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Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy

#61

Post by Houshalter »

aub3bhat wrote: post #44
axx wrote: post #9

That's the thing with personal pictures online. Most people can't imagine what is going to happen in the future. People on Hacker News well understand this issue, but ask your non-computer friends and family. If you'd tell them, that you can take a picture of a random person and search that picture out of a pool of people and get their contact info (as a private company / random programmer with enough data), they won…

This is an unbelievably ridiculous argument, the government has data on almost entire population thanks to all sort of identification cards and other innumerable sources of data. Why should corporations and other people be denied the same access & privilege. You are spreading pure FUD, out of ignorance and misplaced sense of paternalism. The reality is that most people correctly understand the trade-off between priva…

This is an unbelievably ridiculous argument. Just because the government has something doesn't mean everyone can or should.

Re: Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy

#62

Post by dysfunction »

MasterScrat wrote: post #15

Now aggressively poll the new images with GPS location from Instagram/Twitter/Facebook, identify every face in sight, and build a realtime map of everyone everywhere! (Actually for a lot of shots you could probably get by without the GPS location by recognizing some landmarks in the background)

So, Marauder's Map for the whole world?

Re: Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy

#64

Post by beachstartup »

wangii wrote: post #30

>> “With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer,” With Intel Core i7 5960X (238,310 MIPS at 3.0 GHz), it only takes 238 instructions for a photo?

"from" a normal computer. meaning a terminal, connected to the internet.

Re: Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy

#65

Post by allemagne »

aub3bhat wrote: post #44
axx wrote: post #9

That's the thing with personal pictures online. Most people can't imagine what is going to happen in the future. People on Hacker News well understand this issue, but ask your non-computer friends and family. If you'd tell them, that you can take a picture of a random person and search that picture out of a pool of people and get their contact info (as a private company / random programmer with enough data), they won…

This is an unbelievably ridiculous argument, the government has data on almost entire population thanks to all sort of identification cards and other innumerable sources of data. Why should corporations and other people be denied the same access & privilege. You are spreading pure FUD, out of ignorance and misplaced sense of paternalism. The reality is that most people correctly understand the trade-off between priva…

>Why should corporations and other people be denied the same access & privilege.

Should we be offering that access and privilege to governments? Assuming that we should, your argument seems to be that it's "unfair" not to offer the same to businesses? Bizarre. Perhaps you can clarify.

>The reality is that most people correctly understand the trade-off between privacy and utility.

I would argue against that. However, even if "only" something like 20-30% of people don't understand the trade-off, that's a huge problem. Additionally, those who understand the trade-off that they are personally making in the present may not be giving thought to problems it will have for them personally in the future (the argument of the commenter you are responding to), or problems access to huge amounts of data causes in society right now or in the future.

Re: Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy

#66

Post by kardos »

aub3bhat wrote: post #44
axx wrote: post #9

That's the thing with personal pictures online. Most people can't imagine what is going to happen in the future. People on Hacker News well understand this issue, but ask your non-computer friends and family. If you'd tell them, that you can take a picture of a random person and search that picture out of a pool of people and get their contact info (as a private company / random programmer with enough data), they won…

This is an unbelievably ridiculous argument, the government has data on almost entire population thanks to all sort of identification cards and other innumerable sources of data. Why should corporations and other people be denied the same access & privilege. You are spreading pure FUD, out of ignorance and misplaced sense of paternalism. The reality is that most people correctly understand the trade-off between priva…

> Why should corporations and other people be denied the same access & privilege.

Why should I be denied the option to keep my personal information private from said corporations/people?

Re: Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy

#67

Post by aub3bhat »

Houshalter wrote: post #61
aub3bhat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unbelievably ridiculous argument, the government has data on almost entire population thanks to all sort of identification cards and other innumerable sources of data. Why should corporations and other people be denied the same access & privilege. You are spreading pure FUD, out of ignorance and misplaced sense of paternalism. The reality is that most people correctly understand the trade-off between priva…

This is an unbelievably ridiculous argument. Just because the government has something doesn't mean everyone can or should.

You do realize the irony in your argument, considering its the Russian government which has probably the worst track record in recent times when it comes to a corrupt government abusing its power.

What you are essentially saying is that [1] this is bad but a government having a similar tool is fine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine

Re: Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy

#68

Post by matheweis »

aub3bhat wrote: post #49
wangii wrote: post #30

>> “With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer,” With Intel Core i7 5960X (238,310 MIPS at 3.0 GHz), it only takes 238 instructions for a photo?

The Google FaceNet and other similar system typically perform an approximate nearest neighbor search in a ~128 dimensional embedding of faces. Here is the paper for the reference: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03832v3.pdf Also 70% accuracy is like really really bad. Here are results from MegaFace Challenge, which involved identifying face in presence of Million distractors: http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/fgnet…

That was with the FGNet dataset... Ntech labs (incidentally the algorithm behind FindFace) beat Googlr on the FaceScrub dataset.

http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/facescrubresults.h...

Re: Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy

#69

Post by jdimov10 »

hack_edu wrote: post #60
jdimov10 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I fully understand that I am the ONLY anti-privacy advocate on HN. I accept all of your downvotes and hold no grudges :) But you are all wrong.

> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. > Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted. Consider the guidelines regarding worthwhile contributions next time, please. :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My comments are anything but boring.

Re: Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy

#70

Post by digi_owl »

axx wrote: post #9

That's the thing with personal pictures online. Most people can't imagine what is going to happen in the future. People on Hacker News well understand this issue, but ask your non-computer friends and family. If you'd tell them, that you can take a picture of a random person and search that picture out of a pool of people and get their contact info (as a private company / random programmer with enough data), they won…

For me the trick seems to be to get people to treat the net as if it was downtown during high noon.

Just because you are sitting there typing in your undies do not mean that what you post has the same privacy.

Also the worrying bit is not so much the data, as the actions taken on their basis.

Denying someone a job because they have a few photos of them enjoying a colorful drink is just the tip of the iceberg.

What about the day a kill shot is approved because the computer says the face is above a certain likelihood of being some big bad terrorist? At 70% there is still a 1 in 4 chance of being wrong.

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