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Facebook Will Soon Be Able To ID You In Any Photo
sciencehabit writes Appear in a photo taken at a protest march, a gay bar, or an abortion clinic, and your friends might recognize you. But a machine probably won't — at least for now. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you, has trained on dozens of photos of your face, and has high-quality images to examine, your anonymity is safe. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random, uncaptioned photos. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the largest collection of personal photographs in the world, the technology for doing all that is beginning to blossom.
No problem. You see that nice girl in the street, take pic and immediately FB gives you her address and phone number. Cool. The next day you step on the foot of this unsympathetic guy in the train. He takes a pic of you and during the week-end your house is burned to the ground. Everybody knows everyone, that's great!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The possibility is neat technologically, but do we want to put up with the consequences?
There. I fixed it for you.
The possibility is neat technologically, but do *they* care about the consequences when can get a profit?
Here's a suggestion you may not have considered.
Your "secret" life? Don't post it to social media.
So because someone is socially different they have to forego socializing and connecting with others?
One good thing about the internet is that it allows people to be who they really want to be - by actions, words, and accomplishments - without it threatening their personal welfare. One bad thing about the internet is that it allows many people to put undue pressure on the few who stand out.
If Facebook bridges that gap, so that our anonymous personae are always connected to our real selves, then we all become subject to enormous societal pressure. It'll be the equivalent of the "old boys club" everywhere and in everything we do. You mist be the right type, have the right behaviour or you won't succeed.
It will be impossible for (for example) a secret cross-dresser to hold down a job. I know lots of people in the scene who would absolutely be fired if their employers found out, and they take great pains to keep their private lives separate from their public ones. I know people who play LARP who are in the same boat; for example, a Connecticut supreme court judge and at least 2 policemen.
One only needs to go back 30 years (some of us can actually do that) and note how society dealt with homosexuals, non-violent deviancy, even communism and long hair. Even further back was how we (the US) dealt with the Japanese, although Islamics are probably in that position right now. If someone wanted to be heard without being identified as Islamic, shouldn't they be allowed to do that?
On the flip side, is it possible to create a program that replaces faces in images with other faces? If such a program existed, and if there was enough interest we might create a movement to make facial recognition unreliable. Sort of like how "AdBlock" extensions fought against advertizing, we could have a Facebook app that grabs random faces off of other pictures and pastes them into the "gay bar" image mentioned in the summary.
This is a troubling development. I'm not a big fan of government regulation, but I think there's a clear need for delineating the privacy of people who *want* to keep themselves private.
People who do not have an account shouldn't have to deal with Facebook's particular brand of evil.
If the government asked people to do what Facebook asks, there'd be another revolution. But offer them minor services that they could do themselves and they willingly throw away everything Thomas Jefferson fought so hard to give them.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
facebook probably can't generate sufficient profits off an activity like this. since their IPO they have essentially been squandering equity in all directions, including this one, to chase potential revenue. their growth targets are probably impossible (by a factor of 10 or more) without a massive change in revenue model. And so they chase whats app, flying drones, and spy tech. Its an impossible, hilarious, and economically inefficient circus, that is now playing out for the second time in 20 years, with mostly the same people involved. And these are the prized achievements of a system for which most here even express ideological preference.
A while back, I read an article about this. Someone suggested "database poisoning".
It sounds illegal but I am not so sure. All that everyone needs to do is to tag other people as you and vice versa. If enough people did that, it would mess up such a system.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.