Google Unlocks The Power of the Selfie - DTNS 5316

**Jason Howell** (0:09)
This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, July 23rd, 2026 We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (0:17)
Today, Google is letting you use your selfie to access your Google account as an emergency fallback.

**Jason Howell** (0:25)
Is that safe? I don't know. We're going to talk about that. I'm Jason Howell.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (0:28)
I'm Huyen Tue Dao.

**Jason Howell** (0:29)
Let's start with what you need to know with a big story.
So if you've ever loved recording yourself with a selfie, now you can do it and have a reason other than just like looking at your video and going, oh, that was pretty good. I like what I did there.
Google just launched Selfie Video Sign-In. And so basically it allows users to record a selfie video, big surprise, but in advance, and then use it later as an extra way to get back into their account when locked out or happens to be accessing the account from a different device than they would normally use. It's designed as a stand-in option for when users might be trying to access their locked account but can't access their passkey. I think passkey is the real kind of thing around this. Oh, you don't have the device that your passkey is stored on. Here's another way to get access to it in case of an emergency. Usually, passkeys are attached to a device.
To set it up, my dogs are going nuts, so apologies. To set it up, you point your phone or your laptop camera at your face to record a selfie, right? It'll instruct you to look in different directions, from different angles, that sort of stuff. And then Google stores a reference video tied to your account on its servers. Then when you're locked out in the future, you record another selfie, a short selfie with the device that you happen to have. Google compares that against the stored video that it has to confirm that it's you. The option is going to sit inside the security and sign in sections inside of your Google account, alongside other options like passkeys, like recovery contacts and backup codes. Now, Google is including some safeguarding tools, something along the lines of liveness detection. So if the tool spots that something fishy might be going on, like potentially using a deep fake video to bypass that checkpoint, the system is going to include other requirements to block those attempts, and hopefully ensure that you are an actual human and not just trying to game the system. Google isn't releasing the details on that process specifically. They did share that standard security practices include device metadata like location, time of login, browser settings and IP address, and other systems like this often use things like accelerometer, sensor data, other signals from the device that collectively ensure that the person is who they say they are. So there's that. A few other tidbits and then I'm super curious when what you think about this. The video that's stored is encrypted at rest. It can be deleted at any time. It's a feature that is opt-in. It must be set up in advance of an event, so you can't do it during account recovery. And yeah, it's rolling out globally now to most accounts. So what were your thoughts when you heard about this? I feel like maybe we, I don't know. I have an immediate attachment to the very beginning, the early days of Android and picture security and that video process. And everyone immediately reacted in saying, that's highly like insecure. Don't do that.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (3:42)
Yeah.
I had the same thought and also just thinking it'd be really funny if someone did duck face and or whatever. I believe there's a new gen alpha face for selfies, which is sad, angry. I can't do it myself.

**Jason Howell** (3:56)
Yeah, I don't know.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (3:57)
I'm sure my daughter is very adept at doing it. Yeah, I generally like so this has come up in like, I think similar technologies come up for me personally in the last few years. Like, for example, as an American going to the UK, there's a new app that it's not a visa, but it's like kind of an electronic permission or permission immigration type thing. And a lot of them did use did do that kind of one time, you know, like video where you do the up and down, you do left and right. And I suppose always there's a little bit of kind of feeling of when the idea of video of my face is stored on the cloud somewhere. Again, it's all encrypted. And of course, there are options there. I still think we all have like a little bit of a reflex now of being, no, not more of my digital self being stored somewhere else. But at the same time, especially as we moved to pass keys and now we've talked about pass keys at not like at length for the last two to three years and about how a lot of different things about it. I actually have thought about that now that pass keys are quite prevalent, and especially since a lot of services allow you to do completely passwordless entry or login. I did wonder to myself a few times, what if I actually do lose all my phones?