually a notable privacy improvement compared to what we’re already using and accepting as okay, not a step back.
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