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Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps

#101

Post by unobtaniumstool »

mtgx wrote: post #88
yeldarb wrote: post #13

I've been playing with the TrueDepth Camera APIs on the iPhone X. Some things I've noticed: 1) The ARKit "Face Mesh" seems to be a standard model that is scaled and skewed to fit your face (for example, it ignores glasses, still works if you put your hand in front of your face, etc). It is _not_ a 3D scan. 2) The "TrueDepth" data is not really all that granular. It seems similar to the depth map you get from the rear…

> The scary part, which is vast dystopian databases of facial fingerprints is already being done with normal photographs. The depth data is not needed Exactly what I've said from day one - that Apple's "FaceID is 50x more secure than Touch ID" claim, based on the False Acceptance Rate, was total bullshit. That only works if you're going to throw random data at the authentication mechanism. But someone who's going to…

> It's going to you a 3D profile of your face from your online photos or from CCTV cameras

Good thing I'm not Jason Bourne, and the most likely scenario for someone trying to get into my phone involves my sister's kids.

Re: Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps

#102

Post by 0culus »

adpirz wrote: post #7

I'm honestly less worried about Apple than others. They've at least made some measures to prove that they are willing to go some distance to protect privacy, even losing ground to competitors in voice recognition. Now thinking about co's like Facebook that not only has access to far more imagery of faces tied to sentiments and moments but have shown time and time again that privacy is a secondary concern AND that the…

> Now thinking about co's like Facebook ...

This is partly why I am not installing Facebook or Messenger on my iPhone X. Additionally, both apps are massive time wasters for me and, last time I checked, collectively take up a nontrivial amount of space on device. While I haven't been able to entirely exterminate Facebook from my life, restricting myself to accessing it from a "real" computer only has been most refreshing.

Re: Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps

#103

Post by walterbell »

jrockway wrote: post #83
jakobegger wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re 3) I don’t know any details of Apples implementation, but typically computer vision algorithms integrate data from multiple sensors to generate a 3D model. The more data you have, the more robust the output will be. It’s possible to generate reasonable 3D models of faces from a single photograph. [1] The highest resolution 3D scans I’ve seen are produced by aligning data from multiple high resolution photographies…

And if you're interested in building 3D models from multiple photographs, try Helicon Focus. You take a focus stacked set of images (basically get a macro lens, open it up pretty wide, and take a picture with the focal plane 1cm (etc.) apart until every part of your subject is in sharp focus), and it will look for the sharply-focused parts to infer depth information for the stack. It can then build you a 3D model. Pr…

Is there an iPhone app to capture such images, e.g. using the dual camera?

Re: Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps

#104

Post by santaclaus »

yeldarb wrote: post #13

I've been playing with the TrueDepth Camera APIs on the iPhone X. Some things I've noticed: 1) The ARKit "Face Mesh" seems to be a standard model that is scaled and skewed to fit your face (for example, it ignores glasses, still works if you put your hand in front of your face, etc). It is _not_ a 3D scan. 2) The "TrueDepth" data is not really all that granular. It seems similar to the depth map you get from the rear…

> 1) The ARKit "Face Mesh" seems to be a standard model that is scaled and skewed to fit your face (for example, it ignores glasses, still works if you put your hand in front of your face, etc). It is _not_ a 3D scan.

This is how most (all?) state of the art acquisition methods for standard objects (faces, hands, etc) work. By warping a high res template to fit the data in some optimal manner, you get guarantees on the output topology without having to do tons of messy cleanup.

Re: Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps

#105

Post by gigatexal »

yeldarb wrote: post #13

I've been playing with the TrueDepth Camera APIs on the iPhone X. Some things I've noticed: 1) The ARKit "Face Mesh" seems to be a standard model that is scaled and skewed to fit your face (for example, it ignores glasses, still works if you put your hand in front of your face, etc). It is _not_ a 3D scan. 2) The "TrueDepth" data is not really all that granular. It seems similar to the depth map you get from the rear…

Well that's not what I was sold at the keynote. Has this been verified? I thought my face was being scanned with 30k dots and all that.

Re: Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps

#106

Post by philwelch »

musage wrote: post #97
philwelch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if I don't want to have my face scanned, but nevertheless need to pick up somebody's lost-phone/detonation-device? Shall I just wear a mask? Well...yeah. If you're out in public and your face is visible, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

If you are an apologist for what is the equivalent of having hundreds of people in trenchcoats following every person on the planet, detailing their every public move and storing it forever, you don't have any reasonable expectation of your part in the documentary being underlaid with anything but sinister music.

I don't know if I'm an "apologist" for anything, but what you're describing has been the case for decades by now; it's an inherent property of cell phone networks. By 2005 we already all carried personally identifiable devices with microphones, geolocation, and cameras and a persistent connection to a network.

Re: Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps

#107

Post by StanislavPetrov »

adjkant wrote: post #99
zeep wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a precise wireframe could be as precise as a fingerprint... If it has a very high mesh count, it is just a high resolution 3D model of your face... much more information then what is required to face-id you look at this model for example, it has medium amount of mesh: http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/279553/1...

Not sure why this is being downed. I haven't looked into the details of this case, but the more detailed the wireframe mesh the faces are being fit to, the more possibilities there are, and the lower the likelihood of collisions between two people. Think of it as a hashmap with the number of buckets being determined by the mesh quality. At a certain point, a few collisions won't hinder apps from capitalizing on the i…

Apple is very popular among the HN crowd. Any comment critical of Apple or skeptical of their intentions will be immediately rejected by a substantial number of readers.

Re: Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps

#108

Post by mlindner »

Osmium wrote: post #19
yeldarb wrote: post #13

I've been playing with the TrueDepth Camera APIs on the iPhone X. Some things I've noticed: 1) The ARKit "Face Mesh" seems to be a standard model that is scaled and skewed to fit your face (for example, it ignores glasses, still works if you put your hand in front of your face, etc). It is _not_ a 3D scan. 2) The "TrueDepth" data is not really all that granular. It seems similar to the depth map you get from the rear…

> 2) The "TrueDepth" data is not really all that granular. It seems similar to the depth map you get from the rear-facing cameras on the "plus" sized models. Here's what the sensor data spits out: https://twitter.com/braddwyer/status/930682879977361408 As @braddwyer himself notes, you can probably get a much better mesh integrating over time. It depends how long it takes to capture a single frame, but I imagine that'…

> And yes ... after all, humans are quite capable of identifying people with high accuracy from 2D photographs. Depth maps are not required for there to be serious privacy issues with such databases.

Which would be true if they were actually storing this on the cloud in a form they could access. As far as we know, they are not. That's the point of the "Secure Enclave".

Re: Apple is sharing your facial wireframe with apps

#109

Post by mlindner »

dmart wrote: post #50

You know how some F2P games will allow you to watch video ads in order to e.g. earn extra in-game currency, activate a point multiplier, etc? As it stands, you can start one of these ads and then turn your phone upside down, or look away. How long until an advertising provider makes use of the attention API and makes it so that you can't look away? Seems bleak.

Reject such F2P games. There's lots of F2P games out there.
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