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Apple's New Photo Patent Detects Your Friend's Face and Sends Them the Snaps

But wait, there's more!
Image: Flickr/Braden Kowetz

The US Patent and Trademark Office published two Apple patents today. This means that it's a very good day for the people who freak out over every new Apple invention, and a bad day for everyone who has to read about it on Twitter.

The first patent, initially filed in 2013, describes a system for using facial recognition on iPhones to determine who's in a photo, and then linking that facial recognition information to your contacts—much like iPhoto on Apple's computers already does. That way, photos featuring one of your friends can be automatically sent to them. It's a bit like Facebook's Moments app, which launched in June.

Apple collecting data that links your appearance and contact information is a bit of a scary idea, but the patent notes that the information can be stored on the user end, and not on Apple's own servers.

The second patent lays out an ad-hoc method for iPhone owners to backup their data using a friend's phone when an internet connection isn't available. According to the patent, the phone attempting a backup searches out nearby phones with active Bluetooth and NFC. When the phone finds a familiar device, it sends encrypted data to it to be temporarily pushed to a cloud-based storage service. Later, the data can be restored to the original phone.

This would come in handy for any plebes stuck with a shitty phone plan that limits their data—such as myself—who would then be able to mooch off of their friends' connections to backup their information.

Of course, like a double-sided, solar powered iPad/MacBook that Apple patented last year, none of these technologies actually exist on the market yet. Happy speculating!