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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.
You uploaded all the photos and did all the tagging they needed for this yourself, didn't you?
Postgrad students at our faculty were developing face-recognition stuff that can easily and percisely tag almost all photos we were able to stuff in it. In microseconds. I guess it would be really weird if facebook didn't have this technology available long time ago (it isn't really that hard either).
And I don't believe the article either. At least not for practical purposes. Show me the numbers for misses and false positives please.
With two Facebook accounts (the real and my secret life). Will anyone now be able to identify me and do things like blackmail or slander me?
Sometimes Zuckerberg doesn't understand the boundary between "being able to do something" and "whether you should do it." I wonder if he will be pleased if I stood outside his house and recorded his activities and followed him everywhere to post his whereabouts online? What if I went through his bin and post pictures of that?
I'd like to be able to ask Facebook:
"Out of all the hundreds of millions of Facebook users, which ones look the most like me?"
Wouldn't that be cool?
So, that mean the NSA has been able to do this for a decade or so?
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?
It can't even find me in my own photos.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You should NEVER post pictures of your face on the internet, not even "just for" restricted groups of friends. Because someone is ALWAYS there selling you out. Social, dating, employment... all these types of sites. NEVER POST YOUR FACE. There is absolutely no good reason to post your face on the internet. Social... your friends and family already know what you look like. Dating... if people are shopping for looks you will not find love. Employment... that's illegal.
Too bad you SUCKERS bought the privacy policy BS. Everyone is whoring you out. HAHA!
Now go delete all your stupid photos and use your damn brain the next time.
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.
but Google have also recently taken to autotagging faces in photos you upload to G+.
Incidentally, a 2013 report from the ITC says that you are 6 times more likely to have your bank account emptied by an identity thief via data taken from Facebook than you are to be the victim of a house burglary. http://blog.identitytheftcounc...
I hate it when I'm right. AGAIN.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Facebook already had ass recognition up and running. Whenever I try to post this picture, http://i.imgur.com/4FcyrcO.jpg , Facebook will remove it automatically and instantly.
Could it be that this is indicating society has to evolve, allowing more freedom of personal expression rather than trying to keep the old ways?
"Shelly Sxxxxxx was tagged in Lisa xxxxxx Xxx's photos." came across that a few days ago.
Shelly is one of few people in my friends list, she and her sons were part of the same COD4 clan as I was.
Yes, I had to join facebook to become involved with my family, took 182 edits to my HOSTS file just to get in.
Even worst, most photos are done with smartphones, whose default settings ( which most people do not touch) tag the photos with time and location.
Imagine some over ambitious prosecutor ( are there any other kind?) going on a fishing expedition using these photos.
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
lead in the first graf of this post: "a protest march, a gay bar, or an abortion clinic" like those are automagically bad things?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Not only have they been doing this for decades, part of the leaks reveal they've been intercepting messaging systems to get the photos. It's a program called Optic Nerve (started in 2008):
"One document even likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals."
"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face," it reads. "The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo
Here this is GCHQ intercepting everyones Yahoo webcams, but all of the current crop of messaging apps will all be being grabbed. Do you really think that free messaging app can pay for all those servers by selling a few stickers?
So you can pretty much assume that NSA pays for feeds to all your Line, Whatsapp, Viber etc. messaging, and its worth remembering those apps can turn on the camera and mic any time they want. Once you grant an app permission on Android, its in charge.
There's no filtering here, its everyone stupid enough to have a smartphone with an open camera and one of the suspect apps. On the plus side, only senior spys are allowed to watch you wank. The ordinary ones can only look at your teenage daughters tits.
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.
I guess now, short of plastic surgery every other day, there is nothing standing in the way of a totalitarian state - everywhere.
Nothing you do out side of your home is private and anonymous. Every thing you say or do will can be used against you.
Because, you know, no one wants/is able to police the police.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
This keeps coming up, every time someone gets a better algorithm for doing the recognition. The actual problem is that it won't scale , not that it's not accurate enough.
If you have 23 people in a group, and you're comparing something like their face or their birthdays, you have to do 22+21+20+...+1 = 253 comparisons to cover the group. If it's birthdays, there is a 50% probability you'll find a pair with the same birthday. If your facial recognizer is 99.7% accurate, you'll have a 50% chance of getting a false match out of this tiny group.
If you are the NSA or the German FSS, and your recognizer is only accurate 97.35 percent of the time, you'll be getting one false recognition out of about every ten people you scan. When you're looking for any one of several hundred criminals out of an airport full of people, that means you'll be constantly arresting your granny for being an Bader-Meinhoff Gang member (;-))
If you're looking for just one face, yours, and you don't care if a few times it mistakes you for Quaku Breki Kiku, it's fine. If you're trying to run a police state, or even trying to keep problem gamblers out of a casino, it a horrendous waste of your time.
--dave
I ran into this years ago, when Siemens had one of the first recognizers and the FSS tried it out in an airport in Germany. A statistician colleague eventually explained why it kept generating such obviously false matches now matter how they tweaked the program. See also the "birthday paradox" on wikipedia
davecb@spamcop.net
I resolved many years ago that I would never be myself on the net. Several years ago I added to that never to post pictures of my face to the net. I guess the next step is to never go out in public without my randomly-generated mask.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Luckily, my religion requires me to wear a mask in public, and nowadays my profound and sincere religious beliefs trump your silly laws.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Wally?
Have gnu, will travel.
Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random, uncaptioned photos.
Actually that is possible, and why are you people still using Facebook?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The question is moot, Any information gleaned is money.
This isn't new news and it shouldn't be on Slashdot. The title of "Facebook Will Soon Be Able To ID You In Any Photo" is clickbait, and "soon" was years ago. The article on "Sciencemag.org" is just a summary of a research paper by Facebook titled Deepface which was published in early 2014. https://research.facebook.com/... Additionally, this summary-story has already been on Slashdot in March of 2014, http://tech.slashdot.org/story... . I've done a lot of artwork and research involving facial recognition, but I hope that most people already realized that Facebook was doing facial recognition research.