The National Academy of Sciences are about to publish an article in their proceedings entitled ‘Privacy In The Age Of Augmented Reality’, co-authored by Alessandro Acquisiti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stuzman. It is about developments in face recognition software.
To use the authors’ words the document
“investigate(s) the feasibility of combining publicly available Web 2.0 data with off-the-shelf face recognition software for the purpose of large-scale, automated individual re-identification.”
They are also working on an app that can do it all from your phone! See the FAQ section here for more information. The article reports a series of experiments conducted over the last year or so during which the researchers try to identify a person from their photo using an over the counter face recognition software using information that is freely available over the internet.
The results are interesting. The experiments are as follows:
Students walking through the university campus were asked if their photo could be taken and to complete a questionnaire. As they were answering the questions the computation task was carried out, looking for a picture match on Facebook and requiring only seconds. In this case more than 30% of the students were immediately traced.
Because the faces were the same but the photos taken from different angles, humans had to decide which of the possible matches were the most appropriate, but that is not always the case. Some photos are replicated and therefore the computer can give a 100% guarantee that the match is correct.
For example in another experiment the researchers used an online dating agency that provided anonymous photos. In this case they could match names to the photos in about 10% of cases. In several cases the same photo had been used on different sites.
In a third experiment the knowledge gained was used to search for further private information, all freely available on the web, such as details of sexual preference, date and place of birth and this information even allowed them to generate the first five figures of the individual’s US social security number.
So it seems that we can draw a simple conclusion here, either now or in the very near future, as these technologies are improved and made freely available, anybody will be able to recognize anybody they see on the street, identify them through an app in their telephone, and find out about their interests and other personal information, if they have ever posted (or had posted for them) a photo of themselves on the internet.
For more information, please read my face recognition article on the Bassetti Foundation website.
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Very interesting article Jonny
The laptop I’m using has a face recognizing application as well. It’s used to log in to my computer but to be honest, I don’t use it. But the way this application is used amazes me! Now we can find people that we know with ease.
Thanks for sharing this man, have a nice day!
Duy.
Yes, but people can find out information about people they pass on the street, and some people (even without thinking about privacy issues) might use this information in a way that we might not like.
By this technology one can easily find out about other people that means lack of privacy, which I feel not good at all. You’re not secure at all, anyone can find your details and can misuse it.
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Yes, that is precisely my point. The problem is that when people posted their photos on Facebook they had no idea that technology would make it so easy (and cheap) to do.
This is going to be one cool app if and when they get to release one. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of bugs and imperfections during the first few releases. It’ll be awesome nevertheless.
don’t you think that in the wrong hands it might also be dangerous?
Thanks for the article! I too have a laptop with face recognition feature but I rarely use it. The simple reason is that it sometimes becomes very complicated for me.
It is really not secure at all. Security Experts believe that if you are someone who is very particular about privacy protection, Facebook should not be the app for you. It does not protect your privacy.
And to add on, Facebook by default turned the on Face Recognition. I’m not too sure how it works but I think it will auto-tag you into a photo as far as Facebook is able to recognize. That should be manually turned off as well.
Facebook repeatedly change their settings to try and get more information into the public domain. The point of the article is that this technology brings up some serious privacy issues. As some of the comments above seem to prove however users are not particularly interested and give little thought to such issues.
I am afraid of such apps as this one as machine and computer technologies are catching more and more out of our lives and we depend more on it as well. May be the app will be helpful, but I think it will become a good tool in the hands of criminals.
Not sure if its a Toshiba laptop that offers face recognition. Anyway, my cousin actually owns one that kind of computer and I find it really great. It’s far more powerful I guess than my brother’s laptop which can only recognized his fingerprint. If this kind of security is offered by most computers nowadays, stolen items might decrease in the long run.
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