The Trump phone was never a serious phone. Not when it was announced last June, in dodgy renders and with an incoherent spec sheet. Nor when Trump Mobile admitted — just two weeks later — that it wouldn’t be made in the US. Not even when the company revealed the final phone, first to me over a video call in February and then to the world in April through a short commercial with the slick sheen of AI.
Technology
Amazon adds controversial AI facial recognition to Ring
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Amazon’s Ring video doorbells are getting a major artificial intelligence (AI) upgrade, and it is already stirring controversy.
The company has started rolling out a new feature called Familiar Faces to Ring owners across the United States. Once enabled, the feature uses AI-powered facial recognition to identify people who regularly appear at your door. Instead of a generic alert saying a person is at your door, you might see something far more personal, like “Mom at Front Door.” On the surface, that sounds convenient.
Privacy advocates, however, say this shift comes with real risks.
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Ring’s new Familiar Faces feature uses AI facial recognition to identify people who regularly appear at your door and personalize alerts. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
How Ring’s Familiar Faces feature works
Ring says Familiar Faces helps you manage alerts by recognizing people you know. Here is how it works in practice. You can create a catalog of up to 50 faces. These may include family members, friends, neighbors, delivery drivers, household staff or other frequent visitors. After labeling a face in the Ring app, the camera will recognize that person as they approach. Anyone who regularly passes in front of your Ring camera can be labeled by the device owner if they choose to do so, even if that person is unaware they are being identified.
From there, Ring sends personalized notifications tied to that face. You can also fine-tune alerts on a per-face basis, which means fewer pings for your own comings and goings. Importantly, the feature is not enabled by default. You must turn it on manually in the Ring app settings. Faces can be named directly from Event History or from the Familiar Faces library. You can edit names, merge duplicates or delete faces at any time.
Amazon says unnamed faces are automatically removed after 30 days. Once a face is labeled, however, that data remains stored until the user deletes it.
Why privacy groups are pushing back
Despite Amazon’s assurances, consumer protection groups and lawmakers are raising alarms. Ring has a long history of working with law enforcement. In the past, police and fire departments were able to request footage through the Ring Neighbors app. More recently, Amazon partnered with Flock, a company that makes AI-powered surveillance cameras widely used by police and federal agencies. Ring has also struggled with internal security. In 2023, the FTC fined Ring $5.8 million after finding that employees and contractors had unrestricted access to customer videos for years. The Neighbors app previously exposed precise home locations, and Ring account credentials have repeatedly surfaced online. Because of these issues, critics argue that adding facial recognition expands the risk rather than reducing it.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) staff attorney Mario Trujillo tells CyberGuy, “When you step in front of one of these cameras, your faceprint is taken and stored on Amazon’s servers, whether you consent or not. Today’s feature to recognize your friend at your front door can easily be repurposed tomorrow for mass surveillance. It is important for state regulators to investigate.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a well-known nonprofit organization that focuses on digital privacy, civil liberties and consumer rights in the tech space.
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Once a face is labeled by the device owner, Ring can replace generic notifications with named alerts tied to that individual. (CyberGuy.com)
Where the feature is blocked and why that matters
Legal pressure is already limiting where Familiar Faces can launch. According to the EFF, privacy laws are preventing Amazon from offering the feature in Illinois, Texas and Portland, Oregon. These jurisdictions have stricter biometric privacy protections, which suggests regulators see facial recognition in the home as a higher-risk technology. U.S. Senator Ed Markey has also called on Amazon to abandon the feature altogether, citing concerns about surveillance creep and biometric data misuse.
Amazon says biometric data is processed in the cloud and not used to train AI models. The company also claims it cannot identify all locations where a face appears, even if law enforcement asks. Still, critics point out the similarity to Ring’s Search Party feature, which already scans neighborhoods to locate lost pets.
We reached out to Amazon for comment but did not receive a response before our deadline.
Ring’s other AI feature feels very different
Not all of Ring’s AI updates raise the same level of concern. Ring recently introduced Video Descriptions, a generative AI feature that summarizes motion activity in plain text. Instead of guessing what triggered an alert, you might see messages like “A person is walking up the steps with a black dog” or “Two people are peering into a white car in the driveway.”
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Ring’s Video Descriptions feature takes a different approach by summarizing activity without identifying people by name. (Amazon)
How Video Descriptions decides what matters
This AI focuses on actions rather than identities. It helps you quickly decide whether an alert is urgent or routine. Over time, Ring says the system can recognize activity patterns around a home and only notify you when something unusual happens. However, as with any AI system, accuracy can vary depending on lighting, camera angle, distance and environmental conditions. Video Descriptions is currently rolling out in beta to Ring Home Premium subscribers in the U.S. and Canada. Unlike facial recognition, this feature improves clarity without naming or tracking specific people. That contrast matters.
Video Descriptions turns motion alerts into short summaries, helping you understand what is happening without identifying who is involved. (Amazon)
Should you turn Familiar Faces on?
If you own a Ring doorbell, caution is wise. While Familiar Faces may reduce notification fatigue, labeling people by name creates a detailed record of who comes to your home and when. Given Ring’s past security lapses and close ties with law enforcement, many privacy experts recommend keeping the feature disabled. If you do use it, avoid full names and remove faces you no longer need. In many cases, simply checking the live video feed is safer than relying on AI labels. Not every smart home feature needs to know who someone is.
How to turn Familiar Faces on or off in the Ring app
If you want to review or change this setting, you can do so at any time in the Ring mobile app.
To enable Familiar Faces:
- Open the Ring app
- Tap the menu icon
- Select Control Center
- Tap Video and Snapshot Capture
- Select Familiar Faces
- Toggle the feature on and follow the on-screen prompts
To turn Familiar Faces off:
- Open the Ring app
- Go to Control Center
- Tap Video and Snapshot Capture
- Select Familiar Faces
- Toggle the feature off
Turning the feature off stops facial recognition and prevents new faces from being identified. Any labeled faces can also be deleted manually from the Familiar Faces library if you want to remove stored data.
Alexa is now answering your door for you
Amazon is also rolling out a very different kind of AI feature for Ring doorbells, and it lives inside Alexa+. Called Greetings, this update gives Ring doorbells a conversational AI voice that can interact with people at your door when you are busy or not home. Instead of identifying who someone is, Greetings focuses on what they appear to be doing. Using Ring’s video descriptions, the system looks at apparel, actions, and objects to decide how to respond.
For example, if someone in a delivery uniform drops off a package, Alexa can tell them exactly where to leave it based on your instructions. You can even set preferences to guide delivery drivers toward a specific spot, or let them know water or snacks are available. If a delivery requires a signature, Alexa can ask the driver when they plan to return and pass that message along to you. The feature can also handle sales representatives or service vendors. You might set a rule such as politely declining sales pitches without ever coming to the door yourself.
Greetings can also work for friends and family. If someone stops by while you are away, Alexa can greet them and ask them to leave a message for you. That interaction is saved so you can review it later. That said, the system is not perfect. Because it relies on visual context rather than identity, mistakes can happen. A friend who works in logistics could show up wearing a delivery uniform and be treated like a courier instead of being invited to leave a message. Amazon acknowledges that accuracy can vary. Importantly, Amazon says Greetings does not identify who a person is. It uses Ring’s video descriptions to determine the main subject in front of the camera and generate responses, without naming or recognizing individuals. That makes it fundamentally different from the Familiar Faces feature, even though both rely on AI.
Greetings is compatible with Ring Wired Doorbell Pro (3rd Gen) and Ring Wired Doorbell Plus (2nd Gen). It is available to Ring Premium Plan subscribers who have video descriptions enabled and is currently rolling out to Alexa+ Early Access users in the United States and Canada.
Thinking about a Ring doorbell?
If you are already in the Ring ecosystem or considering a video doorbell, Ring’s lineup includes models with motion alerts, HD video, night vision, and optional AI-powered features such as Video Descriptions. While Familiar Faces remains controversial and can be turned off, many homeowners still use Ring doorbells for basic security awareness and package monitoring.
If you decide Ring is right for your home, you can check out the latest Ring Video Doorbell models or compare features and pricing with other options by visiting Cyberguy.com and searching “Top Video Doorbells.”
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Kurt’s key takeaways
Amazon Ring’s AI facial recognition feature shows how quickly convenience can collide with privacy. Familiar Faces may offer smarter alerts, but it also expands surveillance into deeply personal spaces. Meanwhile, features like Video Descriptions prove that AI can be useful without identifying people. As smart home tech evolves, the real question is not what AI can do but what it should do.
Would you trade fewer notifications for a system that recognizes and names everyone who comes to your door? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.
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It’s now on sale for $499, past the days of its tenuous, ever-shifting release dates. A few buyers even have the phone, The Verge among them, though more still seem not to.
It’s clear now that the T1 is a real phone, but that doesn’t mean it’s a serious one. Still, for the next thousand words or so, I will try to take it seriously.
$499
The Good
- It actually exists
- 3.5mm headphone jack
- MicroSD card slot
- It basically runs stock Android
A serious phone wouldn’t look like this
The T1 Phone is a curved slab of cheap gold plastic, the smartphone equivalent of a pair of knockoff wraparound Oakleys. The gold finish — more yellow in certain light, though it certainly does shine and shimmer — is tacky in every sense, with a sticky friction that makes it feel distinctly unpleasant to the touch. My phone arrived with a tiny scratch in the top-right corner.
The phone is fairly thin, and light, but its excessively curved waterfall display feels immediately dated. It also loses one of the chief advantages of that design — better in-hand feel — thanks to the oddly angular frame, which juts into my palm as I hold it.
Almost every detail speaks to bad design. There’s the American flag logo, missing a stripe. The fact that “Trump Mobile” appears on the back twice, in two different orientations and two different fonts. Or the camera module, where the three lenses are spaced at irregular intervals.
There are things to like. The 3.5mm headphone jack will have its fans, as will the microSD card slot inside the phone, or the fact that the phone ships with a case, charger, and braided USB cable. These are things that a certain type of Android fan has lamented the absence of for years.
I, for one, am more excited to be reviewing a phone with a notification light again, a true treat that I thought we’d lost forever. It’s a glimpse of a better world, one I didn’t expect from Trump Mobile of all companies. But like the curved screen, even these welcome touches betray that this is a dated, old-fashioned phone, one based on an old HTC design that already felt like a throwback two years ago.
A serious phone would work outside the US
I live in the UK, meaning I may well have the only Trump phone outside of North America. It cannot maintain any signal stronger than 2G, meaning I can use it for texts and calls but not for data. As best as I can tell from digging through the T1’s FCC certification documents, the phone simply doesn’t support the network bands commonly used in Europe.
The T1 Phone isn’t sold in Europe, and that misshapen flag makes its target market clear. But even Americans get to go on vacation every once in a while. From my experience, it seems unlikely that the T1 would work anywhere in Europe and perhaps not anywhere in the world outside North America.
A serious phone would use more than the minimum hardware
At first glance, the T1’s spec sheet might seem impressive enough: a 120Hz OLED screen, a 5,000mAh battery, a triple rear camera with 50-megapixel sensors.
But the truth is you could find similar specs on almost any $200 Android phone and superior ones on phones sold at this price. Hardware like this is cheap and commodified, something that’s only beginning to change thanks to the ongoing memory crisis. Here, amusingly, the T1 is generously specced: 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM come as standard. Those, along with the inclusion of wireless charging, are the only things that really stand out on this spec sheet.
Despite all that RAM, and Qualcomm’s modestly capable Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset, the T1 is often sluggish. It sometimes stutters when switching apps or triggering animations, making even basic apps like Duolingo frustrating to use. This hardware isn’t flagship, but it should certainly be more capable than this. I can only assume Trump Mobile didn’t develop the sort of software and firmware performance optimizations that other manufacturers do, handicapping the phone from the start.
1/16
I suspect the camera’s limitations are for similar reasons. The three rear lenses and single selfie camera take basic, functional photos, at least in good light — with the exception of the 8-megapixel ultrawide, which is uniformly poor.
Other phone manufacturers spend millions optimizing their image pipelines, and none of that work is evident here. Daylight photos are vivid and oversaturated, nighttime shots are noisy, and the telephoto shows no signs of electronic stabilization at all, making it feel shaky and unstable. Incredibly, by default every shot is overlaid with a strangely small T1 watermark — as if anyone should want to take credit for these photos.
1/12
A serious phone would have made more effort in its software
As the Trump phone lurched haltingly toward its launch, the going assumption from many was that it would be a bloated mess, loaded with spyware, crypto apps, and MAGA-themed experiences, putting the president’s leering face front and center.
The truth is rather more mundane. It runs Android — the nearly two-year-old Android 15, to be precise — with almost no modifications at all. This is, in fact, about as close to what the nerds call “stock” Android as you’re ever likely to get these days.
The only preinstalled apps that are out of the ordinary are Truth Social, Trump’s own social media network, and Doctegrity, a telehealth platform that’s included with Trump Mobile’s $47.45 cell service. Beyond that you get a single Trump Mobile wallpaper and those photo watermarks, and that really is that.
In a sense, that’s a good thing — I’m hardly lamenting the lack of bloatware. But there’s also no sign that Trump Mobile has the ability or the intent to optimize its phone’s software or deliver any features beyond the minimum.
More worryingly, Trump Mobile hasn’t announced how long it will support the phone with software updates. When I spoke to executives from the company in February, they seemed confused by my question about how many Android version updates the phone would receive, though they did insist that customers won’t “be locked into what’s there today.” For now, that means a 2024 version of Android with a February 2026 security patch; I wouldn’t hold my breath for either to be updated any time soon.
A serious company would put more effort in
In a strange way, the T1 Phone isn’t all that terrible, but only because it proves how hard it actually is to make a truly terrible phone these days. It’s easy enough to throw together the baseline hardware, stick Android on top, and call it a day. For better or worse, that’s more or less exactly what Trump Mobile has done. Between the simple software and the dated hardware features, the T1 is an oddly compelling phone for some old-school Android fans, but Trump Mobile got there entirely by mistake.
This isn’t a serious phone. It’s a marketing stunt that got out of hand, a way to grab attention and juice the subscriber count for an overpriced cell service with the president’s name on it.
Trump Mobile doesn’t care about this phone. And after the year of reporting on it that’s led to this review, I’m thrilled to finally say: Neither should you.
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Microsoft may once again be struggling to keep up with its own climate goals, according to its 2026 sustainability report. As reported by GeekWire, the report states that Microsoft’s carbon emissions increased 25 percent in 2025, totalling 34 million metric tons “without select interventions.” Microsoft says this was “driven primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure,” as well as the company’s decision last February to stop purchasing “non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates.”
Several years ago, Microsoft set itself a goal to be carbon negative by 2030, meaning it will need to remove more carbon emissions than it produces. This isn’t the first time Microsoft has faced setbacks toward accomplishing that goal, as its 2024 sustainability report showed a similar rise in climate pollution. This year’s report admits that, “While AI infrastructure is driving demand for energy, water, land, and materials, sustainability solutions are not scaling fast enough to meet demand.”
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That old phone sitting in your drawer may have more life left in it than you think. You may look at it and see a dead battery, an outdated camera or a screen that no longer feels worth using. Google and researchers at the University of California San Diego see something else: a tiny computer that may still have useful processing power.
Their idea is called phone cluster computing. Instead of treating retired smartphones as electronic waste, researchers remove the motherboard and redeploy it as part of a low-carbon computing system.
Google says UC San Diego plans to launch a data center built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones in fall 2026. The goal is to provide low-cost cloud computing for students and researchers while reducing the need for newly manufactured server hardware.
That means the next chapter for an old phone may not be a junk drawer. It may be a server rack.
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Researchers plan to launch a 2,000-phone data center at UC San Diego in fall 2026 to support students and research workloads. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
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What is phone cluster computing?
Phone cluster computing takes retired smartphones and turns their core hardware into a computing platform. The process starts by stripping each phone down to the motherboard. That board holds the processor, memory and storage. The display, battery, cameras, chassis and other phone-specific parts are removed.
That step is important because a full phone does not belong in a data center. Batteries can create safety issues. Screens and cameras waste space. The motherboard is the part that still offers computing value.
Once the board is removed, researchers load a general-purpose Linux system onto it. Android already runs on Linux at its core, but Android is built for mobile apps and personal devices. A data center needs something more flexible for cloud workloads. After that, the phone boards can be grouped into clusters. Many small boards then work together like a collection of tiny servers.
Why Google wants old Pixel phones for cloud computing
The AI boom has created a huge appetite for computing power. Data centers need more chips, more electricity and more cooling. At the same time, billions of phones fall out of use around the world.
This Google-backed project takes that conversation in a different direction by asking whether some useful computing can come from hardware we already made.
The project focuses on embodied carbon. That means the emissions created before a device ever turns on. Mining, manufacturing and shipping all add to that carbon footprint.
If a phone motherboard already exists, reusing it can avoid some of the environmental cost tied to manufacturing new hardware. Google says the motherboard accounts for about half of a phone’s embodied carbon, which makes it the most valuable part to recover.
How retired smartphones become low-carbon servers
You cannot plug a pile of old phones into a rack and call it a data center. The process requires careful teardown, new software and a way to manage many boards at once. Google says the project uses containerized applications managed by Kubernetes. That helps coordinate the work across many devices.
The phones are organized into self-managing clusters of about 25 to 50 boards. Each board works as a small Linux machine. Together, they can handle tasks that would otherwise run on traditional cloud servers. That does not make one phone equal to one server. A server has many more processor cores, more memory and data center-grade hardware. A phone board has fewer resources and tighter limits. Still, some jobs do not need a giant machine. They need enough compute to run efficiently without wasting resources.
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Google and UC San Diego are testing a cloud computing system built from retired Pixel phone motherboards, giving old smartphones a possible second life. (Google)
Can old phone processors handle cloud workloads?
The technical case is stronger than you may expect. Google says the single-threaded performance of modern smartphone performance cores can match or beat the per-core performance of some modern multicore servers. In one comparison, a 2023 Pixel Fold was tested against an ASUS RS720A-E11 server using SPEC benchmarks. The Pixel Fold’s performance cores beat the baseline data center server core on many of the tests. That sounds impressive, but there is an important catch.
A smartphone board has a smaller memory limit and fewer cores. It also lacks the management tools and hardware durability that servers are built around. So the project needs the right workloads.
UC San Diego is starting with educational and research computing. That makes sense because many classroom tasks can run on small cloud instances. Google says early experiments showed that a 20-phone cluster could support peak submission rates for a class of more than 75 students. The grading latency also came in below the default AWS backend used in the comparison.
Why UC San Diego is testing a 2,000 Pixel phone data center
UC San Diego plans to use the 2,000-phone cluster to support computer science classes and research workloads. Google says the deployment could support about 100 classes at once. It also describes the system as providing about 50 server-equivalents worth of compute at a fraction of the usual cost.
For a university, that could be a major advantage. Cloud computing costs can rise quickly, especially when many students submit assignments at the same time. If a reused phone cluster can handle some of that load, schools may save money while reducing demand for newly manufactured servers.
This also gives researchers a chance to test phone-based computing at scale. A small lab demo can look promising. A 2,000-board deployment will show much more about reliability, maintenance and day-to-day performance.
Phone cluster computing still has big limits
Phone cluster computing sounds promising, but it still has a lot to prove. Your smartphone was made for daily use in your hand, not nonstop work inside a data center. Data center servers are built to run for years with steady cooling, fast repairs and constant monitoring. Phone motherboards come from devices made for pockets, backpacks and kitchen counters. That alone raises some big questions.
The boards could fail faster than expected. Cooling may also become a challenge once thousands of tiny processors run side by side. Then there is the labor problem, because someone has to safely remove batteries, screens and other parts before the boards can be reused. Cost will be the deciding factor. If teardown, maintenance and replacement work get too expensive, this idea may stay in the research lab.
Phone clusters also will not replace the massive GPU systems that power advanced AI training. They make more sense for smaller cloud jobs, classroom tools and research tasks that fit within smartphone hardware limits. That still leaves plenty of useful work. After all, not every cloud task needs the newest chip.
Why old smartphones could help cut e-waste
The world’s e-waste problem is growing fast. The Global E-waste Monitor projects that electronic waste could climb to 82 million tonnes by 2030, while formal collection and recycling rates are expected to fall to 20%. Old phones are a big part of that problem because many never make it to a proper recycling program. They sit in drawers, land in closets or get tossed out with valuable parts still inside. Even when a phone no longer feels useful to you, its processor, memory and storage may still have work left to do.
CyberGuy has covered related second-life ideas before, including old smartphones being turned into tiny data centers and repurposed EV batteries helping power AI data centers. The common theme is hard to ignore. Some of the hardware already in circulation may still have useful work left to do.
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Google says reusing smartphone motherboards could cut hardware waste and reduce the carbon cost of building new data center servers. (Yawar Nazir/Getty Images)
How to safely recycle or reuse your old phone
This research does not mean you should toss your old phone into a random donation bin tomorrow. Before you recycle, donate, trade in or sell an old phone, you need to protect your data. Back up anything you want to keep. Then sign out of your accounts and securely wipe the device.
CyberGuy has a helpful guide on how to securely get rid of your old cell phone. Privacy comes first whenever you part with a device.
You can also consider trade-in programs, certified refurbishers or reputable electronics recycling programs. If the phone still works, buying refurbished can also keep devices in use longer. CyberGuy has covered what to know before buying refurbished electronics, which is helpful if you want to save money without taking a gamble. The key is to avoid letting old devices sit forgotten forever. A phone in a drawer helps no one.
What this means to you
That old phone in your drawer may not be as useless as it looks. Even if the battery is tired or the camera feels outdated, the processor inside may still have real value.
Now, you probably will not be mailing your old phone to a Google data center anytime soon. Still, this project points to a bigger shift in how we think about retired tech. Instead of sending every old device straight to recycling or letting it collect dust, companies, schools and researchers may find smarter ways to reuse the parts that still work.
There is also a money lesson here. If your current phone still runs well, you may not need to rush into an upgrade just because a newer model comes out. A battery replacement, trade-in or refurbished option could save you money while keeping perfectly good hardware in use longer. To me, that is the real takeaway. The phone you forgot about could possibly still have a job to do.
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Kurt’s key takeaways
Google and UC San Diego are testing how to turn retired Pixel phone motherboards into a low-carbon cloud computing platform. The project could give old smartphones a second life while reducing the need for newly manufactured servers. That is important as AI data centers keep demanding more computing power and more electricity. The first major test is expected in fall 2026 with a 2,000-phone data center at UC San Diego. If it works, the cluster could support students and researchers at a lower cost than traditional cloud infrastructure. However, this idea still has to prove it can handle the grind of daily use. Reliability, cooling, teardown labor and maintenance will determine whether phone cluster computing can grow beyond just research. To me, the most relatable part is sitting in your junk drawer. That old phone may seem useless, but its processor could still be powerful enough to help run cloud jobs. Maybe the future of computing starts with hardware we already forgot we owned.
Would you feel good knowing your old phone could help power cloud computing? Let us know by writing to us at CyberGuy.com.
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