Facebook’s Face Recognition Tech Goes on Trial

You don't want to be "that guy" constantly demanding that your friends pull down any picture that you show up in, a request your friends will probably ignore anyway, and which will greatly diminish your personal likability.

The government has your name, face, address, and other personal information stored away safely in DMV and passport databases, among several others, and this information is surely being used in similar ways behind the scenes. Facebook neatly bundles all of its data and submits it to the NSA via PRISM every day, granting the government full access to both datasets, although to be frank, just Facebook's dataset is going to be good enough to track someone down, even if a little more work is necessary to dig up the exact details like address.

An interested party with such access could almost surely run a program and find the last people you were photographed with, which will almost definitely make it easy to find you personally. Combine this with smart surveillance systems and any time you enter a public place, sans cell phone or any other trackers, your personal location can be recorded.

I don't really think there's any way around it and I am in fact surprised that people haven't already made a public "search by face" engine. Correlate this data with Facebook or some other all-seeing collections and the technology to dynamically identify every individual that enters a building via surveillance footage is already there. The only thing holding it back now is a) political correctness and b) the practical difficulty of extracting all of this data at a large scale into a format that can be easily cross-referenced. Both of these are permeable and temporary restrictions, and access to the data is already a non-issue for some actors.

Expect to see such systems developed and sold in the next several years. Laws may make such software illegal, which will limit distribution to laypeople, but ultimately it will still be out there for interested parties to acquire.

The age of unscannables and cyberpunks is upon us. The only way to retain privacy will be to wear your hair in interesting ways. [0]

[0] https://cvdazzle.com/

Already deployed. Here's a report by a retailer who installed a face recognition system.[1] Names anonymized.

“We now know within seconds of a person walking in the store if they’ve previously been caught stealing from us. ... Suppose Johnny Johnson is caught shoplifting at a Store-Mart branch. He’s detained, photographed, and given a barring notice. Johnson’s photo is entered into Store-Mart’s database of known shoplifters, becoming an “enrollee” in the system. Three weeks later, Johnson walks into Store-Mart again. Within five seconds, the system has captured his image from the store security cameras, compared it against every photo enrolled in Store-Mart’s database, found a match, and sent an alert to the in-store loss prevention associate’s (LPA) smartphone. The LPA looks at his phone, and Johnson’s name, photo, and detention history with Store-Mart pops up. The LPA verifies that the photo in the alert actually matches the person who just walked in. Then the associate approaches and says, “Mr. Johnson, you’ve previously been given a barring notice from Store-Mart. You’re not allowed to be here. Please leave.” And Johnson walks back out. So, within a minute or so of walking in, a known shoplifter has left the store, empty-handed."

Coming next, the sharing model:

"A national shoplifter database similar to the Stores Mutual Association model is already in the works. This would mean that each additional retailer who adopts the security camera technology and starts sharing will incrementally increase the value of the system for all members."

[1] http://losspreventionmedia.com/insider/retail-security/facia...

Take Facebook out of the equation and you still have friends showing your picture around, perhaps to people you don't want them to. In a Facebookless world, you would simply tell them to stop. My point is that it isn't Facebook's fault that your friends share too much about you.