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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

#61

Post by brokencog »

Completely missing the point. "Social Media Site" aka, a place where we put (mostly) public imagery. By definition this is curated, and as the prof says is a self-selected view of ourselves.

But, the point being missed is that OF COURSE people don't look the same "in day to day life" because those social media pics are just a moment of one day. If the prof happened to meet the person moments after the social media picture was taken then ... he would have concluded that "people present themselves truly as they are in reality" ...

My point, the point ignored in the article, is that Social Media is a self-reflective, self-curated snapshot. Not a continuous, objective representation.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#62

Post by gambler »

gwern wrote: post #34

I am not sure this works or that success rates like claimed are possible: > In 70 percent of cases, he was quite easily able to identify the people he had photographed. VKontakte has 280m+ accounts and is the second most popular website in Russia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_%28social_networking%29); the Russian population is ~144m. I can't find any decent estimate of how many Russians use VK, but it seems to b…

I appreciate your skepticism. And I mean that in the most positive way possible. Seems like most of HN visitors areskeptical about almost everything except extraordinary claims regarding AI prowess.

But really, you're being way too generous. 99.63% accuracy was reported on a relatively constrained dataset[1] when being asked a yes-no question: "are these two faces the same"? In our case, however, we're speaking about a search algorithm that tries to match something in a huge database. The accuracy will be way, way worse.

http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#63

Post by roywiggins »

foltz wrote: post #45
cryptoz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem like it would work at all. The makeup and hair styles suggested would make you stand out even more! Sure, 1990s-style facial recognition won't work as reliably, but surely today's systems would flag you right away!

I haven't tested it myself but according to CVdazzle it works. So the next question is how long before facial recognition technology overcomes efforts to confound it. Or how long until legislators get involved. Yes the looks are ridiculous, but most fashion starts out that way. People often look for ways to stand out and being "retro" could enhance the cool factor. What does someone care if a mugger's facial recognit…

>And if a security surveillance system flags you what is the consequence? Who does that consequence apply to?

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35111363

> "What you can do now is link your face-recognition system to Facewatch and it will pull down the watch list that's relevant for your premises and your group," he says. "Then, if someone walks into your premises, it will send you an alert."

So if you have a criminal record, or your face somehow ends up in that database, you could find yourself followed around shops and asked (or told) to leave. These sorts of massive watch lists aren't feasible with merely human recognizers.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#64

Post by brazzledazzle »

foltz wrote: post #32
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…

How long before anti-facial recognition makeup, hair, and accessories becomes fashionable? https://cvdazzle.com

I'm reminded of the comic book/graphic novel Private Eye[1].

[1] http://panelsyndicate.com/comics/tpeye

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#65

Post by roywiggins »

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.

It's creepy because if someone took a picture of you, combed through enough records to attach your name to it, and then browsed through all your online presence, you'd be creeped out. This just automates the process. If they started knocking on your neighbors doors asking about you, you'd be worried too. It's weird to pry into complete strangers' lives uninvited.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#66

Post by superuser2 »

Karlozkiller wrote: post #25
noja wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A photo ID is legally required (via form I-9) to work.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#68

Post by nemothekid »

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 is something that caused Google/Eric Schmidt to say they were going to hold back on facial recognition back in 2011.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/01/facial-recognition-...

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#69

Post by aab0 »

burkaman wrote: post #59
tom_mellior wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The pairs look like the same "person" to me, not one real and one fake. I seem to be alone in this, but... they don't even look like the same person to me. Do we have any confirmation that the pairs show the same person? About 10 million Russian men look like the guys in the second pair of photos.

I think they just picked the two most striking examples for that article. Look at the rest here: https://birdinflight.com/ru/vdohnovenie/fotoproect/06042016-... Most of them are clearly the same person.

I dunno. Some of them clearly are because you can see they have moles in the same place and stuff like that, but a bunch leave me dubious. For example, that woman with the dyed white hair: the hair looks much frizzier/curlier in one than the other. And some I wonder how the face algorithm could possibly have matched them up - the guy in the parka vs the soldier don't even have the same facial hair, never mind how the parka fuzz obscures most of his head. (And you can't see more than a quarter of the next woman's face!) I wonder how much of this matching was manual.

Re: Russian photographer matches random people with social network photos

#70

Post by bigiain »

joe_the_user wrote: post #36
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.

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.

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