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Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

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Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#21

Post by noja »

Karlozkiller wrote: post #17
blakesterz wrote: post #3

I keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy. You're in public, you can't avoid some random person from taking your picture. You have a public profile, you post pictures of yourself there, in public. But some how this feels... wrong, why is that? Something about the surprise of it? It feels like a surprise, it feels like something that shouldn't be so easy.

I'm more surprised that people are surprised. You provide images to the public with your name and face connected to even more personal data. Why are you surprised that this data can then be used by a third, or even a fourth party?

They're not surprised by that. They are surprised when one of the rules that has held true for the eternity of cities: that you can be semi-anonymous in a crowd, is no longer true.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#22

Post by barrkel »

blakesterz wrote: post #3

I keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy. You're in public, you can't avoid some random person from taking your picture. You have a public profile, you post pictures of yourself there, in public. But some how this feels... wrong, why is that? Something about the surprise of it? It feels like a surprise, it feels like something that shouldn't be so easy.

Innocuousness is not a transitive property of shared data. Any individual act of sharing may be OK, but if everybody does the same, then it's easy for much more insidious things to happen.

You can't generalize from the particular to the whole because large differences in quantity add up to qualitative differences, and machine processing makes laborious correlations and connections easy to tease out.

There's similar problems with automated number plate recognition, public CCTV, non-cash transactions, etc. They all add up to massive potential privacy violations despite being fairly innocent in isolation.

Give someone your phone number, and they can't do much more than phone you. Give them a phone book, and they can phone someone given a name and address. Give them a phone book's worth of data in CSV, and they can deanonimize phone call records. Give them a list of phone numbers that have e.g. called a suicide helpline, and now they know the names and addresses of people who are likely to kill themselves. Without machine processing (i.e. with a book rather than CSV), this would be difficult; without people sharing the relatively innocuous detail of their phone number, it wouldn't be possible (leaving social engineering aside).

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#23

Post by xlm1717 »

justsaysmthng wrote: post #10

I don't see why this can't be done in real time. Point your phone towards a person in a cafe and immediately figure out her name, age, maybe relationship status, social class, augmented reality style. 5 minutes later accidentally bump into her .. and start a conversation, armed with lots of private info about the person. Or even more basic - thieves picking their targets - is this woman's purse likely to contain a lo…

This describes almost exactly the world of the video game Watch Dogs. Didn't necessarily use a photo though, just a connection to the other person's phone.

In the world of the video game, people did adapt to it. However, there was a faction that actively tried to destroy that system.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#24

Post by WireWrap »

blakesterz wrote: post #3

I keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy. You're in public, you can't avoid some random person from taking your picture. You have a public profile, you post pictures of yourself there, in public. But some how this feels... wrong, why is that? Something about the surprise of it? It feels like a surprise, it feels like something that shouldn't be so easy.

For one thing, such a scenario would typically involve the uploading of said picture or facial data or faceprint data to a third party. You have no idea how that third-party will use and/or share the information.

Some people will not have a public profile picture but they too could be subjected to it.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#25

Post by Karlozkiller »

noja wrote: post #21
Karlozkiller wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more surprised that people are surprised. You provide images to the public with your name and face connected to even more personal data. Why are you surprised that this data can then be used by a third, or even a fourth party?

They're not surprised by that. They are surprised when one of the rules that has held true for the eternity of cities: that you can be semi-anonymous in a crowd, is no longer true.

In my opinion you still can. What makes this possible? You need a database linking images to names, as well as the face-recognition data.

People are freely giving away the images for the database linking it all to further personal data. If they did not do this, creating such a database would still be a massive surveillance effort, albeit probably still possible if someone really wanted to do it and had the sufficient resources.

I say it's still possible to stay anonymous if you want to.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#26

Post by yolesaber »

nkw wrote: post #19

This is one of the cool features people have discussed for the past 20 years for wearable computers. I was hoping it would come to fruition with Google glass until Google got all weird about facial recognition on glass (and subsequently glass as a whole). On one side it is creepy, on the other it would be nice to have your digital assistant suitably remind you the name of the person who is walking towards you and rec…

I personally would be pretty disgusted if someone used it on me. If someone doesn't remember my name or their last interaction with me, maybe it's for the best. The last thing I need is people faking nice and friendly after they just scanned me without my consent.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#27

Post by brador »

blakesterz wrote: post #3

I keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy. You're in public, you can't avoid some random person from taking your picture. You have a public profile, you post pictures of yourself there, in public. But some how this feels... wrong, why is that? Something about the surprise of it? It feels like a surprise, it feels like something that shouldn't be so easy.

Information asymmetry. They know you, you don't know them.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#28

Post by barrkel »

Karlozkiller wrote: post #17
blakesterz wrote: post #3

I keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy. You're in public, you can't avoid some random person from taking your picture. You have a public profile, you post pictures of yourself there, in public. But some how this feels... wrong, why is that? Something about the surprise of it? It feels like a surprise, it feels like something that shouldn't be so easy.

I'm more surprised that people are surprised. You provide images to the public with your name and face connected to even more personal data. Why are you surprised that this data can then be used by a third, or even a fourth party?

"Provide images to the public" isn't what people do; they provide images to a limited audience, either unwillingly (you can't walk around outside without creating some kind of image, it is not a willed action) or with people they know or expect to know them (online). It's technology which has converted this limited audience to a universal concept of "public".

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#29

Post by Karlozkiller »

barrkel wrote: post #28
Karlozkiller wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more surprised that people are surprised. You provide images to the public with your name and face connected to even more personal data. Why are you surprised that this data can then be used by a third, or even a fourth party?

"Provide images to the public" isn't what people do; they provide images to a limited audience, either unwillingly (you can't walk around outside without creating some kind of image, it is not a willed action) or with people they know or expect to know them (online). It's technology which has converted this limited audience to a universal concept of "public".

In many cases it is a willed action though. The images in this article are quite probably uploaded by the people themselves. I don't know exactly how privacy settings work on VKontakte, but from what I've seen most images seem publically searchable.

Now tell me how uploading things to such a database is not a willed action.

I agree with you that there is the possibility of someone else taking such images of you and everyone around you, through surveillance cameras or whatever, but for something of the scale shown in this article you'd still need quite an effort to create such a database without the help from the people themselves, especially if you want to link it to other personal information.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#30

Post by xentronium »

FindFace is a very interesting piece of technology. It's legit (the authors, N-Tech.Lab, have successfully competed against google and other strong opponents in MegaFace Benchmark). It's not real-time, but fast enough (0.5-1.0 minute time required to recognize faces and provide their profile links). Their business model is freemium (first 10 or 30 searches per month are free), and they're trying to make it a matching service, you can narrow search by age and relationship status, and then you can like photos of people you find to allow searching for "your type" of partners.
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