Face Search Engine Raises Privacy Concerns 158
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?"
Lesson #1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Governments? (Score:3, Insightful)
you can't hide from everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
No big deal, it won't work anyways (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..
Re:Lesson #1 -- Don't Expect Privacy Online (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
a porn application (Score:1, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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 life up for digital scrutiny in the first place.
The privacy problem isn't with this technology, it's with people who put their personal life on the biggest computer network ever, freely accessible to all and then expect it to be private.
They need to get their head examined and by the looks of it, that's exactly what they'll get.
Dating sites... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Face Recognition, Body Recognition, ... (Score:2, Insightful)
It will not be very long (a decade? two decades?) before face, body, gait, license plate, voice, speech, handwriting, textual habits, (and so on) recognition software will be powerful enough to recognize people in real-time, from a variety of real-time inputs.
I think your decade or two is far too short a time prediction. These technologies will take much longer than you anticipate before they are usable in the manner you describe. You even mention the Semantic Web as a means of putting together these complicated tasks....what's funny about this is that the semantic web is pointless if we have Natural Language Understanding. In many respects, language understanding is just as difficult (more difficult, most likely) as these other intelligent tasks. Predictions about technology due tend to be in the 10-20 year range, but recent history shows that we need far more time. Marvin Minsky advised the creation of "2001: A Space Oddysey" back in 1968. We are now 33 years since then, 5 years after 2001, and the state of the art in Artificial Intelligence isn't even 10% of what HAL represented.
Re:squeezing out the marginalized (Score:3, Insightful)
In the future, this might very well become so cheap that it is affordable for essentially anyone. And it will be possible to track people on a truly massive scale. Who cares if there are laws against to mapping out and keeping registers on peoples political opinions, religion, sexual preferences and so on, if any such information can be extracted automatically on demand? Imagine a search engine like Google where you can enter a persons name, and get anything on that person extracted through data mining and consolidation of public sources. Far fetched? I don't know, maybe. Technologically impossible? I can see no reason why it would be.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What IS OK? (Score:3, Insightful)
The more important question is, why not have oversight in hindsight? I can think of only two reasons: 1) The powers that be don't want any records of their wiretaps that they themselves cannot hide/destroy/deny. 2) The powers that be want to continue with long term wiretaps that they know would never hold up in court. Neither is particularly palatable to me.
Does that seem backward to anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
1)You put it there. In this case it's your own fault and you shouldn't complain.
2)Someone put it there without your permission. Think naughty landlords with hidden cameras or stalkers with telephoto lenses. In this case you generally don't know you're on the $/month "gentleman's website",interent shrine of undying love or heck, even some jerrk at work's myspace page and this image searcher has the possibility to point the fact out to you before someone you know spots it.
I would think people that don't want to be exposed on the internet would be happy to see something like this come out so they can see just how exposed they currently are.