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Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying
oker sends this quote from The Atlantic:
"With Carnegie Mellon's cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person's online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it's a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities. ... '[C]onceptually, the goal of Experiment 3 was to show that it is possible to start from an anonymous face in the street, and end up with very sensitive information about that person, in a process of data "accretion." In the context of our experiment, it is this blending of online and offline data — made possible by the convergence of face recognition, social networks, data mining, and cloud computing — that we refer to as augmented reality.'
This is why Google shelved their version of this tech. The implications were too big.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
It was only a matter of time. This has been one of the most sought after anti-terrorism tools of the last 10 years. Imagine the security implications! I'd be shocked if NSA didn't already have a version of this operational 5 years ago.
I already don't like it.
Look, I am not a paranoid man. I am perfectly willing to give out private and personal information - for a reasonable fee.
I give out private information to my bank all the time. In exchange, I get financial services.
Facebook offers - a) a blog, b) email, c) games, d) convenient log in
The first 3 are available for free elsewhere, the last is not worth much.
I'm not paranoid, I'm just not cheap. And Facebook is asking way way too much for the minimal services it provides.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It's just seems more...electrifying.
This is why I always use a picture like this for any online public pics.
Note that the pic in question (a) does not show a face clearly and (b) may or may not be me.
And what is the error rate when you get a few million people into the database? It's all well and good to say we can identify who someone is against a population of a few dozen, or a couple hundred, but give it all the people in New York City to churn through and I somehow doubt that your false identification rate will be 0.
My pics on a certain dating site don't show my face!
The first real-world, publicly available use of this will be an app that lets you:
1. Take a picture of someone with your smart phone
2. Find naked pictures of this person online
BRB, heading to the local college campus...
Think about how much raw power computers have today, and how for the most part we are just using that for word processing/email/internet/music/video. This is just an example of how to utilize this power. Its all about software now, this is just another example of how databases will continue to interact more and more. There are great possibilities for how this can be used (and horrible options as well) but think about medicine being able to identify a John Doe who is brought into the Emergency Department, or your home security system identifying who is knocking at the door. And of course, this technology is not new, its just finally coming out for public usage.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
when you get an anonymous email telling you you have a booger hanging on the end of a long nose hair
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There was once a time that startrek predicted future technology. CSI is now doing it. And it is far less benevolent than the cell phone and portable medical diagnostic devices.
Time to start dressing like The Stig again.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Might be a good time to take up theatrical masking as a hobby?
This is why Google shelved their version of this tech. The implications were too big.
Having studied this in college and witnessed many failed implementations of it I casually ask: Where are the recall rates (see also sensitivity and specificity) of these experiments?
Because when I read the articles, I found this instead of hard numbers:
Q. Are these results scalable?
The capabilities of automated face recognition *today* are still limited - but keep improving. Although our studies were completed in the "wild" (that is, with real social networks profiles data, and webcam shots taken in public, and so forth), they are nevertheless the output of a controlled (set of) experiment(s). The results of a controlled experiment do not necessarily translate to reality with the same level of accuracy. However, considering the technological trends in cloud computing, face recognition accuracy, and online self-disclosures, it is hard not to conclude that what today we presented as a proof-of-concept in our study, tomorrow may become as common as everyday's text-based search engine queries.
How you want to decide Google passed on continuing down this road is up to you. Frankly, I would surmise that the type I and type II errors become woefully problematic when applied to an entire population. Facial recognition is not there yet, not until I see some hard numbers that convince me the error rate is low enough. Right now I bet if you were to snap pictures of 10,000 people, you would incorrectly classify at least 100 of them leading to wasted time, violated rights and wasted opportunity (depending on the misclassification).
My work here is dung.
Of course, they just managed to link to *someone* ... did they then ask the person to confirm if they were correct?
I have a LinkedIn page, but without a picture. My twin brother on the other hand, uses Facebook, while I don't. (I'm rather sensitive about my info being out there, after having a stalker during undergrad) So, it's entirely possible that they would've gotten information from my face ... but unlikely that it'd have been my information
In this case, the error might still lead them to me, as my brother would recognize me if they showed him the picture ... but how many other incorrect matches might there have been? Just getting *a* match is not the same as getting the *correct* match.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
It would be AWESOME if this causes masks to become fashionable. How cool would that be?
As always, the completely innocent, not socially related to anybody not completely innocent, totally conformant with local and regional cultural and lifestyle standards, possessing enough money to not be of interest to debt collectors; but not so much as to be of interest to marketers, not being followed by any stalkers/vindictive exes/etc., people have Absolutely Nothing To Fear!
Fucking luddites. Go tighten your tinfoil hats.
Burkas for *EVERYONE* !!!
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
you did
it's funny that the tech industry holds some of the most privacy-concerned individuals, yet all their dedication to their craft has done is provide the most privacy destroying entity ever to exist
privacy is dead as a doorknob. just forget about the concept. really, you needn't bother about privacy anymore, it's a nonstarter in today's world. big brother? try little brother: every joe shmoe with a smart phone with a camera has more power than the NSA, KGB, MI6, MSS: those guys are amateur hour
i'm not saying it's wrong, i'm not saying it's right. i'm just saying it's the simple truth of the matter, right or wrong: privacy is dead. acceptance is your only option now. you simply can't fight this
and government didn't kill it, you paranoid schizophrenic goons
your technolust did
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They say the false accept rate is .001, or one in a thousand. That is, they can extract about 10 bits of information from a picture. From those 10 bits they claim to get the SSN? Or, they have the picture of a person, and need to identify them in a sample of a million people, they will get back 1000 possible matches.
The complaints about privacy seem greatly overblown. In essence they are saying that if you post a picture with your name, and then another picture without your name, someone with a million dollars of software might recognize the similarities. Of course they might without the computer too. This is just another in the long line of "security" scares which presume that items of public knowledge such as your appearance, name, DOB and SSN can be turned into a secret passwords after 40 years of being public knowledge. The security experts should be spending their time convincing banks not to pretend an SSN is a secret, rather than enabling them by agitating for legislation to make it so.
Enhance. Enhance.... Enhance.
If we take the technology from CSI, we will be able to use our Motorola razr's to figure out the identity of any one in any seat in a sports arena from across the stadium.
Imagine the possibilities!
The implications of this look big enough to concern even the apathetic, non-technical majority. Perhaps this will finally motivate the long-needed policy reform on privacy in the digital age.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
This isn't going away. The only real answer is to clog the information channels about you with what you actually want the world to know.
Does this pose a problem for, say, pseudonym online dating? Yep. Unless you're willing to drop the pseudonym and link out to your dating profile, alongside your work profile, your hobby blog. It's time to stop pretending that we can post to Facebook and compartmentalize it -- the service providers do not want to do this, and increasingly are unable to provide this even if we do.
So now I can trace my date to see wether she ever did a porno ?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Wasn't this tech used in a William Gibson book by an abusive boyfriend to find his ex who appeared in the background of a photo taken at a party in a different city? Anyone remember the book? It was a recent one. This will be automatic and available to everyone in a few years I figure.
You mean to tell me that 98% accuracy when trying to spot terrorists in airports isn't good enough? That's only 200,000 false positives per year for a typical airport.
How about a reflection off a water droplet on a handrail at that stadium? I love this video: Red Dwarf CSI Spoof
They've been doing this on shows like CSI and NCIS for years. :) You mean... they were just making it up? Wow. My faith in Hollywood's technical advisers is shattered forever.
I am a good looking female. When I was a waitress I had a stalker at my workplace. Because the schedule was posted in view-- not a clear view, but view enough for him to find an opportunity to read it without looking suspicious-- he consistently showed up during work hours and tried to follow me home. I didn't have a car, so I walked home alone in the middle of the night; I worked 3rd shift at a 24-hour diner. This might seem like a poor choice, but I desperately needed a job. With this technology a stranger could find out who I am through a picture of me taken with his cellphone. This is also dangerous for people in the sex industry who are already way more vulnerable to stalking than I was walking home from 3rds at a diner. I'm now doing amateur porn-- difficult to resist when it earns an unskilled laborer a grownup sized income for part time hours-- but my image is everywhere online.
This isn't the Brave New World everyone's always been afraid of. If you wanted to know someone's identity in the past (or present), you just ask around. You can find out almost anything about anyone who hasn't been entirely private their whole lives. It's been this way for millenia. Why else do "Have you seen this person?" posters work?
In this instance, you're just taking the same information and making it more easily accessible. Sure, anyone can see your public photos you've posted online by searching for you with image recognition. Except, they could've done that exact same thing before by asking someone who you are.
Granted, it's slightly more creepy now. But it's not like they'll be able to see your private pictures. You didn't share your *private* pictures publicly, did you? Oh, well in that case, yeah. You're screwed.
You mean to tell me that 98% accuracy when trying to spot terrorists in airports isn't good enough? That's only 200,000 false positives per year for a typical airport.
Perhaps the false positives at airports are OK? Rather than randomly choosing people for more attentive searchers, and the occasional grandma to give the facade of fairness and not profiling, we could focus on the 2% who are higher probability. Of course 2% are unfairly inconvenienced but isn't that better than 100% unfairly inconvenienced? Clearly a negative/negative decision.
Of course this is all academic and falls apart if the false negatives are at a non-trivial level.
There are companies actually selling access to large stocks of video surveillance. Imagine combining facial recognition software with the video from thousands of security cameras. You could do all kinds of scary things.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
nt
May as well embrace it.
Because terrorists all have facebook accounts? I would assume most of them have very little online presence, pictorially anyway.
Oddly whenever a new terrorist is discovered and remains at large law enforcement and the mass media seem to be able to come up with a facial photo. Perhaps there are sources of photos other than facebook, in particular sources available to government agencies. DMV photo, passport photo, school photos, team photos, etc.
The experiment is facebook centric because it is an academic project that needs to stick to info made public by the individual to avoid privacy issues.
This is only the beginning of the end of privacy. It will not be too much longer before it will be possible to start with a picture and actually locate the person in real life. The general trend is for the real world to become increasingly accessible from the virtual (online) world as real-time data. The question is whether that data will be available to only a few privileged people or institutions, or available to everyone. In the former case, Big Brother (on steroids!) is the outcome. In the latter case, there is at least the possibility that new social norms will emerge, in which people afford each other some privacy in exchange for their own. When you may be watched while watching someone else (particularly the person you're watching), you may think twice about it.
All that will happen in a truly transparent society is that people will take responsibility for their actions. The truth will set us free is more than a trivial statement. People of faith normally believe that God sees all of their actions and even their thoughts. A society in which life is transparent just might be wonderful. Crime would vanish. Cheating and lying would vanish. This technology is only a step along the path to a truly open society.
the importance of NOT being seen
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Looks like the time for a Scramble Suit like in A Scanner Darkly. I so wish I had one of those.
I really though this article was going to be about the new show, "Person of Interest" with Michael Emerson and Jim Caviezel.
"We are happy to announce that Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition has been acquired by Google!"
http://www.pittpatt.com/
Technological advance is the purview of many, not only technophiles, academics, or governments. Technology to monitor and correlate just advances. Other than that, I agree with you.
More data goes online every day, even aside from what we put there ourselves, data sourced a myriad ways, ways multiplying constantly. It's a(n ever more) digital life.
There's no pulling the plug. There's only learning to cope. It's just fact that our lives, the lives of everyone, grow ever more transparent.
So, how will we adjust?
Just wait until you no longer respond to your name because every third poster or shop you pass calls out to you directly for your attention. Then, maybe, we'll realize we've erred. "Joey! HURRY! Over here! It's about your daughter, Sheila! ... She would LOVE these shoes!". If that's too far into the near future for you, imagine arming a Carnie with this tool today.
Nobody I know is stupid enough to associate their face with an online identity. That's as dumb as taping your driver's license to your car window facing out and nobody with an IQ over 80 does it. The only people who need to worry about this are people who have posted a picture of themselves and their names online.
FTA:
I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
It's just too much of a binary approach to the matter; either you accept being part of the network and are fine or you choose not to join and are hiding something. The fact is that there are grey areas on this matter; It's not often that there's something I don't want anyone to know, but there are thousands of things I don't want some people to know.
Likewise, I don't think it's entirely appropriate to have you automatically opted in. Suddenly, everyone is a part of a network whether they want to be or not, and that's really problematic when the general response to concerns over the privacy of social networks is "Don't join." What do you do when that's no longer an option?
Then why on earth didn't they just say "the Internet"?!? Are we really going to see the term "cloud" replace "Internet"?
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
FedBizOpps: https://www.fbo.gov/
To be honest, I don't like this either but I think it's inevitable. These things are happening because it's finally become easy enough. It's only going to become easier.
I have a bigger problem with the idea that someone can get my SSN and do anything with it. It's used as a key to my financial identity and to get credit in my name, but it is NOT an authenticator. Knowing it doesn't prove you're me. Knowing it shouldn't be enough to convince some company to give you things and charge an account for them that's linked to me.
As for stalkers, yes that's a real risk, but perhaps we should stop letting dangerous people play with the rest of us. This whole nice, shiny society thing we've built? It doesn't have to include the people who try to tear it down.
Within a population of 1M there are 10,000 terrorists. Within that, 2% of terrorists will not be recognized. 200 terrorists are allowed to fly. Boom!
But, if terrorists know it is unlikely they can get through security, there will be much fewer of them likely to try. If a suicide bomber has only a 2% chance of success, there is almost no-one willing to take that chance rather than doing something else.
So yes there are 10,000 terrorists - but only say 10 of those willing to try something with those odds. And each of the 10 has a 98% chance of failure (independent trials,increasing the number does not increase chances for success) , not to mention the chance of failure from passengers stopping them...
This is I think also why we have not seen any successful airplane attacks today. Yes our security is mostly "security theater" but all you need is an imposing looking edifice of security, no matter how cracked behind the scenes, and you cut out a lot of potential attackers unwilling to run the gauntlet for a low chance of success. And as noted the few that ddi get through had passengers put a lid on the efforts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you wreck even three hundred lives because your technology isn't accurate enough, that's three hundred too many.
That statement is correct, yet you have slanted it the wrong way.
You seem to think the worse error is in false positives. But all that happens is that the person would be selected for extra screening. How is that "wrecking" someone's life?
Compare that to not trying anything and letting someone take down a place with a few hundred people. Would you not admit that people who die on a place are substantially worse off than people who had to have someone swab luggage?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
perfect for that augmented reality app that shows "single" or "married" above peoples heads as you point your phone at them.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Such as blow themselves up at the airport if they're caught?
Also, suicide bombers are rarely repeat offenders so I don't really see how facial recognition would help there. Unless, of course, the idea is to recognize all potential threats - such as Muslims and Arabs and people who support them or people who feel sympathy for them or people who criticize this kind of idea on a website, because clearly the only reason why you might find computerized surveillance of your every move unnerving is because you have something to hide, which makes you bad.
The very summary itself mentioned automatically identifying random passing pedestrians and checking their background. I don't want to be digitally stalked at every waking hour.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Hiding your face in public? Obvious terrerist is obvious. [Bang]
What about when you include Facebook's knowledge of your relationships into the equation. Along with gps data from your photo's to know where you hang out and info on where you shop will increase the accuracy considerably.
I doubt Google has given up on this either.. you can still search for pictures including faces and if they are scanning photo's for faces then they certainly aren't throwing out the other 50 bits of info. They'll be ready to mix in the social graph as well... or sell the info to others.
I wonder if the name has been trademarked...
I... (gasp)... just wanted to (god this hurts) take a survey...
It's about lighting conditions between your place of employment and your place of residence.
Mind calling 911 now?
Or maybe the computer will overheat and spit out "doesn't compute"
If a false positive gets removed from an airplane, cuffed, locked into a cell, strip-searched and interrogated before finally being determined to be a false positive and released
Come on. That was from a set of "apparently" middle eastern people. one of the behaving strangely while actually ON a plane.
Sure she didn't come on with them, but the whole arrangement ended up looking odd, and someone complained. That likelihood is to my mind equal (or less likely) to actually being blown up by a terrorist, and again she didn't die, she's still alive and only suffered minor embarrassment. If that had been me I would have understood; I've done odd things that made security people question me before and understood from their standpoint why they are asking questions.
In real life matching on this face profiler will only get you extra screening or observation. Obviously they are not going to be cuffing and strip-searching every match. You are totally blowing the whole thing out of proportion, and attempting to limit use of a technology that can ACTUALLY improved security as opposed to making every person on earth remove shoes in an airport.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wow, I've been calling Slashdot "yesterday's news" for a while, but news that is a month old? That is pathetic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFlPW81SJ10
Walk past an ad....
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
This is definitely dangerous. Your employees might find out that you fly to Vegas on weekends to be a magician's assistant, or you might discover that somewhere, someone who looks exactly like you is living a much more exciting life competing in rodeos.
Or people and interest groups could stalk you, tracking your every movement, and privacy and secrecy would be a thing of the past.
Also, suicide bombers are rarely repeat offenders so I don't really see how facial recognition would help there.
OMFG, THANK YOU!
I mean, really. This is the true crux of why this sill face recognition is useless. Terrorist train newbies off of the street and throw them into the wild for a ONE time mission. How is face recognition going to catch someone its never seen before???
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
suicide bombers are rarely repeat offenders
Rarely?
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to criminals.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
My vision is augmented.
Achmed the Dead Terrorist.