WEB Notes: IOS (Apple) devices already sort your photos into folders by faces. This came out in the latest IOS release. You can then “name” the face. Technology is advancing extremely fast. This is certainly not an evil, however, if you and I have this technology then imagine what the NSA data centers and government databases we have been reading about for years have. Not to mention all the information we publicly provide the world in the form of social media.
Smartphone users will soon be able to identify people using a facial recognition app for the very first time.
London-based firm Blippar is set to add the Augmented Reality Face Profile feature to its app enabling users to scan – or ‘blipp’ a face, either in person, or from an image or TV.
This will unlock a profile with information about that person including links to their social media profiles.
I’m curios to find out how well (or how poorly) this works in private hands, because I think the technology is over-hyped as a surveillance threat.
Several years ago it only had a 50% success rate, and although I’m sure that’s been improved somewhat, it still seems to me like it would be an easy technology to defeat.
The technology does work much better than it used to. Accuracy under good conditions is typically in the upper 90% range. But it’s not at all perfect, and the error rate increases as the database size increases. FR also does much better with straight-on frontal views of the face than with angled shots, especially if only one eye is visible.
Systems that try to ID everyone in real time don’t appear to be feasible — at least not yet. The FBI’s Next Generation Identification system works by having state and local pigs send in photos or snippets of video with images of suspects. Then specialists at the NGI center analyze the images and return a set of matches ranked in order of probabilities.
Countermeasures? A full-head mask showing minimal skin, especially around the eyes, is obviously the best. If that’s not an option, then sunglasses (especially the mirrored kind) will probably degrade accuracy. Wide-brimmed hats, hoodies, or umbrellas when it’s raining should help a lot with high-mounted cameras.
At least the company requires you to “opt in” to their database (and presumably submit one or more photos) in order for this to work. I can’t imagine why anyone would be stupid enough to actually do that, since it basically invites stalking. But there’s no shortage of jackasses out there.