New Delhi: Latest reports suggest that Google is paying people $5 to buy their face data in order to improve the accuracy of its artificial intelligence models that would power the face recognition technology in the Pixel 4 smartphones.
As per a report by ZDNet, Google employees are collecting face data from people in public places in exchange for Amazon or Starbuck gift cards worth $5 (Rs 350 approximately). The report cites an engineer, George, who was approached by two Google employees while he was sitting in a park in the NewYork city for collecting face data “to improve the next generation of facial recognition of phone unlocking”.
The Google engineers asked him to sign the waiver and then handed him a phone in what he described as a ‘very large phone case’. He was offered $5 Amazon or Starbucks giftcard in exchange for interacting with the phone for five minutes.
In a similar incident, a reddit user in New York who goes by the name oheightthirtytwo on the platform was handed over “a device, which had a very thick, boxy, inconspicuous case on it”. As per the description of the Redditor, the device “lacked a bottom bezel, had two front-facing cameras, a speaker and an interesting vertical sensor on the top bezel, and had four small holes on the upper left-hand corner of the back” – which is quite similar to the image renders of the Google Pixel 4 that we have seen of lately.
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Ms Kalinga