10 ms·

Carnegie Mellon face recognition study has unsettling results

201 points by lemming 15y ago

froseph 15y ago
Equally unsettling is the potential of people tracking enabled by the government's increased use of surveillance cameras and large database of photo ids.
personlurking 15y ago
Reminds me of the TV series Lie To Me (03x13) called "Killer App" where the Zuckerberg character's social network uses cell phone camera technology to point one's phone at anyone's face in order to get their profile info. Also reminded me a bit of the iris scanners in Leon, Mexico http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/26/iris-scanning-set-to-secure-city-in-mexico-then-the-world-video/ http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/26/iris-scanning-set-to-se...
- wgx 15y ago
  Meanwhile, in non-fiction... http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/facelook-coca-colas-facial-recognition-app/ http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/facelook-coca-colas-facial-re...
qF 15y ago
"Unsettling" might be a overstating it a bit. The first slideshow[1] explains (on slide 38, Limitations) that face recognition techniques still have a long way to go. More clearly stated on slide 39: "Face recognition of everyone/everywhere/all the time is not yet feasible. However: Current technological trends suggest that most current limitations will keep fading over time" [1] http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/face-recognition-study-FAQ/acquisti-faces-BLACKHAT-draft.pdf http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/face-recognition-study-FA...
- lemming 15y ago
  However: Current technological trends suggest that most current limitations will keep fading over time I'd say that is pretty unsettling, but then I worry about privacy. Given how facial recognition has advanced in the last 5 years, it's plausible that you could have an Android app to do their SSN trick with, say, 50% accuracy in the next couple of years - certainly 5.
  - jbondeson 15y ago
    No that really isn't plausible. Read their original SSN prediction paper [1] and you will see that the highest they got their SSN prediction (with < 1000 attempts, which is quite a few) was 8.5% for SSN's assigned after 1988. For 1979-1988 that number was 0.8%. Only in the smallest states with issuance after 1996 do they get their best numbers of +60% matches. That's only the SSN portion. When you add in the facial recognition, the requirement of a facebook account with pictures and a correlation to place of birth, you're going to see those numbers plummet. At best this is a clever hack that highlights the risks inherent with publicizing your life on places like facebook. [1] - http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full.pdf
    - lemming 15y ago
      You're still only talking about current technical limitations though. Cameras are getting better, the recognition is getting better, and the trend is for people to have more and more information publicly available online. Maybe it won't happen in 5 years, but I can't see how it won't happen relatively soon.
      - qF 15y ago
        Remember that this is done using clear full-frontal pictures, FRT drop significantly in accuracy with even the smallest change in angle. Not to mention sunglasses, (facial) hair obscuring parts of the face and different lighting conditions. Current techniques that try to deal with such variation need several (clear) pictures from different angles to build a model of a face to be able to recognize a face. I'd go with decades rather than years before the limitations mentioned are resolved.
        anigbrowl 15y ago
        Try installing Picasa and spend a little time tagging your family photos. It's a little startling how good it is. It consistently tags me regardless of whether I have a beard or my glasses in any given picture. Likewise, it quickly IDed my parents in 40 year old family photos that they scanned and sent, based on recent images. Mrs. Browl and I enjoy photography as a hobby, I'm pretty sure Google could ID either of us with 90%+ accuracy from a photo taken on the street. With Facebook you have both the computers and the crowdsourcing at work, so their tagging may be even better.
- mcantelon 15y ago
  I'm a bit unsettled when I see the US Army is funding this, given that they're also working on autonomous "terminator" drones.
  - libraryatnight 15y ago
    The robot assassins are coming. But in seriousness, I found this unsettling too.
  - neworbit 15y ago
    They fund a lot of things, but yes, I don't think I'd like to be on the receiving end of "You bear a distinct resemblance to someone we'd like to explode."
- rhizome 15y ago
  Current technological trends suggest that most current limitations will keep fading over time" That may be so, but history and theory both tell us that the remaining issues (after eliminating "most current limitations") are going to be hard-ass bugs that prevent the technology from actually working, and that isn't even accounting for the Red Queen Syndrome. A long way to go, but a short path to grants.
vectorpush 15y ago
The maturation of this technology has additional implications even in the absence of an open social graph. Imagine sophisticated FRT used to track individual customer activity at retail locations. Timestamps could be used to map customers to their precise purchasing behaviors with infinite granularity. It's not far out to imagine a world where average profitability per visit is calculated upon arrival, now imagine an employee with a bug in her ear, marking you down as the guy with a 3 year history of strolling into Best Buy to browse TVs with the saleswomen, but never actually buying anything.
- delinka 15y ago
  "Timestamps could be used to map customers to their precise purchasing behaviors with infinite granularity." Between debit cards and loyalty cards, this is pretty much already happening. In the US, I see few people using cash without the loyalty card (because the loyalty card gets you a discount.) Of course, the remainder of your comment would require this new technology. And would be creepy as hell.
  - vectorpush 15y ago
    The granularity I'm referring to is in the nuanced behavior of an individual in the act of shopping. Apparently, the algorithm has established that you follow a pattern of contemplating Cadburry chocolate bar purchases on every visit, well now your Inbox contains a buy 2 get 1 Free Cadburry coupon that only works for you. Once this is cheap enough that anyone with a high def webcam can consistently track/identify faces, this technology is going to be used by everyone.
  - dhyasama 15y ago
    The difference is you could be identified when you arrive versus when you are checking out. Your experience within the store would change. For example, if you spend a lot of money then you might be greeted with VIP welcome wagon. If you don't, you might be greeted with a cold shoulder.
    - mike-cardwell 15y ago
philwelch 15y ago
What's more unsettling is the fundamental fact that any kind of social norm or expectation based upon the limits of our present technology is unsustainable.
- ajryan 15y ago
  “His very first story, he told me as he was dying, was set in Camelot, the court of King Arthur in Britain: Merlin the Court Magician casts a spell that allows him to equip the Knights of the Round Table with Thompson submachine guns and drums of .45-caliber dumdums. Sir Galahad, the purest in heart and mind, familiarizes himself with this new virtue-compelling appliance. While doing so, he puts a slug through the Holy Grail and makes a Swiss cheese of Queen Guinevere.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
- sp332 15y ago
  I don't think it well be that bad, eventually. It's already creepy to walk into someone else's home uninvited, or enter a public bathroom marked for a different gender, or even just stare at someone for a while. None of these social norms are based on limitations of technology.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    Which means those norms are not necessarily unsustainable according to my statement.
    - sp332 15y ago
      Right, I mean that we'll come up with new social norms to avoid these newly-possible creepy behaviors.
adolph 15y ago
Q. Were the tests IRB approved? Yes, they were approved. As in our previous studies, no SSNs (or faces) were harmed during the writing of this paper.
- praeclarum 15y ago
  Except, of course, for those few SSNs and addresses that Paul the grad student sold so he could play with a botnet. Oh, and we gave the database and algorithms over to the DoD who sponsored our work. I'm sure they won't harm any SSNs or faces either.
cletus 15y ago
This reminds me of a quote from Eric Schmidt (disclaimer: I work for Google) from last year. The full quote [1] is: > I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities. which is entirely reasonable, yet he gets lambasted in the press as being "creepy" [2] based on a sensationalist snippet. If you really want something to remain hidden, you have to remember that any services you use are subject to law enforcement, security breaches, bankruptcy procedures (there was a case not too long ago where a bankruptcy court judge ruled that the creditors' interests overruled the TOS and allowed the sale of information otherwise prohibited by the TOS; I can't find a link right now), etc. With the ever-decreasing cost of mass computing, you will increasingly see just what an illusion online privacy really is. Another example: some sites use shared avatar sites like Gravatar. I've often thought it would be trivial to crawl the Web and link identities from various forums based on using the exact same Gravatar image. In fact, someone's probably already done this. Facial recognition is just one obvious way this will manifest itself. Another that I don't think has even been explored yet is what I would probably call "textual fingerprinting" meaning that the more you write in one post the more likely you can extract some identifiable style, choice of words and so on and that can be linked to other things you've written. [1]: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/my_reaction_to.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/my_reaction_to... [2]: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/01/animation-of-google-ex-ceo-schmidts-creepy-lines-hits-dc-streets.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/01/animation...
- Radim 15y ago
  Re. "textual fingerprinting" -- this is a well-established field (decades old), especially in forensics. It more commonly goes under the name "authorship attribution". For a taste, see e.g. http://www.ncfta.ca/papers/emailforensics.pdf http://www.ncfta.ca/papers/emailforensics.pdf or http://ai.arizona.edu/intranet/papers/isi_visualizing_authorship.pdf http://ai.arizona.edu/intranet/papers/isi_visualizing_author... .
RexRollman 15y ago
So basically, we aren't far from turning Flickr and Facebook photos into a surveillance system? Someone could be found that way without even having an account.
MarkPNeyer 15y ago
i figured a while ago that any notion of online privacy was silly. i said 'fuck it' and decided to just be totally open about who i am and what i think online. i talk openly about having bipolar disorder and experiencing psychosis, about beliefs i have that are considered unusual or downright insane, and about whatever i'm feeling at the moment. it seems to work out pretty well for me. i was even thinking of publishing everything i buy for the world to see, both as an exercise to control my spending and for fun.
- pork 15y ago
  So you've now attached your name to admissions of psychosis. I understand your motivations on some level, but I sincerely hope that you don't regret doing so in the future. You wouldn't staple your medical information on your business card, but I feel you've done just that here. Good luck, and I mean that sincerely.
  - MarkPNeyer 15y ago
    i've done this so many times it's not funny. it hasn't stopped me from getting a job yet. my thinking is that this stuff will come out eventually anyhow, so it's better to be up front about it. people seem to like honesty.
    - awakeasleep 15y ago
      Do you feel like you might be enjoying a privileged freedom that many can not hope to take advantage of? For example, I bet you enjoy both a solid competency in your field, and a relatively free or permissive social environment. Things may be a lot different if an unskilled worker in a repressive society were put in a situation where their social life was highly exposed. I don't know what the exact balance is here, but I feel wary of taking your example as an all-clear on the privacy alarm.
      - ShardPhoenix 15y ago
        "Do you feel like you might be enjoying a privileged freedom that many can not hope to take advantage of?" Do you feel that you might be someone who likes to ask leading questions?
libraryatnight 15y ago
It's moments like this where I wish I could somehow delete myself from the internet and come back fresh armed with what I know now. Personal electronic reset button.
- randomdata 15y ago
  Even if you are careful, all it takes is a kind friend on a site like Facebook to tag you in a photo (you don't even have to be a member to be tagged) and you are back to square one. On the upside, I am super excited for Facebook Goggles. Augmented reality profiles shown for everyone you look at. Out in the dating scene? Know who is single and who is not just by looking at them. Business convention? Find out who everyone works for at a glance. Okay, maybe it isn't an upside, but it is bound to happen anyway.
  - bitops 15y ago
    It's exciting and also deeply disturbing. I agree with all the positive benefits. But after a while I think there's a real tendency to just reduce people to a set if metrics in your mind. It seems scary to me that the more "connected" we are we are often just self-selecting or being selected into some group based on patterns.
ja27 15y ago
Is anyone watching TechStars on Bloomberg? When I saw the Wiji guys and their adaptive advertising, I was immediately thinking of the implications if you can do this good of a job of facial recognition. Imagine if every ad screen you came near knew as much about you as Google or Facebook do. In some ways I'm kind of excited about it - it's like living in the future - but it's scary as heck for privacy concerns. http://immersivelabs.com/ http://immersivelabs.com/
lukejduncan 15y ago
tldr: study shows that it's easy to find you on social networks based online on pictures. Experiments were done to show that you can be found between sites (e.g. a picture on an adult dating site can be used to find you on Facebook) and by taking pictures of random students on campus.
- gobongo 15y ago
  "e.g. a picture on an adult dating site can be used to find you on Facebook" Also, e. g. a picture on Facebook can be used to find you on /r/gonewild. Even absent full faces, eventually just skin tones and identifiable marks (tattoos, birthmarks, mouth shape, whatever) will probably be able to id you in pictures you may not want to be identified in. So don't put nudies up on the web unless you're ok with someone, maybe 5 years from now, being able to Noogle them up in a couple of seconds.
idonthack 15y ago
Anyone with half a brain has seen this coming for years.
astrofinch 15y ago
You could trivially "opt out" of this by ensuring that no publicly available photos of you were tagged on Facebook.
- saucetenuto 15y ago
  How do you ensure that? Recall that the person who uploads the photo controls how widely it is shared, and that you can be tagged in a photo even if you're not subscribed to Facebook.
  - astrofinch 15y ago
    Stay registered and remove tags you don't like.
stretchwithme 15y ago
Its going to become very difficult to commit all kinds of crime. And that is worth some loss of anonymity, provided we still have individual rights and the rule of law. Without those it won't matter what technology can do.
yaix 15y ago
It will come sooner or later. Point your smartphone at any person in the street and know who he or she is in a second. The technology is too trivial to stop it. More important would be to now begin thinking about regulations to limit abuse of that technology. But most likely governments will wait (again) until the system has been abused by big business before limiting regulations are enacted.

201 points by lemming 15y ago

Equally unsettling is the potential of people tracking enabled by the government's increased use of surveillance cameras and large database of photo ids.

personlurking 15y ago

Reminds me of the TV series Lie To Me (03x13) called "Killer App" where the Zuckerberg character's social network uses cell phone camera technology to point one's phone at anyone's face in order to get their profile info. Also reminded me a bit of the iris scanners in Leon, Mexico http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/26/iris-scanning-set-to-secure-city-in-mexico-then-the-world-video/ http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/26/iris-scanning-set-to-se...

wgx 15y ago
Meanwhile, in non-fiction... http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/facelook-coca-colas-facial-recognition-app/ http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/facelook-coca-colas-facial-re...

qF 15y ago

"Unsettling" might be a overstating it a bit. The first slideshow[1] explains (on slide 38, Limitations) that face recognition techniques still have a long way to go. More clearly stated on slide 39: "Face recognition of everyone/everywhere/all the time is not yet feasible. However: Current technological trends suggest that most current limitations will keep fading over time" [1] http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/face-recognition-study-FAQ/acquisti-faces-BLACKHAT-draft.pdf http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/face-recognition-study-FA...

lemming 15y ago
However: Current technological trends suggest that most current limitations will keep fading over time I'd say that is pretty unsettling, but then I worry about privacy. Given how facial recognition has advanced in the last 5 years, it's plausible that you could have an Android app to do their SSN trick with, say, 50% accuracy in the next couple of years - certainly 5.
- jbondeson 15y ago
  No that really isn't plausible. Read their original SSN prediction paper [1] and you will see that the highest they got their SSN prediction (with < 1000 attempts, which is quite a few) was 8.5% for SSN's assigned after 1988. For 1979-1988 that number was 0.8%. Only in the smallest states with issuance after 1996 do they get their best numbers of +60% matches. That's only the SSN portion. When you add in the facial recognition, the requirement of a facebook account with pictures and a correlation to place of birth, you're going to see those numbers plummet. At best this is a clever hack that highlights the risks inherent with publicizing your life on places like facebook. [1] - http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full.pdf
  - lemming 15y ago
    You're still only talking about current technical limitations though. Cameras are getting better, the recognition is getting better, and the trend is for people to have more and more information publicly available online. Maybe it won't happen in 5 years, but I can't see how it won't happen relatively soon.
    - qF 15y ago
      Remember that this is done using clear full-frontal pictures, FRT drop significantly in accuracy with even the smallest change in angle. Not to mention sunglasses, (facial) hair obscuring parts of the face and different lighting conditions. Current techniques that try to deal with such variation need several (clear) pictures from different angles to build a model of a face to be able to recognize a face. I'd go with decades rather than years before the limitations mentioned are resolved.
      - anigbrowl 15y ago
        Try installing Picasa and spend a little time tagging your family photos. It's a little startling how good it is. It consistently tags me regardless of whether I have a beard or my glasses in any given picture. Likewise, it quickly IDed my parents in 40 year old family photos that they scanned and sent, based on recent images. Mrs. Browl and I enjoy photography as a hobby, I'm pretty sure Google could ID either of us with 90%+ accuracy from a photo taken on the street. With Facebook you have both the computers and the crowdsourcing at work, so their tagging may be even better.
mcantelon 15y ago
I'm a bit unsettled when I see the US Army is funding this, given that they're also working on autonomous "terminator" drones.
- libraryatnight 15y ago
  The robot assassins are coming. But in seriousness, I found this unsettling too.
- neworbit 15y ago
  They fund a lot of things, but yes, I don't think I'd like to be on the receiving end of "You bear a distinct resemblance to someone we'd like to explode."
rhizome 15y ago
Current technological trends suggest that most current limitations will keep fading over time" That may be so, but history and theory both tell us that the remaining issues (after eliminating "most current limitations") are going to be hard-ass bugs that prevent the technology from actually working, and that isn't even accounting for the Red Queen Syndrome. A long way to go, but a short path to grants.

vectorpush 15y ago

The maturation of this technology has additional implications even in the absence of an open social graph. Imagine sophisticated FRT used to track individual customer activity at retail locations. Timestamps could be used to map customers to their precise purchasing behaviors with infinite granularity. It's not far out to imagine a world where average profitability per visit is calculated upon arrival, now imagine an employee with a bug in her ear, marking you down as the guy with a 3 year history of strolling into Best Buy to browse TVs with the saleswomen, but never actually buying anything.

delinka 15y ago
"Timestamps could be used to map customers to their precise purchasing behaviors with infinite granularity." Between debit cards and loyalty cards, this is pretty much already happening. In the US, I see few people using cash without the loyalty card (because the loyalty card gets you a discount.) Of course, the remainder of your comment would require this new technology. And would be creepy as hell.
- vectorpush 15y ago
  The granularity I'm referring to is in the nuanced behavior of an individual in the act of shopping. Apparently, the algorithm has established that you follow a pattern of contemplating Cadburry chocolate bar purchases on every visit, well now your Inbox contains a buy 2 get 1 Free Cadburry coupon that only works for you. Once this is cheap enough that anyone with a high def webcam can consistently track/identify faces, this technology is going to be used by everyone.
- dhyasama 15y ago
  The difference is you could be identified when you arrive versus when you are checking out. Your experience within the store would change. For example, if you spend a lot of money then you might be greeted with VIP welcome wagon. If you don't, you might be greeted with a cold shoulder.
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago

philwelch 15y ago

What's more unsettling is the fundamental fact that any kind of social norm or expectation based upon the limits of our present technology is unsustainable.

ajryan 15y ago
“His very first story, he told me as he was dying, was set in Camelot, the court of King Arthur in Britain: Merlin the Court Magician casts a spell that allows him to equip the Knights of the Round Table with Thompson submachine guns and drums of .45-caliber dumdums. Sir Galahad, the purest in heart and mind, familiarizes himself with this new virtue-compelling appliance. While doing so, he puts a slug through the Holy Grail and makes a Swiss cheese of Queen Guinevere.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
sp332 15y ago
I don't think it well be that bad, eventually. It's already creepy to walk into someone else's home uninvited, or enter a public bathroom marked for a different gender, or even just stare at someone for a while. None of these social norms are based on limitations of technology.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Which means those norms are not necessarily unsustainable according to my statement.
  - sp332 15y ago
    Right, I mean that we'll come up with new social norms to avoid these newly-possible creepy behaviors.

adolph 15y ago

Q. Were the tests IRB approved? Yes, they were approved. As in our previous studies, no SSNs (or faces) were harmed during the writing of this paper.

praeclarum 15y ago
Except, of course, for those few SSNs and addresses that Paul the grad student sold so he could play with a botnet. Oh, and we gave the database and algorithms over to the DoD who sponsored our work. I'm sure they won't harm any SSNs or faces either.

cletus 15y ago

This reminds me of a quote from Eric Schmidt (disclaimer: I work for Google) from last year. The full quote [1] is: > I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities. which is entirely reasonable, yet he gets lambasted in the press as being "creepy" [2] based on a sensationalist snippet. If you really want something to remain hidden, you have to remember that any services you use are subject to law enforcement, security breaches, bankruptcy procedures (there was a case not too long ago where a bankruptcy court judge ruled that the creditors' interests overruled the TOS and allowed the sale of information otherwise prohibited by the TOS; I can't find a link right now), etc. With the ever-decreasing cost of mass computing, you will increasingly see just what an illusion online privacy really is. Another example: some sites use shared avatar sites like Gravatar. I've often thought it would be trivial to crawl the Web and link identities from various forums based on using the exact same Gravatar image. In fact, someone's probably already done this. Facial recognition is just one obvious way this will manifest itself. Another that I don't think has even been explored yet is what I would probably call "textual fingerprinting" meaning that the more you write in one post the more likely you can extract some identifiable style, choice of words and so on and that can be linked to other things you've written. [1]: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/my_reaction_to.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/my_reaction_to... [2]: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/01/animation-of-google-ex-ceo-schmidts-creepy-lines-hits-dc-streets.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/01/animation...

Radim 15y ago
Re. "textual fingerprinting" -- this is a well-established field (decades old), especially in forensics. It more commonly goes under the name "authorship attribution". For a taste, see e.g. http://www.ncfta.ca/papers/emailforensics.pdf http://www.ncfta.ca/papers/emailforensics.pdf or http://ai.arizona.edu/intranet/papers/isi_visualizing_authorship.pdf http://ai.arizona.edu/intranet/papers/isi_visualizing_author... .

RexRollman 15y ago

So basically, we aren't far from turning Flickr and Facebook photos into a surveillance system? Someone could be found that way without even having an account.

MarkPNeyer 15y ago

i figured a while ago that any notion of online privacy was silly. i said 'fuck it' and decided to just be totally open about who i am and what i think online. i talk openly about having bipolar disorder and experiencing psychosis, about beliefs i have that are considered unusual or downright insane, and about whatever i'm feeling at the moment. it seems to work out pretty well for me. i was even thinking of publishing everything i buy for the world to see, both as an exercise to control my spending and for fun.

pork 15y ago
So you've now attached your name to admissions of psychosis. I understand your motivations on some level, but I sincerely hope that you don't regret doing so in the future. You wouldn't staple your medical information on your business card, but I feel you've done just that here. Good luck, and I mean that sincerely.
- MarkPNeyer 15y ago
  i've done this so many times it's not funny. it hasn't stopped me from getting a job yet. my thinking is that this stuff will come out eventually anyhow, so it's better to be up front about it. people seem to like honesty.
  - awakeasleep 15y ago
    Do you feel like you might be enjoying a privileged freedom that many can not hope to take advantage of? For example, I bet you enjoy both a solid competency in your field, and a relatively free or permissive social environment. Things may be a lot different if an unskilled worker in a repressive society were put in a situation where their social life was highly exposed. I don't know what the exact balance is here, but I feel wary of taking your example as an all-clear on the privacy alarm.
    - ShardPhoenix 15y ago
      "Do you feel like you might be enjoying a privileged freedom that many can not hope to take advantage of?" Do you feel that you might be someone who likes to ask leading questions?

libraryatnight 15y ago

It's moments like this where I wish I could somehow delete myself from the internet and come back fresh armed with what I know now. Personal electronic reset button.

randomdata 15y ago
Even if you are careful, all it takes is a kind friend on a site like Facebook to tag you in a photo (you don't even have to be a member to be tagged) and you are back to square one. On the upside, I am super excited for Facebook Goggles. Augmented reality profiles shown for everyone you look at. Out in the dating scene? Know who is single and who is not just by looking at them. Business convention? Find out who everyone works for at a glance. Okay, maybe it isn't an upside, but it is bound to happen anyway.
- bitops 15y ago
  It's exciting and also deeply disturbing. I agree with all the positive benefits. But after a while I think there's a real tendency to just reduce people to a set if metrics in your mind. It seems scary to me that the more "connected" we are we are often just self-selecting or being selected into some group based on patterns.

ja27 15y ago

Is anyone watching TechStars on Bloomberg? When I saw the Wiji guys and their adaptive advertising, I was immediately thinking of the implications if you can do this good of a job of facial recognition. Imagine if every ad screen you came near knew as much about you as Google or Facebook do. In some ways I'm kind of excited about it - it's like living in the future - but it's scary as heck for privacy concerns. http://immersivelabs.com/ http://immersivelabs.com/

lukejduncan 15y ago

tldr: study shows that it's easy to find you on social networks based online on pictures. Experiments were done to show that you can be found between sites (e.g. a picture on an adult dating site can be used to find you on Facebook) and by taking pictures of random students on campus.

gobongo 15y ago
"e.g. a picture on an adult dating site can be used to find you on Facebook" Also, e. g. a picture on Facebook can be used to find you on /r/gonewild. Even absent full faces, eventually just skin tones and identifiable marks (tattoos, birthmarks, mouth shape, whatever) will probably be able to id you in pictures you may not want to be identified in. So don't put nudies up on the web unless you're ok with someone, maybe 5 years from now, being able to Noogle them up in a couple of seconds.

idonthack 15y ago

Anyone with half a brain has seen this coming for years.

astrofinch 15y ago

You could trivially "opt out" of this by ensuring that no publicly available photos of you were tagged on Facebook.

saucetenuto 15y ago
How do you ensure that? Recall that the person who uploads the photo controls how widely it is shared, and that you can be tagged in a photo even if you're not subscribed to Facebook.
- astrofinch 15y ago
  Stay registered and remove tags you don't like.

stretchwithme 15y ago

Its going to become very difficult to commit all kinds of crime. And that is worth some loss of anonymity, provided we still have individual rights and the rule of law. Without those it won't matter what technology can do.

yaix 15y ago

It will come sooner or later. Point your smartphone at any person in the street and know who he or she is in a second. The technology is too trivial to stop it. More important would be to now begin thinking about regulations to limit abuse of that technology. But most likely governments will wait (again) until the system has been abused by big business before limiting regulations are enacted.