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Face Search Engine Raises Privacy Concerns
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Dec 19, 2006 02:48 PM
from the i-forget-the-mane-but-the-pace-is-familiar dept.
from the i-forget-the-mane-but-the-pace-is-familiar dept.
holy_calamity writes "Startup Polar Rose is in the news today after announcing it will soon launch a service that uses facial recognition software, along with collaborative input, to identify and find people in photos online. But such technology has serious implications for privacy, according to two UK civil liberties groups. Will people be so keen to put their lives on Flickr once anyone from ID thieves to governments can find out their name, and who they associate with?"
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Lesson #1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lesson #1 -- Don't Expect Privacy Online (Score:4, Insightful)
My advice to anybody who wants their cake and eat it too: Use different handles for different applications.
That is, if you want to indulge in the MySpace/LJ/VOX blogging, then use a handle unique to that type of activity (eg. BlogUser99).
If you want to indulge in Flickr/Photobucket/Picasa photo-sharing, then use a different handle (eg. PhotoDad12).
The same goes for social bookmarking and product reviews on Amazon and the like.
And, of course you should never use your full name except for in business transactions.
By using different handles, you'll give black hats/feds/5kr1p7-k1dd13z a hard time trying to figure out who you really are.
Just my 0b00000010..
Parent
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But man is it hard keeping track of all my own 'identities'. What a PITA. Necessary evil though.
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What if someone else took a picture of you, or say, your wife, or kids, and put it on the net without your consent? Would that be ok? It's not always about what you would do with photos of yourself, but what other people do with your image that you have no control over.
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Re:Lesson #1 -- Don't Expect Privacy Online (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. I submitted a story to
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15994151/site/newswee
From that story, a good example:
Cheap video technology (esp. video-capable cellphones) and social sites make it all possible.
Simply being in public can get you on these social sites, whether you actually use them (or have even HEARD of them) or not. In the end, the only way to ensure your privacy is to not become a part of society. If you venture into public, you too could end up on some social web site.
And remember--this is the PUBLIC engaging in a type of surveillance on the PUBLIC. For the tinfoil hats out there, it's not just the government's watchful eye you have to be careful around; it's that video-capable cellphone in the hands of the seemingly innocent rider sitting across from you on the train, too.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not a big deal, unless you happen to work for a conservative company and maintain an anti-government blog or some such thing.
squeezing out the marginalized (Score:5, Insightful)
In a technical (and technological) sense, you're absolutely right. Given the nature of digital information, anybody putting any information online would be well advised to act as though it is going to get back to everybody they know, perhaps through channels that don't even exist at the time you put the information online.
But the more complicated social reality is that in most people's experience, the public-private distinction has usually been one of probability and degrees, not an all-or-nothing proposition. It used to be the case (and still is, though less and less so) that you could go to certain technically public places and still have a practical/probabilistic expectation of privacy. For example, you could go to a political or cultural event for an unpopular group (a gay pride parade, for example) and have a reasonable hope that it wouldn't get back to your employer or family. You might be in a technically public space and you (hopefully) knew you were taking a risk, but the risk was small enough that it was worth it.
The problem raised by this kind of technology is that it is eliminating those kinds of physical and virtual spaces -- the spaces where you can meet and interact with others and have some practical (if not airtight) expectation of privacy. The fact is, there are very few real places you can socialize with lots of other people that have a truly complete expectation of privacy, so the probabilistic expectation is often the best you can hope for. For people with some kind of politically or culturally marginalized interest -- and let's face it, who doesn't have at least one interest that falls into that category -- it's a sad development.
Parent
The end of protest? (Score:3, Interesting)
Parent makes an interesting point. Who would risk going to any public protest for anything (war, whatever) knowing that you will probably turn up in a Google image search for doing so?
Steve
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The FBI used to do it back in the 60's, when cameras used film. I'm unaware of any of the images actually ever being used, but the threat was obvious: we know who you are. Even if, of course, they didn't.
Didn't stop the protestors then, either. Just pissed a bunch of people off, and had a lot of people jumping in front of the cameras and shouting their names and addr
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In the future, this might very well become so cheap that it is affordable for essentially anyone. And it
"collective intelligence" (Score:5, Funny)
They seem to have made a fatal assumption.
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Governments? (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to put it up (Score:3, Interesting)
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There are various laws in various places concerning what kind of permission is necessary before publishing photos depicting identifiable people. Many of them concern advertising only but some, Canada [findlaw.com] is maybe the most clear cut, cover anything that is p
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There are various laws in various places concerning what kind of permission is necessary before publishing photos depicting identifiable people.
There's the problem... Now everyone is identifiable!
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I am being sued in federal court for publishing a man's photo (along with his name). See:
www.cgstock.com/essays/vilana.html [cgstock.com]
He's a mortgage originator, and he forged a sales agreement, and I'm warning others about him on my website (e.g. consumer speech). He dropped an earlier claim of defamation (what I wrote about his is true), but he's raising the same objection as
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People go way overboard with road rage, so that scenerio isn't entirely paranoid. With a simple photo they get access to the who and where of all of
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Photographers have every right [sirimo.co.uk] to photograph you if you are in a public place. Like the grandfather poster, I also do street photography [smugmug.com] but unlike him I do make mine available. If you required that ph
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pr0n (Score:5, Funny)
The only "facial" recognition software I use is Google Image Search with Safesearch turned off.
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you can't hide from everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
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Who said technology was difficult to deal with?
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No big deal, it won't work anyways (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No big deal, it won't work anyways (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong: nowadays, anything that remotely has to do with security, identification, tracking and general populace control (to save us all from all these hordes of terrorists of course) is big money. Look at most of the advances in computing these days: they're almost all about biometrics, RFID, detectors of this-or-that... Most of it is hype, but it nets whomever spews it a lot of government money.
Parent
Finally (Score:2, Funny)
She's been sending me pictures of herself (chuckles) and her name is Sonya..
She's SO sexy she's got me worried, but my worries will finally go away as soon as I check her photo with this new service!!!
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Yes, they will. (Score:2)
Will people be so keen to put their lives on Flickr once anyone from ID thieves to governments can find out their name, and who they associate with?"
The bad guys already know so hiding only hurts your friends. The resources they own are the ISP, your non free OS, your phone calls and public "security cameras". Your friends only have what you can give them. The bad guys want to limit your ability to match their power and knowledge. The only solution is to guard what's really private and give rest away
Now, the Permanent Record (Score:2)
And now, every picture on Myspace will become part of your Permanent Record.
But at least dating sites will be able to filter out copies of pictures of famous people and porn stars.
Witness Protection (Score:5, Interesting)
Setting aside the fact that, at least right now, sunglasses fool these systems... if someone, lets say, a member of the Talini Crime family wants to find a rat. By giving a picture of him to this company, they could then search for pictures on the internet he appears in.
Considering how many pictures people take with random people in the background, it seems inevitable that said rat would turn up.
Face Recognition, Body Recognition, ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the past will be open to analysis, a theme called "retroactive surveillance." For example, the Seattle bus system keeps timestamped footage of people coming in and out of the bus, and the Seattle bus system keeps records of where the buses are, and when, by GPS. In theory, these two systems can be correlated, and, if you have a system for analyzing faces, you should be able to connect the "network of data" to figure out who is where and when. This type of correlation is what software visionaries are working hard to achieve, with efforts such as the Semantic Web.
People who are worried about "the mark of the beast," through such things as RFID tags and so on, are worried about the wrong thing. You won't need to "wear" anything. You won't need any special marks, once software is sufficiently capable. Your face, your clothes, the way you walk, your posture, the regular patterns you follow every day, your voice, all are sufficient enough, in themselves, to serve as the "mark of the beast."
It is conceivable that you will be able to limit government use of this sort of technology. But will you be able to stop private users from using this sort of technology? If you envision a future revolution of some sort, do you believe that the revolutionaries would not use this technology themselves? To track the motion of police vehicles, and individual policemen, and the people who work for and against you?
The underlying activities behind these technologies: Collecting information, seeing, hearing, sensing, and then correlating what is seen, what is heard- these are foundational. The "problem" is simply intelligence, itself.
I doubt that willful blindness or doubt is going to help us in our path to the future. We see that backwards countries practicing willful blindness, not advanced ones.
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easy enough. Put a hard legal limit on the processing power any person is allowed to possess. Measured in gigaflops or some other metric. The same way most places have legal limitations on what kinds of weapons a person is allowed to possess. There is no moral difference between a computer and a weapon. Both can be used for good or har
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The reason you don't have to worry about invading anyone's privacy is that like Scott Adams says: People like to talk more than they like to listen. And that's why the government conspiracists always make me laugh. They think that the government will one day track everything you do by force, when in reality, private corporations have already b
wild goose chase (Score:2, Insightful)
Reminds of the Libertarian Party (of which I am, unhappily, a member) - seriously complaining about trivial issues means that people will trivialize your complaints about serious issues.
Oh *come* *on* (Score:2, Insightful)
Everybody knew about it and expected this technology to be perfected sooner or later (and for now it seems that it's still a bit later). So, if you were that worried about someone being able to Flickr and Google your personal relationships together, you should have thought twice about putting your entire
Dating sites... (Score:3, Insightful)
Current Technology Scary Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What IS OK? (Score:5, Insightful)
They have NEVER needed FISA warrants before listening. In the event that they need to tap in an emergency (where waiting for a FISA warrant could lose the chance at intelligence), they can just start doing so. However, they do need to apply for a warrant within 72 hours of starting the tap. How could any reasonable person have a problem with this? All they are saying is that you cannot wiretap without ever telling anyone about it.
We obviously need some sort of security. What is OK?
Yes, we do. But we cannot forget that we have a system of checks and balances. Democracy does not move as fast as a dictatorship, and a dictatorship can (in theory) move much faster to protect its citizens. If that is what we truly want as a country then let's just do it and quit pretending. This whole "we are still a democracy with governmental checks and balances but because the president declared war on an abstract concept he can do anything he wants" thing we have going now just does not make sense. The excuses are always so flimsy, it is always a claim that it is perfectly legal under written law and when that proves to be false then it becomes "oh well, none of that matter anyway because he's got unlimited wartime powers".
But you ask what we can do? Obviously we are doing some things that make a lot of sense. Better information between the intelligence agencies is a no-brainer, and I would go as far as saying going after the Taliban in Afghanistan was a good move as well (Iraq was obviously a horribly stupid blunder/distraction though).
However we do a lot of stupid things also. Hiring a lot of poorly trained rent-a-cops to play detective in the airports was probably not the best use of our resources. Insane restrictions on what we can take on airplanes do nothing for security, but make ignorant people feel safer. The whole slew of ways we try to throw billions in poorly thought out "technical" solutions like RealID, MagicLantern, facial recognition (which doesn't work any better than space lasers shooting at ICBMs), and whatever kludged algorithm generates the Mo-Fly list do nothing for security and cost both money and civil liberties.
There are many tried and true intelligence gathering and counter-terrorism techniques, but the current administration is more interested in presenting a color coded security theater for the masses complete with high tech sounding ("it involves computers so you know it must be good") projects. The paranoid thinks they are just using "terrorism" as a bogeyman to implement systems to track and control all citizens. I actually think that is a side effect of their actual motivation to dump money into their friend's and contributer's companies.
Finkployd
Parent
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Why c
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One point is that it creates a record of the tap having happened at all. That means that if you're going to be abusing your power, you should expect records of it to exist somewhere that is not d
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Ok well to start, you cant fight a philosophy. What you are perhaps asking is that the government do more to fight Criminals. I would say that we have enough laws already to fight criminals. Some would say that this is a brave new world we live in and they need better tools to keep up with the crimes. I disagree that the world has magically changed and that we need to become a police state to fight for security. You will never be secure, because security
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This is why I worry about this process. Not because of my privacy, but because there are already too many instances of my large face on the Net. You people have enough of me to deal with already, without yet another database crunching my oily pixels and spitting them back up at you with a hyperlink attached.
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Kinda gives a whole new meaning to the term "facial" recognition when you put it that way, doesn't it?