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A friend and I built a web crawler that published images to a pool of workers that generated feature embeddings for all faces it found. After indexing all the f
by helsinki 8y ago
A friend and I built a web crawler that published images to a pool of workers that generated feature embeddings for all faces it found. After indexing all the feature vectors, we had effectively built a search engine for faces powered by images found on the public web.
The results were terrifying and they really affected me in a very negative way. Needless to say, we moved on to other projects. The world is not ready for the harm such technologies can cause.
Our index contained 100+ million faces and the compute costs were obscene.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ig1 8y agoYandex search already does this
- nostrademons 8y agoPretty sure Google, Facebook, and Apple already have this. They limit it to little convenience features like "Auto-tag your friends" or "Here are some friends you may know" because they don't want to scare people, but they have both the data and the models to do large-scale person search over the entire world. If they wanted to they could launch a search engine where you snap a picture with your cell phone and they tell you who it is, what their home & work addresses are, who their friends are, where they've been over the last week, which businesses they like to frequent, and probably roughly how much money they spend.
- doorbellguy 8y agoWe're almost living inside the black mirror world.
- imglorp 8y agoRight, I don't want it matching general public but I'm curious why a subset of this feature isn't commonplace: celebrities. As a user, I want this all the time to identify an actor, a politician, musician, etc. It would take a random new photo and give you 3 or 4 likely matches. Tineye only matches already known photos. Google/Bing image search will abstract a given photo and show you more of the same type: eg more white men wearing red shirts, rather than identifying the person and showing only photos of that person.
- baroffoos 8y ago>and probably roughly how much money they spend. Google has access to almost all credit card transaction data so that should be easy.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- escherplex 8y agoEven scarier. Imagine someone with evil intent feeding captured feature vectors for any individual into a 3D printer scripted to render high-def latex masks? Privacy could then be the least of our concerns.
- bdamm 8y agoWhy did the work have a negative effect? I can imagine a few ways but I'm interested to know what it was for you, being in the work.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- alexcnwy 8y agoI agree it could cause harm but I’m interested in what harm you think such technologies could cause?