New App Claims It Can Identify Venture Capitalists Using Facial Recognition (theverge.com) 70
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: AngelFace [is] an Android app that lets users identify whether someone is a venture capitalist by capturing a quick photo of their face. According to [app developer Tosh Velaga and co-founder Igor Nefedov], "You just hold your phone up to someone's face for a second, tap a button and their profile will pop up." Velaga and Nefedov scraped photos of investors from Signal, a directory of venture capitalists in different industries, as well as Google Images. They declined to specify how many photos they have, though they said it is over 1,000.
Velaga believes the app can solve a common issue for new entrepreneurs: meeting and talking to the people who can fund their ideas. "Part of it is like if you see somebody walking down the street in Allbirds and a puffy vest, you might be like who is this? VCs are not the most sympathetic crowd and it's hard to just go up and talk to them. Now you at least know who they are," he said. Today, AngelFace is focused on venture capitalists based in the Bay Area, though Velaga hasn't ruled out the possibility of expanding to other cities. He's marketing the app cautiously because, as he says, "it's a slippery slope, this technology. We're not even sure if it's legal." If you're planning on giving the app a try, don't expect it to work very well. The Verge said they tested the app around the office and it "didn't recognize Casey Newton or Benchmark's Bill Gurley."
Velaga believes the app can solve a common issue for new entrepreneurs: meeting and talking to the people who can fund their ideas. "Part of it is like if you see somebody walking down the street in Allbirds and a puffy vest, you might be like who is this? VCs are not the most sympathetic crowd and it's hard to just go up and talk to them. Now you at least know who they are," he said. Today, AngelFace is focused on venture capitalists based in the Bay Area, though Velaga hasn't ruled out the possibility of expanding to other cities. He's marketing the app cautiously because, as he says, "it's a slippery slope, this technology. We're not even sure if it's legal." If you're planning on giving the app a try, don't expect it to work very well. The Verge said they tested the app around the office and it "didn't recognize Casey Newton or Benchmark's Bill Gurley."
No blockchain, no investment (Score:2, Funny)
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WTF are "allbirds and puffy vests"???
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You can turn up to a job interview in ripped jeans and a string vest, and it'll be your shoes that influence the interviewer.
I don't understand it either, but there it is.
It could also solve another problem (Score:2)
Targeting manhacks
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"Can Identify Venture Capitalists Using Facial Recognition"
What, is it looking for? The horns?
Nightmare scenario (Score:2)
This is the nightmare scenario we have been waiting for. Imagine when it gets built into smart glasses. People will instantly know who you are, what you did last summer...
We should probably kill this now. At least in the EU it should already be illegal thanks to GDPR.
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Why is the first inclination of EU citizens to reduce access to information? So you can hide your misdeeds? Because you love living in the dark, eating shit like a mushroom?
The real danger with this technology isn't that someone will find out that you're an asshole. It's assassination drones. A tomahawk missile can fly through a one meter square window you've given it a picture of, but it can't loiter, and it's expensive. If you can recognize faces with a cellphone, you can do it with a raspi. A quadcopter
Re:Nightmare scenario (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is the first inclination of EU citizens to reduce access to information?
Because many lived through Stasi or similar experiences in their lifetime. Even if you don't value your privacy, unrestricted access to your personal information isn't without negative consequences or risks.
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Privacy is OVER and laws like that never affect the authorities. So if your concern is that the authorities will have access to the information, THEY ALREADY DO, and they're not going to follow any of the relevant laws.
The government will use these kind of systems to monitor you no matter what the laws say, and if you ban civilians from using them then you only put The People at a disadvantage, making it harder to monitor government malfeasance.
Trying to prevent normal citizens from using face recognition i
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Privacy is OVER and laws like that never affect the authorities. So if your concern is that the authorities will have access to the information, THEY ALREADY DO, and they're not going to follow any of the relevant laws.
It's theoretical(well, it's there, but the use of it is rare and inefficient but it is possible), but there is a mechanism in place to remove abusive governments or one that is going against the best interests of its people. There is no real mechanism to remove a giant global megacorp. I'll trust the group I have at least nominal control over with my privacy a lot more than I will some company I have no control over.
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That's completely backwards. You do have some power over corporations, the government sometimes helps you with that, and you can also attack then through the courts. But the government isn't going to help you police their secret surveillance. And the UK in particular built a surveillance society even before China!
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That may be true, but after watching all seasons of Dr. Who, I would be doing the same. Aliens are always targeting the UK for some reason!
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I read your "stocking the fascists" point as a noxious version of "think of the children". Nope. I won't.
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Future generations will more likely just give up on privacy, because it will become impossible to live a public life otherwise.
You are the one using the let's think of the children argument, and simultaneously thinking like a child - that wishing makes things so. It does not.
The government has its own ways of building biometrics databases that are much more effective than what corporations can do. They have lots of good chances to collect high quality data when you engage in the usual mandatory practices li
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We can use digital escrows with permission-based access to safeguard collected data. Then you can make choices on how your data is used and can grant and revoke access to some or all of it. For example, you have cameras collecting facial data and processing it. Video feed processed immediately (as it will be il
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You limit yourself to thinking in terms of status quo, situational privacy is possible in a fully digital world. Technology is amazing, as it allows us to do what was infeasible only short time ago.
Yes, but the most advances have been in transmission and distribution of information, not in keeping it secret. The secrets eventually have to be shared with someone and you have to trust them to be scrupulous. And nobody is trustworthy with data which lasts forever.
Yes, your face is in the central database, so it is not strictly private. No, not just anyone can run comparison against it without your authorization and randomly ID you on the street.
That's actually my point. The government isn't going to create a database like that in good faith. They will use it without your authorization, but you won't be able to do the same, which will only further increase the imbalance of power between
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Yes, but the most advances have been in transmission and distribution of information, not in keeping it secret.
I disagree. We do cryptography really well. Well enough that we have unbreakable crypto readily available to consumers. Protecting and access-managing information at rest isn't that different. As evidence, take modern open source databases. Encryption is a standard feature, it isn't bridge too far to ask for per-record encryption with a key escrow.
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I'm not arguing about the quality of your cryptography, but about its relevance. At some point the data has to be decrypted to be used, and it is then vulnerable to attacks which have nothing to do with the encryption at all.
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The difference is that your banking credentials are designed to be used and not displayed. For information that's being displayed frequently, the risks are different.
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Lets try more examples. You are walking by a camera (inserting card into a reader), your face recorded and processed (point of sale reads your card), the information is sent to a central processor along with camera's (point of sale) identity information. If yo
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Just like HDCP stopped anyone from ever ripping a video out of an HDMI stream, right?
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Why is the first inclination of EU citizens to reduce access to information? So you can hide your misdeeds? Because you love living in the dark, eating shit like a mushroom?
They do have a lot to hide.
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So you can hide your misdeeds?
Yes! Our society functions on the basis of people being able to move on and leave their past behind for anything but the most serious transgressions. We have laws to that effect, e.g. credit reference agencies can't report the fact that you were bankrupt 10 years ago.
In the EU privacy is a human right, and your right to know things about people is extremely limited. You may of course find out things about them anyway, but you have very little right to demand information or ask others to provide it to you wi
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So you want to live in denial. People will be pretending they aren't doing the things they're doing, and part of that is publicly castigating others for doing them too.
I hope you all enjoy picking each other apart hypocritically. That should really retard your social progress, and lead to wonderful things!
No, wait, it's going to lead to awful things.
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Privacy is not denial, it's privacy. It doesn't need justification. You have to make the case that you should be able to know all this stuff about random people.
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I think there's more to gain by being able to know more about people than there is to lose. Granted, there will be a period of upheaval which will be unpleasant for many, but it will be most unpleasant for the people who are lying about the most stuff. And that's not me.
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However you can always be sure that there will be a select elite that someone don't come up in the search results or seem to have false data fed back to the device telling everyone what a wo
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TFA isn't about a nightmare scenario: it specifically identifies venture capitalists, so you can avoid them. Sort of like the app in China that beeps to warn you when you're near someone with a low social credit score, except it identifies people who are actually harmful to society!
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At least in the EU it should already be illegal thanks to GDPR.
Really? People voluntarily put their photos on the public net, with names, CV:s etc. Not just on social media. but on company profiles and such. I guess that that's how these guys scraped the info. You probably wouldn't even need to index the info, but just google the photo directly and scrape text from matching web pages. I don't believe that GDPR addresses that?
I am fairly convinced that we will get there in a foreseeable future.
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Yes, really. Just because you found someone's LinkedIn profile doesn't meant they gave you affirmative, informed consent to use their image for your VC finder app.
You have to ask permission for every use of a person's data, with very narrow exceptions.
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Aight! I am not an expert on GDPR, but the things I know about it are mostly about storage of data, not use of publicly available, intently published data.
But try this:
In one browser window, go to: https://cdn.britannica.com/98/... [britannica.com]
In another browser window, go to: https://images.google.com/ [google.com]
Drag the photo from the first browser window into the search field in the second window.
Voila! You have an instant "Is this a king?" app. It even tells you which king it is.
Better Yet (Score:2)
Instead of VCs, we need this to ID all the lawyers and C*Os and shareholders of big tech companies that make their living by fucking with our data, and then also have it display their known addresses, phone numbers, etc.
Give these fuckers a taste of their own medicine.
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Sure (Score:2)
Random people I meet with will be fine with me shoving a phone in their face and snapping a picture.
Basically Pokemon go (Score:2)
Why? (Score:4)
Why VC and its only been tested and recognized two? How many did it miss recognize? Two out of how many many?
I don't see anything revolutionary here. We already have technology that can recognize people by their face. Seems like this is just an adaptation of that technology with a more limited database.
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Why VC and its only been tested and recognized two? How many did it miss recognize? Two out of how many many?
You're misreading. They tested on 2 and it didn't identify either of them.
I don't see this being the best way to get VC funding anyway. Do you really think accosting someone on the street, shoving a phone in their face, and then asking them for money is going to get you anything other than a punch in the face?
Re:Why? (Score:4)
You're misreading. They tested on 2 and it didn't identify either of them.
My bad. I should not post to slashdot before having my morning caffeine jump start.
Where I live if you shove anything in anyones face and demand money it's armed robbery. Doesn't matter if its a phone. This type of technology won't be tied to phones. Our phones actual already have it.
The real application of this type of technology will be when its tied to augmented reality glasses. That day will come when everyone you see walking down the street will have a little name tag over their head. I guess that is one advantage of being a gamer. We are already used to such worlds.
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The real application of this type of technology will be when its tied to augmented reality glasses. That day will come when everyone you see walking down the street will have a little name tag over their head. I guess that is one advantage of being a gamer. We are already used to such worlds.
Start working on those quads and you can just bunnyhop everywhere.
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I think this is a way to get back at those who develop/promote facial recognition.
Think about it... If you're a relatively anonymous VC, you probably enjoy a pretty good lifestyle out in public.
But imagine if now you were being approached everywhere by every Tom, Dick and Jane who "has a great idea" to sell you...
Brilliant!
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hotdog or Not Hotdog (Score:1)
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Funny how the app actually works.
Venture capitalists have faces? (Score:1)
Coincidentally... (Score:2)
It also works on identifying pretentious douchebags.
What next? Pedophiles? (Score:2)
So what will they try next? Identify known pedophiles? Drug dealers?Shoplifters? Troublemakers? Customers who wrote negative reviews?
There will be false positives. With real life consequences. Who will be responsible?
VC dilemma (Score:2)
VC Funded? (Score:2)
Is this application funded by VCs? If so, are they the two that are recognized?
The app is pretty good at... (Score:2)
Should this be called iMooch? (Score:1)
Kind of pointless.
Are the people using this to stalk investors? Teams of homeless developers asking their mark for spare change?
"Hey, brah, can you spare a couple million?"
"didn't" - past tense of does (Score:2)
But it probably recognizes them now :-)