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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
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.
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
Time to start dressing like The Stig again.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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.
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* !!!
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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.
Not if you live in new york city. Wearing a mask is a crime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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