Introducing selfie for sign-in: a new way to access your Google Account

lkurtz 100 points 75 comments July 23, 2026
blog.google · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (19 comments)

praet

April fools?

pudgywalsh

I'm waiting for the new killer feature where "Sign In With Google" popup overlay dialogs go away forever and never come back.

thisislife2

That's Google in a nutshell - "the more personal data you give us, the more access you can have to Google services".

moritzwarhier

This sounds... totally normal. Emphasis on "totally". But I guess Google coming out with a cloud-based FaceID clone was just a matter of time... apart from using just a vastly larger amount of 2D photos and more precise PI techniques, instead of that stupid local-only, small-AI-based, 3D-scanning technique that falls back to passwords... eh, I prefer Apple as my good cop ever since I can afford Apple devices

arm32

Respectfully, John and Claire, what do they have you guys doing? Please blink twice in your selfies if you're okay.

fhn

Next on Google's list, blood draw for sign-in.

andunie

The fact that most people will love this is depressing.

Cider9986

>If you've violated a Google policy, we may save your selfie video for a longer period of time to enforce our policies.

superkuh

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.

ProfessorLayton

This seems like a terrible idea because deepfakes are getting better and better, even with them mentioning them and handwaving concerns away.

muppetman

Google already have 5,000 odd photos of me anyway in Google photos. I'm screwed either way.

LorenDB

Certainly this will never go wrong in any possible way.

iosjunkie

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?

trollbridge

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.

pzxc

https://nevergivethemyourface.com/

xnx

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.

gitowiec

I happily will provide my selfie with one brown eye and round pale face

kotaKat

I'm surprised how fast this came from the whole "give us your hand" bullshit with reCaptcha not being that long ago. https://docs.cloud.google.com/recaptcha/docs/hand-gesture-ve... "Google analyzes one or more videos of a user's hand as they perform various actions or gestures. The video is processed to extract hand landmark data, which includes 21 hand-knuckle coordinates."

charcircuit

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.

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