/ Google's New Sign-In Ditches Support Calls.
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Google just unveiled a new capability that will enable you to unlock your own Google account with a video of your face swiveling from side to side as well as facing backward and forward (News from Google). At first glance, it’s another biometric authentication method like fingerprint scanners or Face ID in an already saturated market. The more intriguing part of this is Google added selfies as a login method. It’s this new fix Google engineered for one of the ugliest, most common things in tech: being permanently locked out of your own digital world.
A person who has lost access to their Google account for example, lost or swapped cell phone, forgot recovery email, etc. will know the panic that ensues. You’ve got to answer security questions you set up 10 years ago, wait for a response that might or might not ever come from someone, and watch years of photos, emails and documents go to waste out of your reach. That one moment is perhaps the largest trust issue in cloud computing, and the one that Google is finally attempting to bridge, rather than relying on an email that you haven’t read since 2019.
If you’re ever locked out, you just repeat the process, and Google matches a new selfie video with the one from when you originally set up, to give you access.
The head turning and hand gestures are meant to thwart impersonation, such as a photo or video created by AI. The technology is layered with multiple security features to stop impersonation attempts, including AI-generated photos and videos.
That’s an interesting design decision. A year ago, anyone offering a company that added “video selfie login” would have sold it simply as a convenience. With AI face-swap tools easily at the fingertips, Google is working on the AI-generated facial image as a first line of defense against deepfakes, and a second line of convenience. This is a subtle hint that Google has now taken “somebody could impersonate you using an AI video” from a hypothetical to a mainstream threat.
Google says that the videos are never linked to the user’s ID and are deleted after the verification process, and that it doesn’t even store hand gesture images or videos after they’ve been verified, nor use that data for anything else.
Importantly, this is opt-in, rather than a required replacement for passkeys or recovery contacts, and the rollout comes without any surprises: they’ve been trialing selfie videos in Brazil before this wider release, and it is only for regular Google Accounts, not Workspace accounts, children’s accounts, or Advanced Protection Program accounts.
Google’s instructions play a role in promoting a clean setup too: Put on a webcam or wear a mask and avoid busy or crowded backgrounds during the process.
That’s not all Google is doing with “help me get back in”. As per its help documentation, it is also intended to be used for verifying that the other party behind the computer is a real human for policy purposes, and perhaps most interestingly to allow users to create an AI avatar that looks and sounds like them to create AI content in the future. The last use case does just make that this isn’t only an account recovery patch, but infrastructure for Google’s wider AI aspirations.
Selfie video sign-in doesn’t stand in place of your passkey and shouldn’t be your sole method of security, Google explicitly says so on their page. But if you need to recover, as a last resort, it is a much smarter idea than security questions or SMS codes, which anybody can socially engineer. These live checks are effectively making it harder to spoof a static photograph and its opt-in, deletable status means it’s not intrusive. If you’ve ever found yourself blocked from your Google account without a way to get back in, this is a much needed addition, but one that’s not replacing passkeys.
Tim Cook’s 15 years as Apple’s chief executive officially ended on September 1 and now the torch has been passed on to John Ternus, who is the company’s long-time hardware. It’s Apple’s first leadership change…
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