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

Google decided against this.

[605dave]

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

Re:But Facebook...

[killmenow]

pictures of other people (often taken without their permission)

One of the reasons I have a facebook account is so I can untag photos others say are me.

98% Accurate!

[bigtrike]

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.

For example, this is dangerous for women

[aestheticpriest]

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.

Re:Where Are the Recall Rates?

[Joce640k]

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.

I dunno. I bet if you combine the location of a photo with what Google knows about where you live/hang out the results would be pretty good.