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.

Comments

Re:Service

[aicrules]

Or just leave both of them alone if they are both consenting adults. Just because I wouldn't be one or use one doesn't mean I need to go "exposing" those that do.

Re:A Change in Society

[Jason Levine]

People who need to maintain their "reputation" will need to be even more self-censoring than they were before. This will create a world(and it is already going this way) where anything you say, or do, any way you react to something, body language, facial expression, what videos you watch, books you read, music you listen to, things you post, etc will be recorded, analyzed and codified.

Or people will learn to self-moderate their online interactions the same way they self-moderate public face-to-face interactions. When I post something online, I think "Would I say this to a room filled with my wife, parents, friends, relatives, boss, co-workers, and (depending on the topic) my children?" If the answer is "No", I don't post it. If the answer is "yes", I go ahead and post it. Too many people will post a ten paragraph screed against their coworkers on Facebook and then act surprised when their boss finds it.