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Face Recognition App Taking Russia By Storm May Bring End To Public Anonymity (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Anonymity in public could soon become a thing of the past. A service called FindFace allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities with 70% reliability. It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts. In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks. In the short time since the launch, FindFace has amassed 500,000 users and processed nearly 3m searches.The Newsweek wrote about this app last month. The publication reported on an abuse of the app in which porn stars and sex workers were targeted. Some wanted to use FindFace for the purpose of "outing" these sex workers to their families and social media contacts.
Something shady like visiting a bar, going to a drunken dorm blowout, picking up some (legal) weed or (legal) porn, visiting the "wrong" political rally, and so on. It's one thing if you bump into a colleague in the dodgy rubber fetish section at the videostore, it's quite another if your current and future friends, family, employers, interested law enforcement officers can place you there until the end of time.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
If one of them is married, though, there's a third, non-consenting adult involved, who deserves to know - and if there are people who feel like exposing this kind of thing,
Then those people need to mind their own god damn business. Society only works when there is a certain level of anonymity and trust in your fellow strangers. If we can't leave our houses and do the things that are human nature (no matter how much you may disagree with them) without fear of someone willfully destroying your life, then we no longer live in a free society. You might as well go back in time and live in East Germany if you want your neighbors all up in your shit, having to watch everything you say or do. Only this is scarier...the people doing it willingly, without the Stasi pulling the strings? No thanks.
It's coming. Employers think you're suspicious (or even a psychopath) if you aren't posting on Facebook every day...