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 Google finally knows everything there is to know about each of us, the government will be able to save the money it would have had to spend on ID cards. Google can issue them for free, relying on advertiser income from selling the info. Savings! Lower taxes!
If they get together with Amazon, we can have little iDentikindle cards with tasteful text ads beside our photos. Maybe the content could be matched with our profession or stage of life...
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?
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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.
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.
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.
... 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
...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.)
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...)