Slashdot Mirror
EFF: Americans May Not Know It, But Many Are In a Face Recognition Database Now
colinneagle writes "People are not going to, nor should they have to, start walking around outside with a bag over their head to avoid security cameras capturing images of them. Yet 'face recognition allows for covert, remote and mass capture and identification of images — and the photos that may end up in a database include not just a person's face but also how she is dressed and possibly whom she is with. This creates threats to free association and free expression not evident in other biometrics,' testified EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch. There are 32 states that use some form of facial recognition for DMV photos. Every day, Facebook happily slurps up and automatically scans with facial recognition software about 300 million photos that users upload to the social networking giant. 'Face recognition is here to stay, and, though many Americans may not realize it, they are already in a face recognition database,' Lynch said. In fact, when you stop to consider Facebook "at least 54% of the United States population already has a face print." Now it purchased Face.com which had 31 billion face images profiled."
Whaddaya wanna bet that there are no more than 15 billion distinct faces in that collection?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I suppose then I have nothing to worry about, since my profile pics are usually cartoons, inanimate objects, and internet memes.
TSA Agent: "Uhh, miss, you don't look anything like your photo." (holds up photo of pedobear)
Me: (triple facepalm)
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
breast recognition database?
Wrong, but that's ok we captured your face on our recognition system and are now in the process of tracking you down to tattoo "I was not first" on your forehead for easier tracking in the future.
I predict an increase in sales of hats, hoodies and any fashion item thats assists the general public in maintaining some privacy.
It'll end up like in Minority Report where the advertisements scanned people's eyes to identify and tailor ads to them. Only instead of eyes, faces will be scanned. Which is probably scarier, since scanning a face requires no special biometric equipment. It just needs an old fashioned camera and an internet connection, so that the face image can be sent to a server and processed.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Funny, I didn't notice anything about the technology only working on females.
For the longest time I didn't have a Facebook page because I am a very private person. I used an avatar instead of a photograph thinking that that would suffice.
The very next day when I logged in I saw that multiple people had uploaded photos with me in them, tagged me and added my full name after I had SPECIFICALLY asked them NOT to do so. They laughed it off and eventually got angry when they realized how pissed off I was. When I told one to remove the photos she point blank said, "No. Because you're being fucking PARANOID. This'll do you some good."
So yeah, I'm sure that I'm in there. Screw people.
http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/ Months ago the Onion came out with this news.. the EFF is just catching up to the reality of it.
People are not going to, nor should they have to, start walking around outside with a bag over their head to avoid security cameras capturing images of them.
Of course not.
What did you think Facebook was?
Seeing a woman's clothes would be just the worst thing ever about this entire photo system!
Please try again when you have a story
They all scoffed when I went to grad school to get my Master of Disguise degree.....
I mean, unless it's possible for anybody to arbitrarily bring up pictures of a person just by typing in their name, I'm really not so sure I see the point in wasting energy worrying about whether or not my own face is in such a database.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I knew my large beard would come in handy!
I can rob a bank then just shave it off!
And yes, I really do have a magnificent beard. a few more years and I'll be ready to join ZZ Top! Facial hair for the obfuscation!
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I thought most people know whether or not they have a Facebook account.
-Shawn "If the Name Don't Rhyme It Ain't Mine" Conn
Of course, it's concerning that facebook profiles, pictures of you going through customs or from a drivers license etc, are now beginning to be tapped into by the government and private sector alike.
In this case, while I think it's a cause for concern for almost every facebook user, the folks I have the most concern about are activists of various sorts.
Facebook, while famed for its use in the Arab Spring for facilitating communication between activists, hardly seems like a bastion of privacy for US citizens. The Arab spring was a bit different than the activism the US or other Western governments would like to target though -- in fact, they encouraged the uprisings. What about forms of dissent that the US or Western governments don't like?
The most prominent recent example is Occupy Wall Street, and regardless what you think about their message, it's easy to see how some subpoenas to facebook could be used to completely subvert an opposition organization. They would be able to find who these activists are without even arresting them -- they'd be able to use facial recognition software, get information on all their friends and relationships on facebook, and then track them between rallies and protests etc. with more facial recognition.
Imagine if the FBI had this ability in the 1960s to crack down on the civil rights movement?
Maybe a decentralized, p2p form of social networking will make facial recognition and tracking etc more difficult for governments and private companies in the future? Or is it already too late for most since the information is all on Facebook to stay?
Luckily US goverment facial recognition software still consists of checking histogram results. Don't apply too much fake tan, ladies, or YOU'LL end up in the lineup!
Depends who has seen you and what they want. ...
http://www.gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com/technology/gadgetbox/look-whos-stalking-10-creepiest-apps-658042
It also depends on they term "anybody" and "arbitrarily".
Get photographed near a protest - inner city financial district, military base, upset an agent provocateur
A few years later you want a good job, fly to distant family - you where just passing, going to work that day - could come back to haunt you.
Many of the databases are one way. No low cost state lawyer or court can make it all better.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The existance of the pictures and the existance of recorded footage is enough to do biometric matching, think beyond mere advertisers, they are the least of your worries.
I have have been saying it for a while to many people. Not only face recognition which is more recent while voice recognition has been around for decades.
AI systems generates reports for humans to handle. Depending on the humans handling the reports, handling techniques may vary. With well trained handlers, it works well with very few false positives. Unfortunately, well trained handlers are rare and more and more of that functionality is being made available to untrained people.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I think you're being naive, I am very careful never to post any image of myself anywhere, and yet when I go looking in Facebook I can find images of me associated with my name.
The trouble is, people who know will keep posting pictures and then identifying those pictures. They have no idea what a nightmare they're creating for themselves.
When one of my wifes friends split with her boyfriend, he dug through her facebook friends and started visiting them at home to see if his ex was staying. Suddenly they all realize what they've done with their FB data sharing, but by then its too late.
So you can say you've been careful, but can you say that about everyone you know, who knows you??
If Gimili the Dwarf ever commits a crime I'm fucked.
"Well...shit."
If you're interested in seeing a unique take on this concept, I'd suggest the novel "The Light of Other Days" by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C Clarke. It's only a minor point in the book, but it shows an interesting way the authors thought a group of people might react to constant unavoidable surveillance.
Many may feel this is a violation of privacy; however, I do believe there is no expectation of privacy in public. People should have a right to observe and record in public, as well as institutions (government, business, etc). We should all be able to do so. If it's not machines doing it, then its people anyways. So what they form a database? That comes with all sorts of issues. Who knows if it's even useful or relevant. Let people observe, collect and store given the boundray is clearly in public only.
My .02
...it's more like - there isn't a shit load we can do about it, so no one cares.
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.
The face recognition demos are nothing more than sales gimmicks. Once you add more faces to the database the misrecognition rate approaches infinity. System is somewhat able to pick high worth targets out of a crowd but worthless if your goal is mass surveillance.
There was a good article about this in The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/21558263
Few of Afghanistan's 30m people have a birth certificate, a second name or can read. Yet America's army and the Afghan government have collected digital records of more than 2.5m of them. Elsewhere such intrusions would have caused an outcry. But few Afghans, so far, have protested. American officers praise the technology as a helpful counter-insurgency tool: if opponents can be identified, they can be separated from the wider, law-abiding populace.
The data are passed on beyond Afghanistan, to America's army, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Agreements to share data exist with dozens of allied countries. American soldiers in Ghazni once described scanning a dead insurgent, then two days later getting a call from the CIA to say that his record matched someone first scanned in Iraq. Yet as the system grows, so do worries about it. It is involuntary and shrouded in secrecy. It is easy to come across Afghans who claim that they were wrongly denied foreign visas or jobs after a biometric scan flagged up their presence on some watchlist. Evidence held against them is rarely divulged, nor is it clear how they can challenge it.
“There is a vetting process to be put on a watchlist,” says Sergeant-Major Robert Haemmerle, of the American army's Afghanistan biometrics programme. “It's not just a matter of ‘I don't like this guy'. There is a deliberate policy and process to ensure that people's rights are respected, that it's not abused.”
Yet those policies and processes are kept classified by NATO and America's Defence Department. Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group based in San Francisco that keeps a watch on how digital technology encroaches on civil freedoms, also questions the quality of the data. She fears that scans done quickly in the field, or by inexperienced technicians, could lead to cases of mistaken identity.
But the more people who are scanned, the more powerful the database becomes.
But it's not like the US is scanning everyone who enters the country, and adding them to this database . . .
. . . yet.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's like some sort of race to see which pays off more; me not joining facebook or me not investing in facebook. Anyone else in the same boat as me? I put up a fake profile for a week to see who from high school got fat and ugly but I was one of the thousand or so "Rusty Shackleford" accounts (very fitting if you know the reference btw). Image search him. I don't think they'll be finding that in a crowd lol.
Face recognition software doesn't work like a barcode. Like a medical test, it has some error rate. So, even if people managed to get it down to an error rate of 1%, that means that a search will pull up 10000 people if you're living in a city of 1 million and you restrict the search to the city. Attempts by police to deploy face-based monitoring at airports and other public sites have been spectacular failures.
Some of this kind of makeup might help...
http://digitalsynopsis.com/inspiration/japanese-artist-uses-acrylic-paint-to-create-fascinating-body-art/
start walking around outside with a bag over their head to avoid security cameras capturing images of them. Yet 'face recognition allows for covert, remote and mass capture and identification of images — and the photos that may
You mean like the Muzzies do
Fighting privacy erosion is futile. There are obvious opposing interests (crime investigation, for example, but basically almost any power) and progress won't stop, making surveilance and data mining ever easier and cheaper. On the other hand, there are no robust mechanisms to prevent it. Most people do not care enough or at all (just see how they post every detail about their life on Facebook), they won't fight against this "to death".
As the database grows and the authorities start to rely on it more in finding suspect terrorists, drug dealers etcetera the more occurrences of the false positive paradox will take place, effectively increasing investigative workload.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
So you're telling me that I can upload my neighbor's photo and label him as Mickey Mouse? Cool!
Get a second head. One for public places, the other as your private "real" identity.
http://www.alhannah.com/islamic_clothing_womens/niqab.html
with tinfoil lining please
and some nice glasses/ski googles
If it had said "he", would you have made a similar post?
Nope. Because in English, "he" is the personal pronoun for males and for persons of unspecific sex. "She" is the personal pronoun for females and for personified objects such as ships and nations.
Not unless you're over fifty and have been living under a rock.
"English" has no such rule. It was formerly common practice, but is frowned upon for societal reasons these days, and pretty much nobody ever does that anymore. (The wiki claims it disappeared from textbooks after the '60s, which seems eminently plausible, but it provides no citation.)
More common today in common usage is the (grammatically dubious) use of the singular "they" and, in formal usage, the awkward construct "he or she." (There have been some revisionists who have tried to create one from scratch. Nobody paid them any mind, thankfully.) There are also style guides which suggest alternating between he or she with each paragraph when describing the hypothetical; that may be what was done in the testimony the quote in TFS was taken from.
Evidence held against them is rarely divulged, nor is it clear how they can challenge it.
And therein lies the problem. They want to know everything about us. They want to share it amongst themselves.
BUT, when we want to know how our information is being used, stored, or managed, it's a big secret. When we want to know about them, it's a secret (remember how Mark Z got pissed when people got into his FB profile).
Combine that with secret court trials and other such things and it's damn scary.
I always wear a hat and sunglasses in public places like stores for just this very reason.
Two years ago, my area was hit with a devastating series of tornadoes. The entire region was without power for a week. It was real and true disaster.
Durring that time, do you know what the number 1 & 2 priorities were for those managing the crisis?
** get power back on to the wal-marts and the gas stations (hospitals had generators and helicopters and had their shit together already)
you know why? That's where the vast majority of people in the area get their food (and in this case, also batteries, flashlights, ice, etc). ...
Like it or not, Wal-Mart is part and parcel of America's critical infrastructure.
think about that
Wal-Mart is clueless in no way shape or form.
Yeah, the thought that they're gonna be in cahoots with facebook is chilling.
See, this issue is a lot bigger than Facebook, IMO. I'm not sure you have any right to control how other people choose to display or label photographs they possess, even IF they happen to have your face in them?
So you can get angry about it all you want, but you don't really have any leverage to force someone to comply with you removal request.
Note: I'm not saying this is necessarily how it should be, but merely that it would appear to be the way it works currently. After all, photographers who you pay to photograph you (school portraits, etc. etc.) still claim a legal right to those images. They say it's illegal for you to so much as make your own duplicates of the set of prints you paid them for.