Facial recognition - the new holy grail for tech Co’s. But it could do more harm than good, researchers believe.
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A recent test, carried out by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, showed that by taking a picture of an individual and then using recognition technology (recently snapped up by Google), one third subjects could be matched to photos of them publicly available on Facebook.
And since most of the time, Facebook photos are name tagged, this means individuals can be traced all too easily.
In other words, if a stranger take a photo of you in a crowded street, using facial recognition, they can gather all sorts of other personal info about you. A stalkers dream, basically.
In addition, the study also found the first five digits of their Social Security numbers could be ‘predicted' in almost one third of the faces tested, just by using Facebook profile details.
The research, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, shows the real dangers the technology poses to formerly secure personal information, with study authors pointing out how it now allows the ability to "re-idenfiy" one another.
This will become even easier to do especially since much more personal information is becoming available on Facebook, Linked In, Twitter and other online profiles.
"We call it the democratization of surveillance," said Prof Prof. Alessandro Acquisti who along with Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman tested 93 students by taking webcam pictures and then attempting to match them to Facebook profiles.
However, Facebook deny this is the case and say members do not always use pictures of themselves on their profile and often opt for a pet or other image. Mark Zuckerberg's Social Network have also argued its 750 million plus users can opt out of name tagging if they so wish.
Introduced in the first week of June, Facebook's facial recognition software was automatically for all members. It looks through photos, recognises a friend and then suggests that person be tagged in an image.
Google recently acquired Pittsburg Pattern Recognition and have created a search engine based on FR, but decided not the put it live, as "people could use this stuff in a very, very bad way, as well as a god way," says Exec Chairman Eric Schmidt.
Blaming Facebook as "the first generally available way of disambiguating identity," Schmidt went on to say such a "fundamental service" shouldn't be owned by one company, thus Google's move to get in on the action.
"Historically, on the Internet such a fundamental service wouldn't be owned by a single company. …I think the industry would benefit from an alternative to that."
A fundamental service owned by one company... isn't that what Google Search is?
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