On an average day, you might unlock or look at your phone dozens of times, which makes the lock screen a hot property for advertising. Ad tech company Glance has been taking advantage of that for years with its ad-laden lock screen experiences, but it's going further in the age of AI. Samsung and Glance have teamed up to deliver a new "AI shopping" experience that uses a selfie to create custom fashion ads. This feature is rolling out to numerous Samsung phones in the next month.
Glance has been around for a while—its non-AI lock screen experience has been bundled on various phones from Samsung, Motorola, and others. Before the AI era, Glance lured people in with promises of pretty pictures and news alerts, which came with a side of ads and tracking. The new Glance AI feature has all that, but it adds an unsettling face-stealing layer to the experience.
The AI-infused Glance will arrive on Samsung phones as both a standalone app and a fully integrated lock screen. Thankfully, this is a fully opt-in experience. If you never open or set up Glance, you can keep using the normal lock screen on your phone.
Should you choose to wade into the murky waters of AI shopping, Glance will have you take a selfie and provide some basic body type details. From there, it uses Google Gemini and Imagen to create fashion ads tailored to you—because they are you. Your lock screen will be populated with images of you "in outfits and destinations [you] would never imagine." Naturally, you will be able to buy the looks chosen for you with a tap, which fills Glance's coffers.
We've looked over Glance's AI privacy policy, and nothing stands out as unusual for the tech industry (which still isn't good). By using the service, you agree to some tracking, including your general location, and some of that data will be shared with partners. However, this all feels a bit more creepy when a service is churning out AI images of you. Glance says it will retain the biometric data used to create your digital avatar for 12 months from your last interaction with the service or until you manually delete your account. The company claims that your images won't be used for any other purpose or shared with third parties without your consent.
Glance is not the only company hoping to motivate buyers with custom AI images. At Google I/O last month, the company unveiled shopping in its AI Mode search product. Virtual try-on allows you to generate AI images of yourself on demand to see how you look in items that appear in the shopping results. The Glance AI experience is somewhat more alarming because it's constantly generating new images of you wearing clothing, which may be based on "trending content, local events, and social media moments."
If you are totally on board with this kind of shopping experience or are just morbidly curious, you can test the service in the standalone Glance AI app in the Play Store. On Samsung phones, the app and lock screen will roll out via the company's Galaxy Store. That process begins today on all phones from the Galaxy S22, S23, S24, and S25 lineups. Glance says it hopes to have its AI shopping fully deployed on an even wider range of Samsung phones within 30 days.
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