APK tear-downs aren’t something we routinely get into at Ausdroid, but this one has some interesting developments in Google’s ever-evolving data collection and use about users. The latest update to Google Photos has code snippets torn apart by 9 to 5 Google suggesting that a new feature called “Live Albums” will auto-add people to albums instead of having to manually add them as the photos are taken which can be time consuming for prolific photo takers.
There is a seemingly high level of control within the new Google Photos, starting with the ability to turn an album into a Live Album when an album is created, who is/was added to albums (select a face to be automatically added), the ability to remove faces from the album, to allow/disallow users from collaborating on a given album and to pause the automatic adding of faces.
Album owner turned off collaboration
Live album paused.
Remove this face
Stop auto-adding photos of this face?
Some of the other identifiers that were found include multiple user devices being able to add to a Live album, adding older photos from your library (no indication if this can be automated at this stage) and lots of capability in setting the filters on the functionality. Not only will Live Albums automatically add human faces but pets as well.
It is great to see Google continually developing the capability of Google Photos, now we just have to hope that it’s functionality that will actually be delivered and be useful.
