New Facial Recognition Software Has Some Critics
Do you have photos floating around online that you would rather not have your name attached to? A new article in The Daily Mail, a newspaper from the United Kingdom, reported on a new software program that has the potential to ascribe a name to every portrait online. This means identifying people from images and photos posted across various search engines, photo galleries, and social networking sites, so you may want to think twice before posting those pics from the party last weekend.
It seems the more advanced facial recognition becomes, the more we are covering issues of privacy, both online and offline, and the new technology is no exception. Certainly there will be discussions and arguments as to what privacy is worth and who gets access to the swaths of recognizable faces online.
Face.com is a company that has produced the new technology that could identify individuals around the web by comparing existing, tagged images of them with new ones. The database is built up from online caches, and already, critics are saying the libraries may lead to employer exploitation. Face.com’s software works by creating an algorithm based on your face’s measurements – distance of the eyes from the nose, size of the mouth, shape of the brow, etc. The company claims it’s 90 percent accurate in tests scanning images from social networking websites.
In an interview with The Daily Mail, Chief Executive of Face.com, Gil Hirsch, said that his company had launched a new service allowing developers to use their facial recognition tech and apply it in their own applications. Hirsch says that the technology has already been used by 5000 developers, allowing searches for people in any photograph.
Facebook already uses a similar system called Photo Finder, and Google is using Picassa, another related program that uses tags to match faces. Some organizations like the Red Cross support the software, saying that it could potentially identify and track lost victims during humanitarian disasters, but others, such as Privacy International say it’s not worth it, at least until the regulations catch up with the technology.
Privacy International director Simon Davies thinks the changes could make individuals quite uneasy, suggesting that regulators have been late to the party as far as protecting individual privacy on the web. Davies suggests a push for far tighter rules.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1305191/Facial-recognition-software-allow-ability-identify-people-photographs-internet.html
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