> For most people, the biometric model of their face is available to nearly anyone. I was curious about this claim, so I did some cursory research. A Pew surv

> For most people, the biometric model of their face is available to nearly anyone. I was curious about this claim, so I did some cursory research. A Pew survey from 2013 [0]--which is perhaps a bit dated--found that 66% of respondents believed a photo of them existed online--which, notably, says nothing about access to the photo or metadata that relates the photo to an identity. Pew found in 2016 [1] that about 68%, 28%, and 25% of US adults, respectively, have a Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn account. These are presumably the main vectors for accessing the face:ID pair. So this gives us some ability to quantify the first part of your claim, "most people". As for the second part of your claim--that this subgroup's face:ID is available to nearly anyone--I did not find data on who or how many people might have access to this information. The vector here is important, though. Let's consider the public UI, which is realistically the only interface most interested entities have access to. With only a name and no other queryable bits of information, finding the matching face is unlikely because of how many identical names there are. The ability to query other bits like geolocation, work history, the social graph, and, of course, the face itself should greatly increase the chance of finding face:ID, which is minimally an account with profile picture. The profile picture is not per se sufficient to extract a face model but also not per se necessary, as other face photos might be viewable in the profile. At this point I can really only speculate about the intersection of privacy settings and photos, but I think it's far from clear that this information is "available", which I take to mean that the information is accessible with relatively little effort and means. And again, this is just the people who have a social media account and probably a photo tied to their account, not the population at large. Of course, there are entities which have access to far more data than this, but that is not "nearly anyone". [0] http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/05/anonymity-privacy-and-security-online/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/05/anonymity-privacy-and-... [1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-20...