Facebook Will Soon Be Able To ID You In Any Photo 153
sciencehabit writes Appear in a photo taken at a protest march, a gay bar, or an abortion clinic, and your friends might recognize you. But a machine probably won't — at least for now. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you, has trained on dozens of photos of your face, and has high-quality images to examine, your anonymity is safe. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random, uncaptioned photos. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the largest collection of personal photographs in the world, the technology for doing all that is beginning to blossom.
Re:Like increasingly often, the real question begs (Score:4, Insightful)
The possibility is neat technologically, but do we want to put up with the consequences?
There. I fixed it for you.
The possibility is neat technologically, but do *they* care about the consequences when can get a profit?
Re:Like increasingly often, the real question begs (Score:4, Insightful)
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I guess now, short of plastic surgery every other day, there is nothing standing in the way of a totalitarian state - everywhere.
Nothing you do out side of your home is private and anonymous. Every thing you say or do will can be used against you.
Because, you know, no one wants/is able to police the police.
Scalability matters, accuracy less so (Score:2)
This keeps coming up, every time someone gets a better algorithm for doing the recognition. The actual problem is that it won't scale , not that it's not accurate enough.
If you have 23 people in a group, and you're comparing something like their face or their birthdays, you have to do 22+21+20+...+1 = 253 comparisons to cover the group. If it's birthdays, there is a 50% probability you'll find a pair with the same birthday. If your facial recognizer is 99.7% accurate, you'll have a 50% chance of gett
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Apparently, the terrorists e-mailed each other using the subject line CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT!!!
If you cannot safely throw out all the spam that infests the web, then you've got a lot more messages to sift through.
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The FSS wouldn't actually mind annoying the populace, but the level of false positives would have required them to dedicate most of their budget to buildings full of humans staring at screens, trying to back-stop the computers.
Anything that doesn't scale will eat your budget, and you won't be able to do the rest of your job.
When it gets close to 99.9997% accuracy or so it will be financially competitive with a security guard with a wand, just checking for weapons (;-))
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The question is moot, Any information gleaned is money.
What's the problem? (Score:1)
You uploaded all the photos and did all the tagging they needed for this yourself, didn't you?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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But he did not choose to allow a company to profit from his name and likeness.
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Not on Facebook, but on Google+ one of the first things I did was to disallow tagging of me in photos. It's just a really really stupid thing to tag yourself or someone else in a photo, or from my view anyway (it's been too long that I can't put myself into the mindset of a kid).
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If I could burn down every data center facebook owned I'd do it in a second, no hesitation.
Hm, I wouldn't. I'd auction off the hardware, then I would invest half of the proceeds in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities...
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if you don't have an account people can't tag you
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correction you can't UN TAG yourself if you don't have an account.
the problem is facebook has a great number of "phantom" accounts for folks that do not have an actual account.
If your friends/coworkers/enemies ect tag your face (or anything else) with your name FB records this and if you someday do sign up for an account you will by way of your friends and such be linked to the data in your "phantom account".
so lets say Krystal Rainbyrd does not have an account but a Jade Morningstar does. Jade does a pict
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you are very, very confused about how facebook and its tagging system works
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they can only tag a name , they can't tag "you"
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No, I didn't.
Other people have been uploading and tagging me whether I like it or not, despite my not having an account.
So fuck you it's not been my decision, but I'll be copping the consequences. If I could burn down every data center facebook owned I'd do it in a second, no hesitation.
It may be more practical to lynch anyone holding a mobile phone in the air with the deliberate intention of photographing you for said sites.
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Need to start mass tagging random people. If we can't prevent them getting the signal can we add noise?
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Whereas you exercise perfect control over everyone in the world who happens to know you, I'm sure.
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ACs can do that you know. The rest of us, not so much.
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Heh.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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So you have a woman's name and phone number. Good for you. I have a large book full of them. It still gets dropped on my porch now and then.
So some guy has your address. Good for him. He could have just as easily followed you home, and there's a very good chance that you never would have noticed.
Now, both of you have a choice to make. What will you do with that information? Will you get on with your life peacefully, as a law-abiding member of society, or will you jump the line over to being a criminal stalk
I don't think this is really true. (Score:3)
Postgrad students at our faculty were developing face-recognition stuff that can easily and percisely tag almost all photos we were able to stuff in it. In microseconds. I guess it would be really weird if facebook didn't have this technology available long time ago (it isn't really that hard either).
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Were these rather generous photographs or partially obscured faces wearing hats in a crowd? Was the database of potential people in the billions? Identifying the subject of a selfie at your university might not be the most difficult task, but identifying everyone in an arbitrary crowd [google.com.au] is going to be a lot more involved. The process could probably benefit from being able to map relationships to narrow partial matches down, hence Facebook.
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Also very hard if there is not a set of reference photographs.
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passport/DVLA database is replete with reference photographs.
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All shot from almost exactly the same angle, which makes them a terrible source of reference data. To do facial recognition well, you need multiple shots of each person, taken from multiple angles... like Facebook already has.
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Also very hard if there is not a set of reference photographs.
Fortunately your friends, relative, and coworkers are willing to help out with that. Each photo uploaded to Facebook with your face tagged in it is a reference photo. Setting your privacy settings to not display those tags doesn't mean the data point wasn't saved.
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Like I said earlier, I don't get my face tagged as I disabled it (and I'm not on Facebook).
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Even if identifying someone from a bad photo is nearly impossible, if you have enough bad photos and enough additional information, the task can become a lot easier. For example,
- if
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This tech is old for the 2d face work. Its fast for local police Privacy concerns? UK police test 'faster-than-ever' facial recognition software http://rt.com/uk/173292-facial... [rt.com] (July 16, 2014)
Or just read the public info on records per second in the 10,000 records/sec http://www.nec.com/en/global/r... [nec.com]
Re:I don't think this is really true. (Score:5, Informative)
I've got facial recognition software running on my netbook. It really is not that difficult to get hold of some very sophisticated shit. It even has the capability of reducing any face to a photofit string.
If you're thinking "Bullshit!", let me throw some titles past you that a: I use for facial recognition features and b: I consider worth mentioning because they actually work (for some metric of "work" which for me is "enough to differentiate between 60 million individuals").
Windows Live Photo Gallery
Google Picasa
DigiKam
Adobe Photoshop Elements
Sony Picture Motion Browser
AmCap
IrfanView
OpenCV
EvoFIT
E-FIT
Faces LE (Law Enforcement edition)
(those last three are compositors, I do use them to reduce found faces to photofit strings - they're much easier to index that way).
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Whoa, good list. There are also very good methods to recognize people by non-facial features (especially the ears are something that computers can "fingerprint" very easily and reliably), but I haven't seen that in any software package yet.
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Everybody does.
Good think I don't use Facebook (Score:1)
And I don't believe the article either. At least not for practical purposes. Show me the numbers for misses and false positives please.
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Re:Good think I don't use Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no "probably" about it.
And that shadow account garbage was why I quit Facebook, for all the good it does. I have no illusions that they have any less of my data now than they did when I was a member... but at least I'm one fewer set of eyes to count as an impression on their auto-playing video ads.
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EvoFIT, pretty much the best photofit software there is, has a 70% naming rate (automatic and correct naming of individuals based on a reference set of file photos such as passport database), it's one of the systems the Metropolitan Police use purely for the fact that it can run a photofit against a reference set.
I'm A Cross-Dresser (Score:1)
With two Facebook accounts (the real and my secret life). Will anyone now be able to identify me and do things like blackmail or slander me?
Sometimes Zuckerberg doesn't understand the boundary between "being able to do something" and "whether you should do it." I wonder if he will be pleased if I stood outside his house and recorded his activities and followed him everywhere to post his whereabouts online? What if I went through his bin and post pictures of that?
Cross-Dressers are people, too (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a suggestion you may not have considered.
Your "secret" life? Don't post it to social media.
So because someone is socially different they have to forego socializing and connecting with others?
One good thing about the internet is that it allows people to be who they really want to be - by actions, words, and accomplishments - without it threatening their personal welfare. One bad thing about the internet is that it allows many people to put undue pressure on the few who stand out.
If Facebook bridges that gap, so that our anonymous personae are always connected to our real selves, then we all become subject to enormous societal pressure. It'll be the equivalent of the "old boys club" everywhere and in everything we do. You mist be the right type, have the right behaviour or you won't succeed.
It will be impossible for (for example) a secret cross-dresser to hold down a job. I know lots of people in the scene who would absolutely be fired if their employers found out, and they take great pains to keep their private lives separate from their public ones. I know people who play LARP who are in the same boat; for example, a Connecticut supreme court judge and at least 2 policemen.
One only needs to go back 30 years (some of us can actually do that) and note how society dealt with homosexuals, non-violent deviancy, even communism and long hair. Even further back was how we (the US) dealt with the Japanese, although Islamics are probably in that position right now. If someone wanted to be heard without being identified as Islamic, shouldn't they be allowed to do that?
On the flip side, is it possible to create a program that replaces faces in images with other faces? If such a program existed, and if there was enough interest we might create a movement to make facial recognition unreliable. Sort of like how "AdBlock" extensions fought against advertizing, we could have a Facebook app that grabs random faces off of other pictures and pastes them into the "gay bar" image mentioned in the summary.
This is a troubling development. I'm not a big fan of government regulation, but I think there's a clear need for delineating the privacy of people who *want* to keep themselves private.
People who do not have an account shouldn't have to deal with Facebook's particular brand of evil.
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uh... nope. EvoFIT can literally see through makeup. One of its sorting algorithms is based on a genetic evolutionary algorithm, which means it's fucking clever.
Re: Cross-Dressers are people, too (Score:1)
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Eh... most American communists weren't Soviet ideologists. While they probably wanted a dictatorship it would be one of the proletariat. Which mostly equals direct democracy.
And the treatment was not only wrong it was extremely so. Even a rumor that one once associated with someone that was (probably falsely) accused of being a communist was enough to make one unemployable. Witch hunt is the proper term for such behavior.
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Only a fool would believe that remotely possible. Funny thing about dictatorships, once in place, democracy of any form is the first thing to go.
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Perhaps that's because you don't understand the terminology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
Not saying the communist idea is realistic - but for this discussion it needn't be to be relevant.
Show me my doppelgangers! (Score:5, Funny)
I'd like to be able to ask Facebook:
"Out of all the hundreds of millions of Facebook users, which ones look the most like me?"
Wouldn't that be cool?
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"Out of all the hundreds of millions of Facebook users, which ones look the most like me?"
There is already a third party app on Facebook that does that.
It only works on the most contrived examples thought, where the lighting is the same and everything is aligned the same way.
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Re:Show me my doppelgangers! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to be able to ask Facebook:
"Out of all the hundreds of millions of Facebook users, which ones look the most like me?"
I'd rather ask, out of all those people which ones look like Mark Zuckerberg enough to pass for him at the corporate headquarters? Just to make a point.
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Actually FB already tags one of my friends as her identical twin...
soon? (Score:5, Interesting)
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So that's the reason why London and by extension the UK, has a CCTV camera at every major intersection...
Snowden: GCHQ/NSA's Optic Nerve (Score:1)
Not only have they been doing this for decades, part of the leaks reveal they've been intercepting messaging systems to get the photos. It's a program called Optic Nerve (started in 2008):
"One document even likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals."
"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face," it reads. "The bes
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No, because NSA didn't have all the photos. Perhaps some which match those in official documents, in a good light, at some angles, but even they're not going to be able to compete with the billions of photos of people on facebook. Also, their "match or no match" is not as useful as "this person is known to these people"; there's a whole network of people they can hit up/monitor to find where someone is.
It can't (Score:2)
Privacy NOT Datamining, Duhr! (Score:1)
You should NEVER post pictures of your face on the internet, not even "just for" restricted groups of friends. Because someone is ALWAYS there selling you out. Social, dating, employment... all these types of sites. NEVER POST YOUR FACE. There is absolutely no good reason to post your face on the internet. Social... your friends and family already know what you look like. Dating... if people are shopping for looks you will not find love. Employment... that's illegal.
Too bad you SUCKERS bought the privacy po
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Won't help you much if somebody else makes a photo with you in it and tags you, will it?
not only have Facebook been doing this for a while (Score:5, Informative)
but Google have also recently taken to autotagging faces in photos you upload to G+.
Incidentally, a 2013 report from the ITC says that you are 6 times more likely to have your bank account emptied by an identity thief via data taken from Facebook than you are to be the victim of a house burglary. http://blog.identitytheftcounc... [identitytheftcouncil.org]
I hate it when I'm right. AGAIN.
Ass Recognition (Score:1)
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I have to retract that claim. I converted the image to .png and it uploaded fine. Turns out Facebook already has their advanced file name recognition technology up and running instead.
Technology nudging Society? (Score:1)
Soon? (Score:2)
"Shelly Sxxxxxx was tagged in Lisa xxxxxx Xxx's photos." came across that a few days ago.
Shelly is one of few people in my friends list, she and her sons were part of the same COD4 clan as I was.
Yes, I had to join facebook to become involved with my family, took 182 edits to my HOSTS file just to get in.
Location and time usually in photos too. (Score:2)
Even worst, most photos are done with smartphones, whose default settings ( which most people do not touch) tag the photos with time and location.
Imagine some over ambitious prosecutor ( are there any other kind?) going on a fishing expedition using these photos.
Facebook = The devil incarnate (Score:4, Insightful)
If the government asked people to do what Facebook asks, there'd be another revolution. But offer them minor services that they could do themselves and they willingly throw away everything Thomas Jefferson fought so hard to give them.
Interesting what's used as the big scary (Score:2)
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Not universally or objectively bad, but they are examples of things that a certain number of people might want discretion about. Other people would have different things that they would feel that way about but the underlying anonymity concerns would be the same.
But of course you already knew that.
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I think it's more like, "Might be problematic if you're planning to visit or, even better, *return home* to some country whose authorities regard these as acts worthy of a thousand lashes, afterwards".
I heard of something (Score:4, Insightful)
A while back, I read an article about this. Someone suggested "database poisoning".
It sounds illegal but I am not so sure. All that everyone needs to do is to tag other people as you and vice versa. If enough people did that, it would mess up such a system.
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My response will evolve (Score:2)
So, where is ... (Score:2)
Wally [theregister.co.uk]?
Sigh (Score:1)
Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random, uncaptioned photos.
Actually that is possible, and why are you people still using Facebook?
news? (Score:1)
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