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:For example, this is dangerous for women

[icebraining]

Yes, now besides getting raped, she can be shot too!

Re:98% Accurate!

[Pieroxy]

Let's take JFK. From Wikipedia:

In 2010, the airport handled 46,514,154 passengers

2% of that is almost a million people. Every year. Now, let's assume handling each these false positives is the work of an hour on average. That's about a million hours spent.

Let's assume a workday of 8 hours, and 250 workdays a year. That's about 2000 hours a year for an average worker. So it'll take 500 people to track these false positives at JFK.

I think it's a little unacceptable, but YMMV of course.