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."
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
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.
Bah, this is nothing. Just wait until someone comes up with a way to turn facial characteristics into a string, which can be stored into a database. That would let the system to automatically deduce the likely identity of everyone on each picture by cross-correlation with social networks and such. And even if they can't get your name, they'll still be able to get that you're a close friend or family member of unnamed persons X and Y, who in turn are friends with some other, named persons.
Advancing AI means that total information awareness is coming. It's just a matter of time before you can't take a shit without Google noticing. Skynet was a fuzzy kitten compared to what will happen...
Ironically enough, the same tool could be extremely valuable to economists and planners of all kind, giving detailed statistical information about the habits and movement of humans. It's only the control freak league which makes it a threat. Truly a modern-day Tree of Knowledge...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
...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.)
It's not their dislike that they are exploiting, it's their like.
It amazes me that people use Google services at all considering their retention policy..."FOREVER." But people flock to Google, use their browser and other apps and without question, some of it is really good and really useful. But it isn't hard to see how it can be exploited and this face tagging thing is certainly one of them.
"Hey, you don't know me but I got your spam-target email address from google face search. I know you didn't submit your own information but I saw your family vacation photos and then the ones your boyfriend took of you... both are very nice!"
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.
By introducing a depression, rioting society and fearful rulers to an argument you can make almost anything look bad. Yes, under such circumstances this technology could be abused by government or other enemies.
But people have been succesfully identified by malicious parties for ever. If you want true individual privacy we should go back to pre-Sovjet, no, pre-Nazi, no, pre-Napoleon times. And even in those times, without a surname, just one friend, co-worker, acquaintance or shop keeper would be sufficient to rat you out to the authorities.
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...)
Google itself, and other companies, may have the best of intentions and never willingly violate your privacy. At the same time, the NSA, tapped into the major Internet routers as they are already and probably with unlimited access to services like ChoicePoint, could be watching everything we do on Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, SMS texting, mobile location, AIM, Yahoo, QQ, and every other significant networking system, as well as banking and debit/credit transactions. The companies themselves do not need to help those who would desire to spy on us. We WILL be watched, just as people out on the street or local grocery watch you as you pass by and many cameras record you every day. The question becomes when has it all gone too far. What we have to do is be vigilant, keep an eye on the courts, and make sure the legislators are protecting our privacy with appropriate laws.
Ouch! The truth hurts!