Slashdot Mirror
Face Recognition — Clever Or Just Plain Creepy?
Simson writes "Beth Rosenberg and I published a fun story today about our experiences with the new face recognition that's built into both iPhoto '09 and Google's new Picasa system. The skinny: iPhoto is fun, Google is creepy. The real difference, we think, is that iPhoto runs on your system and has you name people with your 'friendly' names. Picasa, on the other hand, runs on Google's servers and has you identify everybody with their email addresses. Of course, email addresses are unique and can be cross-correlated between different users. And then, even more disturbing, after you've tagged all your friends and family, Google tries to get you to tag all of the strangers in your photos. Ick."
Google's option is pretty creepy. Any of my loved ones that dislike me enough to put my face to my personal details on a remote server are in trouble...
sudo mount --milk --sugar
When you choose to run your photos through facial recognition software (or give them to others who may do the same) you should expect .. ta da.. that they will run them through that software.
The criteria for success includes Facial Identification (figuring out where the face is), Facial Recognition (figuring out if the face matches one on file), and some method of Facial Labeling ("tagging" that face with an identifier).
Calling google "creepy" (pejorative nontechnical evaluation) doesn't give it the credit for doing all three parts correctly. Not liking that google's choice of identifier is more unique than "LAST, FIRST" or "FIRST LAST" is a personal foible, not a problem with the technology.
Was this a slow "news" day?
E
They are trying to covertly establish a database for their next big project; Google People Search. With just a name you can find a person's address, email address, phone number and what they have searched for in the last three years.
What exactly did everyone think "Don't be Evil" would mean once the company went public, grew up and grew larger?
Not that this is necessarily anything premeditated and sinister, but notice how thinking through whether something might seem weird or discomfiting isn't at the top of the list?
Taking away the facial recognition technology, it's not that much difference than facebook. A friend takes a photo of me somewhere, sticks it on their facebook profile, labels me in the picture, and links it to my facebook profile. Then your pictures can be searched.
Given enough labeled pictures of me, one could run it through a facial recognition system. It would have the same applications, without the initial creepy factor.
Talking about facebook, I guess soon people will not need to label you. Facebook will label you automatically. Recognition error rates can be reduced by making sure you are in the same circle of friends.
From http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2236775/researchers-hack-facial
"VNBusinessNews - Researchers from Viet Nam have cracked facial recognition scanners on laptops to bypass security. They will be demonstrating how to hack facial recognition biometrics at the Black Hat security convention in Washington DC this week."
From Feb 20, 2009
Its weird, since I realize that my fears are misdirected while total creepy lurks in the hearts of shareholders, stalkers, or the obtuse. But lately a great deal of Google beta features are clearly exploiting user input and data profiling. I suppose its good that they do the creepy just to snap us out of our hypnotic stupor and remember that our every keystroke is available to the creep factory. I suppose its like someone digging through your garbage, or like a dog sniffing some poop on the curb. Its just creepy, even if it is "doing no evil" it sure smells funny and I'm glad I didn't step in it. I just wish I could get the taste out of my mouth.
Is there a proper alternative to Picasa for Linux?
f-spot is horribly unstable and not very usable imho
I want to know when I'll be able to run my porn through a facial recognition program and sort by actress. That is, uh, a friend of mine wants to know when...
Assuming that the uploaded pictures also contain the proper EXIF data, then Google will also know exactly when was the picture taken. If you they can also figure out the location the picture was taken on (perhaps as a tagging feature connected to Google Maps?), then they'll be able to track people - where and when they were, and in whose company. They could even extend the concept to try to combine pictures of the same event from different albums into a massive "super-album" of the event, even if the owners of the photographs never found out about each other.
Is the prospect of having a picture associated with an email address really creepy and disturbing? The 100M+ people who use Myspace and Facebook to associate their email with their picture, contacts, relationship status and favorite foods don't seem to think so.
In any case, I have a Google Photos/Picasa Web account with hundreds of pictures and everybody whose name I know in them is tagged, not one of which is identified by their email address.
So to conclude, thanks for the FUD. I'm looking forward to more technology reviews by people with no understanding of technology, much less the concept of social networking.
Could we get a more visceral evaluation? Yours was just so objective and devoid of feeling. I think you underplayed the emotional impact of this technology.
All your face are belong to us!
Did Anyone else notice that the photo in TFA is credited to Simon Garfinkel? Poor bastard.
On second thought, let's not go to the internet. 'Tis a silly place.
Facebook will do this. I've been waiting for them to do it, it only seems natural, they have a ton of data available to them for face recognition when users tag photos of their friends. Soon you can just upload your photos and they will automatically identify your friends in them
What exactly is your problem here?
There are two clauses in that sentence, joined with an 'and', and the subject ('Picasa') applies to both.
'Picasa has you identify everybody with their email addresses.'
Or are you confused in some other way?
These days you can't sunbathe in your backyard without appearing on Google Earth. Forget to draw a curtain and you might end up on Google StreetView. Giving you the chance to opt-out-after-the-fact is disingenuous.
We've seen people hugging, fondling, urinating, staring and even coming out of sex shops. Google doesn't give a toss (sic) about anyone else's privacy. Privacy laws were written in a time when you could wander behind the barn if you wanted a quiet conversation. These days, we have Google peeping and probing us, tracking everything they can about us. Privacy laws need to be rewritten to cater for the omniscient peeping-tom that is Google.
Google pretend there is no problem. Tell you what: If Larry Page and Sergey Brin install webcams in every room of their house so we can see them in the nude, urinating and making love (StreetView has already caught that) then their shrugs of "What's the big deal" might seem more believable.
I've just never seen such construct, does it mean "Picasa enables you to identify everybody..." or "Picasa demands that you identify everybody"? I've parsed it as "Picasa owns you identify everybody.." but it could be because I didn't have my coffee yet.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
It's all creepy to me. The fact is, it's pervasive and very difficult to opt out of as current social norms exist. Even if you don't have a gmail account, if you have even a small circle of friends there is a high chance of someone else having a gmail account that you have sent mail to, which puts your email in that circle of friends. If someone else in the same circle of friends has your picture and labels it, that would be enough to reliably link your email, first name, last name and face together. (Your friends would be identifiable as a cluster.)
With the above and a sample of your writing, there is a good chance that you have a statistically improbable phrase or two (or vocabulary) that is going to identify you elsewhere on the net.
Have enough cameras in a given country, and you can build up a database of people and locations they have been to, updating in real time. Those whose faces haven't yet been identified will relatively easily be able to be associated with the groups of people they associate with (enough times at nearby camera locations with a given person at the same time, with extra weight if those other people are there at the same times, coupled with cell phone location information), and their domicile located to within the nearest camera. In fact, just correlate the cell phone location info with the face from the camera - if they have a phone you have a match. Remember there is also the database of passports (with photos) that can be assumed scanned, and nicely labeled high-school graduation photos for all potentially subversive people coming of age. And those unidentified faces might be driving a car which will have a license plate, again, traceable to a database of names and addresses.
At this point the number of unidentified people should be small enough so that there are only a relative handful of people who are just unidentified faces. These people will be probably be high value enough on average to make it worthwhile to find out who they are. It would be relatively inexpensive to obtain their identity - identify from the database the scheduled activities they keep, send an undercover vehicle there to stake them out at probable times, when the camera gives a positive, trail them home to an address etc. You'll get at least an alias if not a name, an address, a face, and a likely circle of friends.
If they can recognize faces they should be able to recognize ethnicity (if you can recognize a face and an ethnicity from a photograph, so can a machine). The facial measurements and last names will form a cluster. A scan through the last names will identify the ethnicity probably within the first few entries or so.
If I can think it, google/NSA has smarter people than me working for them and they will have done that and more.
The only way to opt out is to live as a hermit or with similarly google avoiding hermits. Maybe not even possible. It seems harmless enough now, but the moment the rulers are actually fearful (e.g. if there was a large enough depression, people out of work started rioting in sufficient numbers or with arms), you can bet that there will be unmarked vans going around the city in the night picking up people with their "SubversiveRank (TM)" above an arbitrary threshold with a one-way ticket to either a slave labor camp or an unmarked grave.
Who exactly does google's "Don't be Evil" motto apply to? It makes MUCH more sense if it is externally directed.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
It wouldn't surprise me if Google were also using the facial recognition s/w to also extract what it can about demographic information - age and sex are obvious candidates. This could be stored in their database of everything else they know about you to aid their targetting of ads in your email and your searches. I do find it rather creepy that other people could be sending Google photos of me right now so their computers can try and work out more about me.
... Google should get. It wants you to name all those people? That's Sergey Brin and Larry Page. All of them. Google wants email addresses? Get a gmail account, tag them all with it, spoof yourself with it, and then surf a couple dozen porn sites and post to a bunch of usenet groups. Google wants mail? Give it to them.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This feature is a big threat to a diverse democratic society. Because:
1. Every society, no matter how peaceful and democratic, will come into the hands of the wrong people / organizations at times.
1. These people/organizations/movements/businesses will see it as their duty to put down any resistence against whatever their goal is, with any means they have.
1. The systematic registration of peoples faces will not only create a register of images where they know who's on them. It will also make it possible to automatically tag any other image on the net of the people who has been tagged. This includes recognising everyone who's caught in one of the millions of surveilance cameras hidden or visible everywhere.
2. One way to beat this feature is to change your own features as often as possible. With make up and piercings, hair style and plastic surgery if you're a woman, with all of those in addition to growing a beard and cutting it off regularly, if you're a man. This will surly confuse the system.
3. One way to beat this feature is to purposely submit a lot of images and tag them incorrectly. This will surly confuse the system.
If we fail to break this, there will come a time when the people in power will have the possibility to know where anyone is at any moment. They will use this power to subdue any resistance. And believe me, I'm not one who jumps at any conspiration theory. And believe me, people will be rounded up, tortured and killed if we don't break this.
...which was pointed out in the article as well as the summary, but so far has failed to gain any notice in the comments, is that one implementation is purely local to the owner's physical machine, whereas the other is hosted on a corporate server, with no provision that the data of interest is solely under the author's control.
That's the crux of the entire matter. Talking about unique identifiers or linking to other metadata is secondary. The real issue is that anything you submit to Google, Facebook, etc. is no longer really yours. The companies who host and mine this data have a vested interest in allaying such fears. They will say and do anything to give the appearance of trustworthiness. Whether they actually follow through is simultaneously independent and irrelevant, because the fact remains: once you put data online, or have it hosted remotely, someone else has it. Data is infinitely copyable, modifiable, crackable.
When you use a program like iPhoto to tag images you took on a camera, nobody else has access to that information, provided you don't share or publish it in some manner. The recognition technology is programmed into the application, and the application runs locally. Google's service does not. The trend toward server-side computing to be alarming. The price of convenience and robustness is security and privacy. I am becoming increasingly convinced that the former is not worth the loss of the latter.
(I do not have the latest version of iPhoto. And I'm not an Apple apologist by any means--for instance, I despise MobileMe for the exact same reasons I find Google's practices to be problematic. We live in a time when avoiding the harvesting of personal user data by powerful, ethically questionable governments and global corporations is virtually impossible, and it is getting more difficult by the day.)
"I can have you do my bidding" is a perfectly sound sentence, and it has a unique implication, which is: none.
"I can make you do my bidding" implies force or coercion from my part.
"I will nag you until you do my bidding" implies manipulation from my part.
"You will do my bidding because it's in your own best interest" implies a mutual goal as a motivator.
"I allow you to do my bidding" implies consent from me, but does not assert that you will do it.
Instead, the construct means that Picasa enables use of that feature, and implies that (the majority of) the users will use it, but makes no implication on how Picasa will achieve that.
How's that for an ESL? :)
With the advent of automatic facial recognition technology, you need to get yourself some black bars, and you need to wear them anytime you're out in public. Then any photos of you will come out pre-censored, no more worries about automatic facial recognition!
See 8
See 6
After thinking about it I do agree that it sounds a bit strange, but only because of the way the author wrote it. The verb is technically fine, but it just doesn't "fit".
No existe.
NSA and the Department of Homeland Insecurity likely already have face recognition software trawling websites including social network websites recognizing the same people popping up in photographs all over the world. I doubt it's effective in practice, if they have this, but in theory, this would be the technique to be able to 'search' for say, a suspected terrorist, drawing down shots of faces from all over the world. Someones holiday snap of a crowd in some city. pulled down from flickr. may put a pin in the map as far as tracking a known suspect goes. Nevermind what realtime access to urban CCTV that seems to be popping up in many cities all over the world.
^^^You see what I did there right... I fixed it for myself, i put 'IN' in front of 'security'.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I found out recently that when you tag a face in Picasa Web it appears as a contact on my G1. Weird scrolling through my contact list and seeing dead relatives and famous scientists...
Task Mangler
"I would eat the corn out of Apple's shit. Google is evil, and if I could figure out a way to work it in, so is Microsoft."
Six degrees of separation?
Do you really want an Ubuntu user outside your house?
Holding a print out of how he is joined to you?
Joined by some email you sent in 1999?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I vote "creepy".
Friends, I never tire of repeating: Google is the NSA.
Once a clever guy in the NSA (they have lots of them) pondered... and found a way to get people giving them willingly all sorts of info. On top of that, it's an operation financing itself!
The title should be "Face Recognition - Works or is Bullshit" ?
After working in computer vision for a few years, I learned how this stuff works, and I find it a lot of baloney. Sure, you can get something that works for a bit of the time for a restricted amount of data, but as we found out with the MIT debacle after 9/11, this stuff isn't robust. It can't handle simple changes in lighting, obstruction of portion of faces etc., which makes sense, since it isn't magic. Unfortunately it is a hot media topic, and computer vision researchers and others keep hammering away at it. I am here posting mainly to ask slashdotters to be more critical of the performance of such systems. Remember, when someone shows one of these systems, and this goes for other stuff like in-painting, tracking, edge detection and other standard computer vision problems, always ask yourself if the person presenting the solution has demonstrated it is a very wide variety of situations. You can always get something to work for one photo. (Usually of Lena...)
Beth dear, It isn't that big a deal. If you find yourself creeped out by Google then move on! Nothing is forcing you to enter your friends' emails. Resist! There's risk out there is the big bad world, Beth! Get used to it or go crawl in a hole.
this is an easy system to defeat:
everyone just start putting random names on random faces . . .
What you appear to forget is that you have no defence against this violation of your privacy.
Google will not tie an email account to your face - it just makes it very, very easy for your friends to do it. As soon as there is an image of you out on the Web you basically lose anonymity at an alarming rate with what Google is doing.
Amusingly, I see heaps of people object to the NSA and Carnivore, but putting their details and images on Google. Let me remind you that Google is a US company too, hence not to be trusted with private information.
How would you know they are violating your rights?
Ever tried to get hold of someone at Google (or Youtube, for that matter)?
Insert
Facial recognition is scary beyond any conceivable dystopian nightmare. George Orwell is having seizures in his grave right now. You might not be to worried in the US, but in Europe we have conflicting left and right-wing extremist groups who already spend a fair amount of effort on tracking each others identities, adresses and employments. And when they do find out, scary things happen. Just wait.
Apart from this, facial recognition is the wettest dream of any would-be totalitarian state (and here I explicitly mean the US, the EU and China). The ability to snap a picture of people at a demonstration and let google tag every single one of them and associate it with their meta (adress etc) opens up a whole new world of possible ways to oppress people. Of course, it is all poised as a new exciting way to tag your friends without having to do all the dirty work yourself. The question is - do you need to know who the strangers in your pictures are? Even more importantly - SHOULD you know?
Google is a false front for the "no such agency" , which has a mission to gather data on every man, woman, and child in the US and any other countries of interest.
What is most amusing is that some of you are so damned stupid you are unwittingly cooperating.
Have a nice day, and don't forget they are watching ..................
Today I procrastinate. Tomorrow I start giving names to all the pictures of donkey rear-ends.
This is why I have been taking pictures at the zoo and tagging all of the monkey pictures with "president@whihouse.gov".
With this kind of information it is possible that, one day, the streets will have advertisements that change after they identify the person that looks at it, using facial recognition.
And this is the most harmless application I can think of.There are many others which are must less benign.
This will be the last step of the this trend in which we loose completly our privacy.
If you're offended by being tagged in photos belonging to others, you're in a tough spot. You can't remove the tags from other people's photos, but perhaps you can add a little poison to Google's database. Start by classifying your face in your Picassa albums, and put either an interesting name or a nice email address on them. Put your real name on some, but with the email address of a Nigerian prince looking for a financial partner or the vendor of anatomical-enhancement pills. Put a fake name on the others, and use the email address of a different scammer. So the pictures will have either your real name and one false email, or the false name with another false email.
Me? I don't use Picassa, but if I find any pictures of me (by name) in Google (with email address), I'll have to adopt some protective measures. Actually, maybe I'll start a Picassa album just as a precautionary step.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Email addresses aren't always unique. I know husband and wife couples that share one email address.
Can't you use something like firstname.lastname@your-google-id.gmail.com to tag your photos? If you do that, then Google will only know that the person who has the given first and last name is the one that is known by you. It doesn't correlate with another person with the same first and last name known by someone else.
Or simply firstname.lastname@example.com could cause many false correlation when two different people have the same first and last names. This also thwarts attempts to do data mining.
I once had a signature.
Being in public is the only practical (and logistical) way to accomplish many day-to-day tasks. It is, for all intents and purposes, a requirement, not an option. This requirement, however, does not impart any kind of permission, invitation, or other level of participation in order to record or track what it is I or anyone else is doing. Even in public, people have the right to be left alone.
Man, fear really is the mind killer.
This has got to be one of the lamest articles ever on Slashdot; the only thing more lame than the post itself is all the overblown, over-reaction to it.
Do any of you know ... *normal* people? They don't care if their friends know about their photos. In fact, they *want* to share their photos with friends; that's why they upload them by the millions to MySpace/Facebook. All that Google is doing is making it easier for people to do what they want to do. If those people have to give up some privacy to get the advantage of all the useful online enhancements Google can add by doing so, they will all *happily* do so ... even if you were to sit them all down and carefully explain all of the details of and risks associated with the privacy they are losing. They won't care.
Real privacy issues come from users not understanding what they are giving away. But when you are trying to share your photos out to your friends and family, a tool that associates their email address with the pictures they are in is a useful service, not something to fear.
The government can somewhat track us, but we can track everybody in the government too.
So what? You'll end up in a database and your name goes through 100 servers a day, but we know where politicians are on a 24/7 basis.
This is not a book. When politicians decide (if they do that) to fsck with us we can fsck back twice as hard. "You may stop me, but you can't stop us all" stuff.
Nothing to worry about...
Here be signatures
This requirement, however, does not impart any kind of permission, invitation, or other level of participation in order to record or track what it is I or anyone else is doing.
Yes, it does. And always has.
Cops don't need a warrant to follow you around, for example, and neither does anyone else.
Even in public, people have the right to be left alone.
Left alone, yes. Left unobserved, no.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Amazon.com (and other companies that deliver, of course) and working remotely. Seems like the privacy crowd really doesn't have to 'be in public' if they don't want to.
Even in public, people have the right to be left alone.
Including the people you are being in front of. If you don't want them to see you doing it, don't force them.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Another take on Picasa facial recognition: http://dcpatton.com/2008/10/16/picasaweb-facial-recognition/ Both IPhoto let you geotag your photos as well.
as John Conner.
Right. And what will they pay their mortgage with? Their misplaced faith in humanity?
Yes, it does. And always has.
Cops don't need a warrant to follow you around, for example, and neither does anyone else.
No, it hasn't. The reason it hasn't is that it has been practically and technically infeasible. However, with CCTV, data mining, other means of technical surveillance, and companies willing to sell customer information at the drop of a hat, the playing field has become far too one-sided. Without this technology, cops can't follow me around because it simply isn't practical (unless there is probable cause to believe that I either have, or am about to, commit a serious crime). Without the recent advances in technology, I wouldn't have had to worry about my picture inadvertently appearing on someone's google account, much less that I had been identified. I also wouldn't have to worry about being profiled based on all kinds of information that was once relatively private. Do you get it now, or should I go on?
... then you should try this (replace with your name of course).
http://images.google.com/images?q=your+name