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Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy
- praeivis 10y agoBut only if you published your photos in public. If you dont spread your photos around the web you still safe in crowd.
- mikewilliams 10y agoFindface can't identify you, who are you, why are you walking past my house? I have never seen you before, I'm going to call the police, you're acting strange.
- Dolores12 10y agoDo you expect police to come every time you see a stranger?
- EliRivers 10y agoI can imagine things getting to the stage where someone not being findable on the face register is considered suspicious enough for police attention.
- pjc50 10y agoThis was how the Trayvon Martin shooting started: Zimmerman saw someone "suspicious" in his neighborhood and decided to confront him.
- dagw 10y agoIf you have a passport or drivers licens then the government, and thus the police, already have your picture.
- dagw 10y agoThere are all kinds of ways your picture can end up on the web without you putting it there. Perhaps you where at an event where pictures where taken and uploaded to Facebook. Perhaps your company has an employee profiles page. Perhaps you where photographed for your local newspaper a few years ago when you did that things. Saying "I haven't spread my photos thus they don't exist" is extremely naive.
- kardos 10y agoNope, your lifelong discipline of not publishing a single self-photo online will be undone by someone else who snaps a photo of you and posts it online.
- skoczymroczny 10y agoYour picture might already be on the internet. Your friends may have uploaded a picture from a party or school reunion on Facebook. And since Facebook nagged them and they thought it'd be cool to tag you on the picture even though you don't have a Facebook account.
- mtgx 10y agoWhat if retail stores take your picture and then match it against your credit card at POS and then automatically identify you in the future as well? I can't imagine this is too far off, if it's not already happening.
- progman 10y agoI think exactly the opposite is true. "Personal spamming" will probably help you. Spread your photo as much as possible, all with different names and profiles :-)
- dingaling 10y agoI have a colleague / acquaintance who worked laboriously to prevent photos of himself being put online. He avoided all social media, tried to duck out of group photos and used pseudodyms for fora. Searching for him only returned photos of other people sharing his name. Then one day last year he attended an open-day about retraining IT professionals as teachers. He didn't read the small print closely enough and photos taken at the event were published and studiously tagged by the event organisers. There he was, bubbling up on Google Images. Subsequently he contacted the organisers and they did remove the tagging, but it was purely by chance that he had discovered it.
- id122015 10y agotechnology is a double edge sword. We'd better adopt a Snowden mindset.
- benevol 10y agoHonestly, this evolution became obvious more than 10 years ago. Btw, Snowden is about illegal mass surveillance by the government (in collaboration with tech corporations). The app mentioned in the article however only connects publicly and legally available data (the consumer's fault).
- chopin 10y ago> (the consumer's fault). I doubt that. No one prevents someone tagging me on Facebook even if I don't have a Facebook account. Now Facebook knows my name and the corresponding face without me ever using Facebook.
- AJRF 10y agoWell you can't do that. You can only tag someone with an account.
- miander2 10y agoYou can tag anyone on Facebook even if they don't have an account. When you start typing their name a drop-down box of suggestions appears. Hit the escape key and you can continue typing their name and tag them. Anyone with your photo can associate it with your name on Facebook even if you don't use it.
- AJRF 10y agoAh just check and yes you are right, apologies. Do people actually do this? Pretty ignorant if they do!
- fixermark 10y ago
- dovdov 10y agoStalkers delight
- axx 10y agoThat's the thing with personal pictures online. Most people can't imagine what is going to happen in the future. People on Hacker News well understand this issue, but ask your non-computer friends and family. If you'd tell them, that you can take a picture of a random person and search that picture out of a pool of people and get their contact info (as a private company / random programmer with enough data), they won't believe you or tell you that something like this is only possible in movies. Even today it's no problem to analyze the Facebook picture of some random person and calculate a chance of that person being an alcoholic in X years based on the number of party pictures they share. Before sharing personal information online, people should not ask themselves what could be done with that data now, but what is possible with that data in the future. If Facebook is going out of business (just as a thought), their data has a lot of value. Don't think that they will delete everything. It will go to the highest bidder!
- imgabe 10y ago> Even today it's no problem to analyze the Facebook picture of some random person and calculate a chance of that person being an alcoholic in X years based on the number of party pictures they share. The problem is not that this calculation exists, but that people so easily misinterpret it. It doesn't mean "Person with these photos has a 65% chance of being an alcoholic in 5 years", what it REALLY means is "65% of the people with these photos became an alcoholic in 5 years". That is a HUGE difference. For the remaining 35% there is perhaps some additional factor not included in the existence of the photos that guarantees there is a 0% chance of them ever becoming an alcoholic. When you try to apply general statistics about a large population to a single individual, it's not as simple as just saying "65% of the time this person will become an alcoholic". That's ridiculous anyway, because the person will only live one life, one time.
- logicchains 10y agoThe calculation is useful from a marketing perspective. If I decide to advertise alcoholism treatments to these people in five years' time, I'll have a lot more success then if I'd just picked people at random to advertise to.
- acaloiar 10y agoExcuse me – Russia's new FindFace app? I'll have to research this on The United States of America's Google app.
- MasterScrat 10y agoNow aggressively poll the new images with GPS location from Instagram/Twitter/Facebook, identify every face in sight, and build a realtime map of everyone everywhere! (Actually for a lot of shots you could probably get by without the GPS location by recognizing some landmarks in the background)
- nxzero 10y ago>> "Actually for a lot of shots you could probably get by without the GPS location by recognizing some landmarks in the background" Yes, this is already being done. EDIT: Curious, why this is getting downvotes, any thought on why? EDIT-2: Here's an example, though the general gist is you grab millions of photos with geo-location meta data, then train against this to ID the location of photos without the location meta-data: http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/25/11112594/google-new-deep-learning-image-location-planet http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/25/11112594/google-new-deep-l...
- GavinMcG 10y agoBecause the comment suggests, without offering any evidence, that there is a coordinated or automated large-scale effort underway to carry out the previous comment's plan.
- runeb 10y agoIt may be because you are simply stating that it is being done without any references to actual projects which might back up and add some value to your statement.
- dysfunction 10y agoSo, Marauder's Map for the whole world?
- MasterScrat 10y agoFrom a purely technical point of view: Does anyone knows what they are using for face matching? their results sounds excellent.
- GFischer 10y agoThere was an article recently on that, light on actual technical content though. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/russian-startup-n-techlab-upstaged-google-in-face-recognition-562635061.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/russian-startup-n-te... http://ntechlab.com/ http://ntechlab.com/ http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/ http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/ HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11491264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11491264
- vdaniuk 10y agoFindFace is already used in Russia to find, identify and attack gays, sex workers and porn actresses. One of the incidents https://globalvoices.org/2016/04/22/facial-recognition-service-becomes-a-weapon-against-russian-porn-actresses/ https://globalvoices.org/2016/04/22/facial-recognition-servi...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- clentaminator 10y agoI wonder how effective systems like https://cvdazzle.com/ https://cvdazzle.com/ are against this. Will we all be putting on masks or face-paint in the future when we go outside?
- coleca 10y agoYou would need to somehow convince the population that looks are no longer important, or that somehow looking like you were a member of the band Kiss is now a popular look. It's not impossible, fashion changes all the time.
- Chris2048 10y agoMaybe start a movement?
- lafay 10y ago~10 years ago I was at Disneyland and saw this family all decked out in really elaborate face paint. At the time I thought "How cool!" Then several months later I realized it was Heidi Klum and Seal after I saw them on the cover of a supermarket tabloid. Granted, the face paint was probably to disguise themselves from the paparazzi and autograph requests rather than AI facial recognition. But perhaps prescient nonetheless. http://media2.popsugar-assets.com/files/upl0/0/88/08_2008/080219-heidiseal/i/Heidi-Seal-All-Kiddies-Face-Paint-Disney-Fanatics.jpg http://media2.popsugar-assets.com/files/upl0/0/88/08_2008/08...
- 3v3rt 10y agoWhenever I see some of these 'countermeasures' I usually run them through some high end commercial face recognition algorithms I have access to. In many of the cases the countermeasures are completely ineffective. They may fool some things like opencv DIY algorithms, but not the expensive stuff :). For those the most effective strategy is to just tilt your head to the left or right a lot, though that will possibly give you a sore neck and you'll definitely look silly.
- bsenftner 10y agojust shave off your eyebrows, or makeup to make them appear gone. Most (nearly all) facial feature finders expect eyebrows of some kind. (I work in facial recognition.)
- bhanu423 10y agoCan anyone point me in the direction of algorithms and papers involved in implementing facial recognition over a fairly large audience.
- andyjohnson0 10y agoPrevious discussion (yesterday) with 90 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712197
- mtgx 10y agoIf this app can do it with 70% accuracy, then Google, Facebook, and Microsoft's tech (which may not be currently used for this) can probably do it with 90%+ accuracy.
- wangii 10y ago>> “With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer,” With Intel Core i7 5960X (238,310 MIPS at 3.0 GHz), it only takes 238 instructions for a photo?
- gunshigh 10y agoIt's likely using a nearest neighbor or tree search; it might take a billion instructions to process a single photo and another billion to do the nearest neighbor search.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- aub3bhat 10y agoThe Google FaceNet and other similar system typically perform an approximate nearest neighbor search in a ~128 dimensional embedding of faces. Here is the paper for the reference: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03832v3.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03832v3.pdf Also 70% accuracy is like really really bad. Here are results from MegaFace Challenge, which involved identifying face in presence of Million distractors: http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/fgnetresults.html http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/fgnetresults.html
- matheweis 10y agoThat was with the FGNet dataset... Ntech labs (incidentally the algorithm behind FindFace) beat Googlr on the FaceScrub dataset. http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/facescrubresults.html http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/facescrubresults.h...
- pradn 10y agoThe accuracy is not 70%. The percentage of times it is able to match a face to a social media profile, given the person has a profile, is 70%. You can't compare apples-to-apples with the results in Google's FaceNet.
- beachstartup 10y ago
- kdamken 10y agoThey must be improving - a few minutes ago on HN this headline read they did it with 49% accuracy.
- known 10y agohttps://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/face-api https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/face-api AND https://how-old.net/ https://how-old.net/
- fsloth 10y agoIt sounds that this would be a great tool for street scammers. At least the performance of the malevolent fortune tellers should be improved considerably. Find a gullible mark, research their life a bit and then perform the act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_telling_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_telling_fraud
- jdimov10 10y agoTechnology increasingly exposes the superficial nature of concepts like privacy and security. In nature, these things simply do not exist. They are also completely non-essential to human well-being. Our emotional attachment to such concepts is not doing us any favours. Also, you can't be rooting for transparency AND privacy at the same time. You have to give up on one of these, and when you think about it, you have to conclude that the losing idea is that of "privacy".
- jdimov10 10y agoYes, I fully understand that I am the ONLY anti-privacy advocate on HN. I accept all of your downvotes and hold no grudges :) But you are all wrong.
- hack_edu 10y ago> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. > Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted. Consider the guidelines regarding worthwhile contributions next time, please. :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jdimov10 10y agoMy comments are anything but boring.
- LunaSea 10y agoCould you please give me your full name and address? Providing the information publicly shouldn't be an issue since you don't believe in the concept of privacy.
- jdimov10 10y agoMy full name and address are already publicly available in countless places, if you had any legitimate interest you should have been able to find them in less time than it took you to write that comment. Btw., so are yours.
- himanshuy 10y agoI downloaded this app yesterday and tried it multiple times. Every time it gave me wrong result.
- cm3 10y agoWith all the data being collected, has anyone been able to use it to defend themselves based on location and time recorded? I tend to think that if we're recording all of it, it ought to be immutable and sealed so that one can at least use it as evidence, but the cynic in me thinks this isn't something the governing powers have any interest in allowing.
- ryangittins 10y agoI think if (more likely, when) we get to the point where people can have an alibi in this way, it will quickly turn sour. When you're accused of a crime and you can't be located during that time, it'll be used to make you look guilty—not just neutral.
- cm3 10y agoHadn't thought about that. Reminds me that I don't use Facebook or WhatsApp or LinkedIn.
- cm3 10y agoMy primary concern is who records and stores the data and how trustworthy it is. If a judge reasonably just believes a printout from law_inquiry@facebook.com, how am I able to prove the data is wrong? Therefore, we need standards and tamper proof records just as they are created on a device or even on servers. It's funny that so much of our ability to live a somewhat free life without getting locked up depends on cryptography.
- dclowd9901 10y ago> The algorithm comes from Moscow-based NTechLab, which recently boasted it bested Google’s recognition software at MegaFace, a technical challenge hosted by the University of Washington. It's a bit baffling to me why University of Washington was trying to accelerate this capability. I'm all for pure academia, but this is just fingerprinting someone's face. The real tech is in being able to map a face from a 2D image, so why not make the contest about that?
- svig 10y agoTheoretically can't Facebook can create a similar app with about 99% accuracy? On a tangential note, privacy is going to have interesting connotations as we build wearables and work to forget different ways of socially connecting them.
- jernfrost 10y agoThis is just one of many indicators that Edward Snowden is right about the importance of privacy in this day and age. With so much of our lives online, and the ability of technology to interpret that information, allowing spying agencies free pass to all your online data, is the equivalent of making it legal for them to install camera's in every room in your house and office. There needs to be strong privacy rules and transparency on what degree spying agencies access data about random citizens. We can not leave it completely to technology to solve this issue for us because regular users will never have the competency to understand how to secure their digital presence.
- greggman 10y agoI agree with you .. but, the first thing that comes to mind is comparing the futility of staying private with the futility of stopping piracy. Most tech people seem to believe piracy (music, video) is effectively unstoppable. What makes the end of privacy any different? Of course I want privacy. For current sized cameras I'm pretty sure none are on (not 100% sure though) but as they get smaller and cheaper and people post more and more photos and eventually livecast their lives or at least large chunks of it (it seems like coming eventually whether we want it to or not), how will we stop the end of privacy anymore than we can stop piracy?
- axelfreeman 10y agoIf this will be a problem and it's getting abused it will be illegal. It's also illegal to clone a human from your hairs. I don't get it. I can also search in a phone book for names or i can contact goverment help to find. The problem is what happens after you got the information and this is regulated in laws. If your data is not on the internet it doesn't mean you are invisible.
- angelbob 10y agoLifestyle business idea: wear somebody's printed-out paper face at a place it can be recorded (public photos to Flickr feed, etc) as a service. A customer who uses services of this kind can "prove" they're anywhere in the world at a given time. Useful for celebrity misdirection, criminal alibis and the like.
- transpy 10y agoOk, it seems this step is done. Face recognition, check. What's next? Does somebody knows the state of voice recognition (in the sense of ID'ing someone by his/her voice)?
- soared 10y ago70% is pretty bad.
- jellicle 10y agoFrom three years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/state-photo-id-databases-become-troves-for-police/2013/06/16/6f014bd4-ced5-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/state-pho...
- pasbesoin 10y agoWell, I'm glad I kept my FB profile photo too small for automated recognition (not enough detail), and disabled automatic tagging (I have to approve others' tags of me before they apply). Flipside? I'm waiting until waitstaff start refusing to seat Goldman Sachs assh-les. I can dream, can't I? (Yes, this second paragraph is somewhat rhetorical, but also with a legitimate point about the possibilities of such technology.)