Anonymity No Longer, Privacy Settings Need To Be Revised!
Well, frankly speaking, I'm one of those self-obsessed guys who loves to take self-portraits and upload it on some social networking site in a hope to receive a few "likes" and "comments" for my handsome little face. The best part is, there are many people out there who do the same. The sad part is, they'll have to think twice before uploading any other pic on the web, once they finish reading this.
#-Link-Snipped-#
You are being 'snapped'! Image: Flickr
If by chance, your face and name is anywhere on the web, you may be identified whenever you walk the streets, not just by cops but by any random geek with a computer. That appears to be the conclusion from some new research on the bounds of privacy. For likely suspected miscreants, and people chasing them, face-recognition technology is out of fashion. Preparing for the soccer World Cup in 2014, Brazil is already testing pairs of glasses with mini-cameras provide, so that policemen wearing them could snap images of faces, and compare them with the databases of criminals. More autocratic states adore such methods- photos are snapped at checkpoints, and images checked against recent participants in protests.
During their first experiment, the researchers gathered images from 5,000 profiles of people on a popular American dating site in a particular city, most of whom used anonyms. They ran the pictures into an standardized face-recognition program that compared them with 280,000 images they had gathered by using a search engine to name Facebook profiles from the same city. They detected the identity of just over a tenth of the folk from the dating site. That might not seem like a big percentage, but the hit rate will soon get better as face-recognition software develops and more snaps are uploaded. The researchers did a second experiment where they took webcam photos of 93 students on Carnegie Mellon’s campus, with their agreement. These were ran in the face-recognition software along with 250,000 photos gathered from publicly available profiles on Facebook. About a third of students in the test were detected.
But the most striking result was from a third experiment. By extracting public sources, including Facebook profiles and government databases, the researchers could name at least one personal interest of each student and, in a few cases, the first five digits of a social security number. All this adds up to the concerns over the use of face-recognition software by the likes of Google and Facebook, that have been taking on firms that specialize in this technology, or licensing software from them. (Google just broke up with Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, the firm which owns the program the researchers used for their tests.) Privacy officials in Europe have stated that they will audit Facebook’s use of face-recognition software to help people “tagâ€, or identify, friends in photos they upload. And privacy nominees in America have made a formal complaint to regulators. (Facebook observes that people can choose out of the photo-tagging service by altering their privacy settings.)
Given the sensitivity of the issue, Google resolved not to issue a face-recognition search engine it had built. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman, said that it took the decision because “people could use this stuff in a very, very bad way, as well as a good way.†But face-recognition methods may still disperse widely. Like Mr Acquisti states, sharing named photos online has “opened the floodgates†to a new, privacy-sapping world. Shutting them down will be hard.
#-Link-Snipped-#
You are being 'snapped'! Image: Flickr
If by chance, your face and name is anywhere on the web, you may be identified whenever you walk the streets, not just by cops but by any random geek with a computer. That appears to be the conclusion from some new research on the bounds of privacy. For likely suspected miscreants, and people chasing them, face-recognition technology is out of fashion. Preparing for the soccer World Cup in 2014, Brazil is already testing pairs of glasses with mini-cameras provide, so that policemen wearing them could snap images of faces, and compare them with the databases of criminals. More autocratic states adore such methods- photos are snapped at checkpoints, and images checked against recent participants in protests.
#-Link-Snipped-# raised a question: But can anybody now use such technology at all, to identify random passers-by and uncover personal details about them? A study that is to be revealed on 4th August at Black Hat, a security conference in Las Vegas, hints that day is close. Its authors, Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman, all at America’s Carnegie Mellon University, processed several experiments that show how three meeting technologies are weakening privacy. One is face-recognition software itself, that has developed a lot. The researchers also employed “cloud computing†services, which supply lots of cheap processing power. And they followed social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, where most users post real names and photos of themselves.
During their first experiment, the researchers gathered images from 5,000 profiles of people on a popular American dating site in a particular city, most of whom used anonyms. They ran the pictures into an standardized face-recognition program that compared them with 280,000 images they had gathered by using a search engine to name Facebook profiles from the same city. They detected the identity of just over a tenth of the folk from the dating site. That might not seem like a big percentage, but the hit rate will soon get better as face-recognition software develops and more snaps are uploaded. The researchers did a second experiment where they took webcam photos of 93 students on Carnegie Mellon’s campus, with their agreement. These were ran in the face-recognition software along with 250,000 photos gathered from publicly available profiles on Facebook. About a third of students in the test were detected.
But the most striking result was from a third experiment. By extracting public sources, including Facebook profiles and government databases, the researchers could name at least one personal interest of each student and, in a few cases, the first five digits of a social security number. All this adds up to the concerns over the use of face-recognition software by the likes of Google and Facebook, that have been taking on firms that specialize in this technology, or licensing software from them. (Google just broke up with Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, the firm which owns the program the researchers used for their tests.) Privacy officials in Europe have stated that they will audit Facebook’s use of face-recognition software to help people “tagâ€, or identify, friends in photos they upload. And privacy nominees in America have made a formal complaint to regulators. (Facebook observes that people can choose out of the photo-tagging service by altering their privacy settings.)
Given the sensitivity of the issue, Google resolved not to issue a face-recognition search engine it had built. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman, said that it took the decision because “people could use this stuff in a very, very bad way, as well as a good way.†But face-recognition methods may still disperse widely. Like Mr Acquisti states, sharing named photos online has “opened the floodgates†to a new, privacy-sapping world. Shutting them down will be hard.
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