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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

#81

Post by LunaSea »

jdimov10 wrote: post #69
hack_edu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Could you please give me your full name and address?

Providing the information publicly shouldn't be an issue since you don't believe in the concept of privacy.

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

#82

Post by bduerst »

kardos wrote: post #21
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…

That's a really hard battle to fight, even for those of us who understand the full implications. The entire population is not going to drop facebook overnight, it does deliver some sort of value to them despite it's heavy privacy price. I'm beginning to believe that the answer is to simply devalue all that information. We can do it in some contexts on the technical side, for example, rotating passwords devalues stole…

I think is more phobia about technology than an actual problem.

I get that this is a radical view on HN, but when topics like this come up, it's always slippery slopes and fantastic nightmare scenarios (like 3D printing your face). I feel like we're in the 1980's debating over how to handle traffic laws for our flying cars in 2010 just because someone built one.

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

#83

Post by aub3bhat »

allemagne wrote: post #65
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…

>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,…

>> Should we be offering that access and privilege to governments?

They already have it.

>> your argument seems to be that it's "unfair" not to offer the same to businesses? Bizarre.

In Sorrell vs IMS Health (2011) Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor IMS Health, that Commercial Speech was protected under First Amendment. This case is particularly relevant since IMS Health counsel successfully argued that Government could use Prescription data to market cheap generics to physicians however Pharmaceutical companies were prohibited from using the same information. The judges decided that this was unfair and amounted to restriction of commercial speech.

And few days ago the US Supreme Court in 6-2 decision in Spokeo inc. vs Robins ruled that there has to be a concrete evidence of harm/injury before data brokers can be sued.

So regarding my reasoning being Bizarre I think not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrell_v._IMS_Health_Inc

http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/spokeo-inc-v-robi...

http://fortune.com/2016/05/16/supreme-court-spokeo-decision/

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

#84

Post by btown »

kardos wrote: post #21
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…

That's a really hard battle to fight, even for those of us who understand the full implications. The entire population is not going to drop facebook overnight, it does deliver some sort of value to them despite it's heavy privacy price. I'm beginning to believe that the answer is to simply devalue all that information. We can do it in some contexts on the technical side, for example, rotating passwords devalues stole…

For your point about face recognition, this art project may be of interest to you: https://cvdazzle.com/

A very interesting idea that email privacy might realistically turn into a steganography problem - how do you make it so the real content is indistinguishable from fake content, and given that this is imperfect, make it so that all but the most sophisticated attackers wouldn't be able to tell that a hidden message even exists?

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

#85

Post by pjc50 »

Dolores12 wrote: post #6
mikewilliams wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Findface can't identify you, who are you, why are you walking past my house? I have never seen you before, I'm going to call the police, you're acting strange.

Do you expect police to come every time you see a stranger?

This was how the Trayvon Martin shooting started: Zimmerman saw someone "suspicious" in his neighborhood and decided to confront him.

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

#86

Post by jdimov10 »

LunaSea wrote: post #81
jdimov10 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comments are anything but boring.

Could you please give me your full name and address? Providing the information publicly shouldn't be an issue since you don't believe in the concept of privacy.

My full name and address are already publicly available in countless places, if you had any legitimate interest you should have been able to find them in less time than it took you to write that comment. Btw., so are yours.

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

#87

Post by dclowd9901 »

> The algorithm comes from Moscow-based NTechLab, which recently boasted it bested Google’s recognition software at MegaFace, a technical challenge hosted by the University of Washington.

It's a bit baffling to me why University of Washington was trying to accelerate this capability. I'm all for pure academia, but this is just fingerprinting someone's face. The real tech is in being able to map a face from a 2D image, so why not make the contest about that?

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

#88

Post by logicchains »

imgabe wrote: post #77
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…

> Even today it's no problem to analyze the Facebook picture of some random person and calculate a chance of that person being an alcoholic in X years based on the number of party pictures they share. The problem is not that this calculation exists, but that people so easily misinterpret it. It doesn't mean "Person with these photos has a 65% chance of being an alcoholic in 5 years", what it REALLY means is "65% of t…

The calculation is useful from a marketing perspective. If I decide to advertise alcoholism treatments to these people in five years' time, I'll have a lot more success then if I'd just picked people at random to advertise to.

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

#89

Post by kardos »

bduerst wrote: post #82
kardos wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really hard battle to fight, even for those of us who understand the full implications. The entire population is not going to drop facebook overnight, it does deliver some sort of value to them despite it's heavy privacy price. I'm beginning to believe that the answer is to simply devalue all that information. We can do it in some contexts on the technical side, for example, rotating passwords devalues stole…

I think is more phobia about technology than an actual problem. I get that this is a radical view on HN, but when topics like this come up, it's always slippery slopes and fantastic nightmare scenarios (like 3D printing your face). I feel like we're in the 1980's debating over how to handle traffic laws for our flying cars in 2010 just because someone built one.

> it's always slippery slopes and fantastic nightmare scenarios

It already is a nightmare scenario for some [1]. How bad should we let things get before we try to fix them?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11721600

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

#90

Post by LunaSea »

jdimov10 wrote: post #86
LunaSea wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please give me your full name and address? Providing the information publicly shouldn't be an issue since you don't believe in the concept of privacy.

My full name and address are already publicly available in countless places, if you had any legitimate interest you should have been able to find them in less time than it took you to write that comment. Btw., so are yours.

Sure I don't pretend that that mine are no accessible but this is most of the time a conscious choice. I still have privacy but I just choose what information I make public.

Also for example my address is probably nowhere public because I didn't choose to publish it.

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