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Picasa Rolls Out 3.0 — Now With Facial Recognition
eldavojohn writes "If you use Picasa (Google's photo sharing site), they have upgraded to 3.0 and are purportedly offering facial recognition. That's right, why tag photos of your friends when the software will group similar faces together for you? There's a new list of features including repairing old photographs by touching them up and even writing on your images. As expected, not everyone is 'ok' with Google automatically recognizing you in pictures."
He downloaded it twice.
It can sort my porn.
Google's Picasa is a photo-manipulation application that you download to your computer and install so you can manipulate images. It includes the capability of uploading those files to PicasaWeb, which is actually the photo-sharing site...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
...but you can still sort by actor.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm waiting for Google Earth integration, where it matches your face with images on street view and finds you on planet earth.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
to find out if you tag someone mooning the camera, if the facial recognition will eventually 'recognize' a friends face.
Considering that members of a family typically bear a very strong resemblance to one another (with identical twins being the extreme case), I would think this would be one of the tougher trials for a facial recognition algorithm.
Better known as 318230.
This was one of my favorite programs when I was on Windows, and I miss its use on my mac. I enjoy iPhoto, but Picasa just had so many features that I loved and used and find so much better than iPhoto. Things like watching folders to see when new pictures were added, moved, and deleted. Cmon google...
From TFA:
This is why you raise your child with a "whitelist" concept of who is a family friend. That's how my parents did it, and how most people did it when I was growing up. If I didn't know you, guess what? That meant you didn't come around enough to know you were a family friend, and no friend of my parents would have been upset if I didn't trust them and we'd never met. Why? Family friends understand that sort of thing from little kids who may have met them at most once or twice. Most of the problems should go away when they hit the teenage years because by that time, they can be reasonably expected to be able to figure these things out, and make their own way home.
I don't trust Google, but give it a rest with the sex offender crap. If your kids fall prey to this, it's your fault, not Google's fault because you should have taught them to only trust "friends of the family" that you introduced them to.
Facial recognition is nothing new. It's been in casinos and airports for years. This is the first time this technology has been available to the general public, though, if I'm not mistaken (and I probably am).
How do you try this feature out? I RTFA, WVFYTV (*** you tube video), read the new feature page (which as far as I can see, doesn't mention this feature), did a few searches on the feature, then installed picasa 3 and fiddled with tagging photos, but no tag suggestions have come up. Can someone please enlighten me as to how this works?
Really? Privacy, a big concern because you can choose to download a piece of software that will attempt to recognize your face? Or *gasp* a friend could import a photo of you into said software? Without your written consent? The Horror! Won't somebody please think of the children!
You think I'm exaggerating, but TFA actually says:
This is also a larger issue for parents with small children. Other family members could tag photos of your child on the Internet. If a predator were to find pictures labeled with a location and a full name, he could gather enough information on your child to pose as a family friend in an attempt to lure your child from safety. What is Google's advice on keeping your children safe?
Now will you please explain to me how this is more of a concern than some random friend tagging said photos without the use of Google's software?
I'm all for privacy, but this seems like a white whale. Nobody's forcing you to use Picasa, and there's really nothing intrusive about this application of the technology. I think it's just the phrase, "Facial Recognition" that brings to mind images of big brother.
Let's try and do a better job of picking our battles.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
The technology exists. It's out of the bag. It doesn't matter if Google does it -- if they don't, someone else will.
You have to assume that in a couple of years, someone can take a phone cam picture of you on the street and use it to trace you back to a Facebook page (or whatever). Or that the police can trace you back to your DMV photo.
If you can't handle that, stop posting pictures of yourself in a way that allows someone to tie them to your real name. And take down the ones that are already up there.
This is inevitable.
From the internets.
Picasaweb (Google's photo-sharing website) does the facial recognition, not the Picasa application. On the Picasaweb site, you can opt-in to the facial recognition stuff, and it will bulk process your uploaded photos. To use it you have upload some photos to the web first, using the Picasa app.
I was watching a Dr. Phil show by chance about a week back that dealt with some girls posting questionable pictures of themselves (not naked, just.. plastered) on their Facebook/whatever, and discussing how that might impact their (future) lives - with one employer type guy saying that he will check you out on the internet and if he were to find stuff like that, not consider you for a job.
So Dr. Phil and some 'expert' went on to say that posting pictures like that is not good, blablabla; the same stuff parents would tell their children, I guess.
But what Anonymous Brave Guy mentioned was not even touched upon in the program; yes, it's stupid if you publish those pictures yourself, but what are you gonna do if somebody -else- posts those pictures?
Yes, you can ask them to take them down... maybe they will, maybe they won't.. in the latter case you might ask Facebook.. who may take them down, or not.. in the latter case you might have to sue, etc. But even if your friend does take them down... a friend of theirs may have already copied it to -their- facebook page. In no time, it can be in a hundred random places on the internet... and that employer-type guy is going to find it and not hire you. So what are you going to do against that? Check if anybody's taking pictures while you're plastered? Good luck doing that when every cellphone has a camera these days. Only get plastered while in a private setting? Most of these pictures -are- from private parties.
I guess the answer is "don't get plastered". Sadly, that means "Don't do anything whatsoever that, while innocuous, may be interpreted in such a way by other people as to form a negative opinion of you either personally or professionally". A boring life that'll be.
Back to the topic at hand; protecting your own privacy is all good and well, but in the end, if others are allowed to talk about you in the forum of a billion people that is the internet, you're bound to be screwed one way or another.
You have to modify Picasaweb settings to 'English US' then save/ok, go back to settings and now a 'Face tag' prefs exists
wolruf@gmail.com
As there are no valid links in any of the pages linked in the story, I managed to find one manually:
http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa3-setup.exe
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
There are faces in porn?!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I had no idea you could identify a male pornstar from their facials. What an odd feature to include in a public photo app...
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
PLEASE tell me that you aren't tracking the ejaculations that do not result in conception as the "dot releases"...
\/\/oobie
Strawman, much?
Most of the civilised world has basic privacy protections. If the US doesn't, then in the age of the Internet, the US needs to be penalised by everyone else until it does. This is no different to the way the US itself leans on other nations to protect its own interests. Related things are already happening, with increasing numbers of European businesses explicitly forbidding service providers from storing data in or routing data via the US because of legal and regulatory concerns.
Either this sort of harmonisation with basic rights protected by worldwide law happens, or sooner or later the Internet probably becomes fragmented into more localised parts with more consistent legal environments. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, IMHO: just like any other international agreements, if you want to play with the others, you have to play nice.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Hi Bill, how is that retirement going?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'