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.'

Comments

Re:Google decided against this.

[rwa2]

This is why Google shelved their version of this tech. The implications were too big.

I don't know... I fed my pr0n directory to Picasa's face recognition, and the results were pretty awesome.

Re:Google decided against this.

[AliasMarlowe]

This is why Google shelved their version of this tech. The implications were too big.

I don't know... I fed my pr0n directory to Picasa's face recognition, and the results were pretty awesome.

You mean there are people with noses shaped like... that?

Re:For example, this is dangerous for women

[HangingChad]

I am a good looking female.

On Slashdot? Are you lost?