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Face Recognition Tech Pushes Legal Boundaries
An anonymous reader writes: As face recognition software becomes more capable, companies and governments are coming up with new ways to use it. Microsoft has already patented a Minority Report-style personalized billboard, and loss prevention departments in big stores are rolling out systems to "pre-identify" shoplifters. But this rush to implement the technology runs afoul of privacy laws in at least two U.S. states: Illinois and Texas forbid the use of face recognition software without "informed consent" from the target. Facebook is the target of a recent lawsuit in Illinois over this exact issue; it's likely to test the strength of such a law. "Facebook and Google use facial recognition to detect when a user appears in a photograph and to suggest that he or she be tagged. Facebook calls this "Tag Suggestions" ... With the boom in personalized advertising technology, a facial recognition database of its users is likely very, very valuable to Facebook. ... Eager to extract that value, Facebook signed users up by default when it introduced Tag Suggestions in 2011. This meant that Facebook calculated faceprints for every user who didn't take the steps to opt out." If Facebook loses and citizens start pushing for similar laws in other states, it could keep our activities in public relatively anonymous for a bit longer.
Upload to Facebook a whole heap of random pictures of people (actors, the famous etc) or all kinds and tag the lot as yourself. Make yourself appear to be a mashup of every possible gender/race/age and physical appearance. So any photos of yourself that do get tagged are drowned in a pool of misinformation.
Scary "TERRORISM!" scenario aside, you don't have an expectation of privacy when you walk down the street. You can't tell someone that he can't take a photo of you walking down the street (or run that photo through a facial recognition algorithm) because it violates your privacy. Now, if you have facial recognition being forced on you in your own house, that might be an issue.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I don't have any social media accounts
oh you do, you just haven't filled in the form yourself,
see, you might not visit social media but your friends do, and they will tag you at will, happily upload your phone number from their contact list when they install that "app", you better believe that Facebook have everything except your IP address.
i had a CEO ask me why his name was coming up in google searches as listed at Facebook when he hadn't signed up, it was because people had taken photos of him at social events and then other friends had tagged him, Facebook created a "ghost" profile of him, the only way he could prevent it was to sign-up and then lock it down,
what do you think 5,000 150 grand programmers with PHDs at FB HQ do ? its not fixing bugs, they are trying to identify you, every single day they get closer.