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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

#91

Post by joe_the_user »

bigiain wrote: post #70
joe_the_user wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes glad about my zero-photos-of-me-on-the-Internet policy. Also, the neural net may return a certain percent of false positives and there may be no particular way for this guy to tell. The impact is small here and would be larger in other circumstances.

How's that working out for you? I have a significant number of friends who look at me like I'm speaking in Klingon when I tell them I'd rather not be tagged in their Facebook photos.

It works out pretty smoothly really.

Occasionally a family member wants to post something but there's seldom a problem.

Most of my friends don't post anyone's photo on Facebook even though they use it a lot.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#93

Post by prawn »

We are not far off AR-type scenarios where someone in public is overlaid with info about them and their interests. Keen on that girl? It instantly tells you she likes a particular band and movie genre, giving you quick access to small talk cues. Or that she never mentions a boyfriend online.

Or that the guy about to get off the subway earlier thanked his friend for giving him that money he owed him.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#95

Post by jcoffland »

I found it interesting that with out exception in the photos on the artist's Website the people on the subway are activity using their smart phones and/or have headphones on. The transformation of the human race into cyborgs, of sorts, over the last two decades is uncanny.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#96

Post by jcoffland »

timthorn wrote: post #56
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…

> But this is unavoidable, right? I don't think so, if you're happy to remain off social networks.

I mostly stay off of social networks, with the exception of HN, but other people put pictures of me on them anyway. I say don't put that on FB and people just laugh because they think I'm kidding, but what can you do?

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#97

Post by robmcm »

timthorn wrote: post #56
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…

> But this is unavoidable, right? I don't think so, if you're happy to remain off social networks.

Exactly, it's frighting how everyone is assuming they have to change their public persona in order to protect their online version!

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#98

Post by TeMPOraL »

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 keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy.

And I'm trying to figure out why this apparently feels so wrong and creepy to so many commenters here. I don't feel any of that. As far as I'm concerned, it feels... totally normal. Maybe I'm wired wrong or something, but I really don't see anything weird or creepy about learning from publicly available datasets (AKA observing your surroundings?). Nor do I see anything wrong in leveraging computational infrastructure to learn more from those datasets.

The way I see it - a hypothetical "creep" who takes a photo of someone and matches it with their public social media profile is fine. Where I draw the line is them attempting to put that into action through stalking, harassment, etc. because it hurts the other party. Trying to break into data sources that are not meant for public is of course a violation of personal privacy, which is wrong. Also, I consider a person with obsessive interest in another to have a problem that probably requires medical attention.

Are people so afraid today that the fact that another person notices them makes them uneasy?

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#99

Post by TeMPOraL »

barrkel wrote: post #22
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 p…

Your example suggests a trend - there's much more information hidden in data that it seems on a surface. Many people don't understand it, or don't want to accept it. But it's the nature of the world, and I see no way around it except banning all computation. Because our natural capabilities aided by data-crunching machines are enough to make those "massive privacy violations".

So if we want to live with computing, I think we need to learn to live with capabilities of computing and the nature of the casual structure of the physical universe.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#100

Post by possibility »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #98
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 keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy. And I'm trying to figure out why this apparently feels so wrong and creepy to so many commenters here. I don't feel any of that. As far as I'm concerned, it feels... totally normal. Maybe I'm wired wrong or something, but I really don't see anything weird or creepy about learning from publicly available datasets (AKA observing your surroundings?). Nor…

I think that posting the pictures online like that is actually what's creepy. The matching almost has nothing to do with it. For instance, if he just had the subway photos, or he just had the profile pictures, it would give me a creepy feeling. It feels like an invasion of privacy. Here we even have laws that say you cannot publish someone's picture without their consent. Russia does too.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_...

Additionally he quite likely doesn't have permission to post the profile pictures due to copyright.

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