As processing power becomes cheaper and smarter software is produced, it seems inevitable that more and more people and organizations will begin to identify people automatically by recognizing their faces with surveillance cameras.
London’s Heathrow airport is planning to install such a system, and Facebook may be the ultimate database to let freelancers do it themselves.
To me, it is all rather worrisome. At a basic level, life becomes more paranoid and less creative and interesting when you are being watched at all times and all of your actions are being archived forever. It’s only a matter of time before photos from every fun party ever are being combed through by investigative journalists hoping to catch someone who has become famous in an embarrassing-looking situation. Facial recognition allows for the creation of databases that can be used for truly evil purposes, from suppression of political dissent to stalking and blackmail.
Like nerve gas, facial recognition technology is probably one of those things that it would be better if we could un-invent.
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William Gibson’s novel Zero History raises some of the issues associated with ubiquitous surveillance.
The police are already using facial recognition technology in Canada.
Tech.view
Smile: you’re on camera!
Face recognition is only the beginning
DOES that new feature increasingly found in pocket-sized digital cameras—face-recognition technology—really work? It’s actually a lot cleverer than you think. A few years ago, it would have needed a shoe-box of electronics to drive it, and it would still have been hit-or-miss. But in the brutally competitive world of digital photography, Canon, Pentax and Fuji have honed the technology so their popular digicams can take more striking pictures by finding, and then focusing on, the faces in the viewfinder.
With 70% of all photographs being taken primarily of people, much is to be gained from using a face-recognition algorithm stored in the camera’s chip. This scans the image in the viewfinder for a shape resembling a human face—ie, eyes, ears, nose and chin. Once located, the camera can then adjust the focus exclusively for that part of the picture. Some cameras can recognise up to ten faces in a scene and set an average focus, or select just one face from a group and focus on that.
To prevent the camera from locking on to faces in the background, the algorithms used in today’s digicams tend to ignore features smaller than 10% of the viewfinder’s height. The result is a pin-sharp image of the subject’s facial features—the part we’re interested in—amid a slightly blurrier foreground and background. Niftier still, the algorithm can also capture the face’s actual location within the scene. That lets the user zoom in automatically on the face immediately after the picture has been taken, to check everything is okay before saving it.
ICBC is the British Columbia provincial crown corporation with a monopoly on the issuance of basic auto insurance in BC and the dominant insurer in the optional coverage. This week it was reported in the Globe and Mail that ICBC offered to the Vancouver police the use of its facial recognition technology to assist in the investigation of the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots. The Vancouver Police have not taken up this offer.
I am simply now reporting on this development, not really knowing what to think – with feelings ranging from support so that the hooligan rioters can be identified to concern for setting up a precedent that can be misused.
I am sure that there are benign and positive reasons to have this technology , including the original intended to catch and verify speeding drivers.
But I am uncertain considering the potential abuse. It s difficult to un-invent something. Nuclear weapons come to mind.
SOCIAL NETWORKING Facebook face-recognition not available to Canadians
ANITA ELASH Facebook’s controversial facial-recognition technology for photographs will not be available to Canadian users, the social-networking site says.
A spokesperson for Facebook did not say why Canadians would not get access to the feature but wrote in an e-mail: “Not all of our launches roll out globally and each of our different products and features have varying launch schedules, and we don’t have plans to roll this feature out in Canada at this time.” The feature, referred to by Facebook as a “tag suggestion,” has raised concerns about privacy since it was launched in the United States in December. It recognizes faces in new photos and automatically suggests names of friends in photos as they are uploaded. Facebook users who do not want their photos tagged are not asked their permission but must opt out of using the feature.
A coalition of digital rights groups in the U.S. has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that users are not fully informed of the biometric data that is “secretly” being collected about them. A group of privacy watchdogs from European Union countries is also investigating possible privacy violations.
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TIME TO LEAD / BIOMETRIC IDENTIFICATION It’s a reality: facial recognition and privacy
ANN CAVOUKIAN Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario One of the most common forms of biometric identification is when our face is compared with a stored facial image, such as a driver’s licence or passport photo. Facial-recognition technology automates this process.
First, a biometric “template,” or representation of you, is generated from measurements of your physiological traits (in this case, the image of your face), and retained in a database. Further samples from captured facial images may then be compared against this template – if there’s a match, then you’re identified.
Imagine a scenario where you’re walking down the street or attending a sports event or shopping at a mall, and your photo is taken, identified, tagged and matched against a database of facial templates, without your knowledge or consent. This would be an affront to privacy that should not be tolerated.
Two key developments are making this scenario possible. First, sophisticated, high-resolution cameras in surveillance systems – and now conveniently embedded in our mobile devices – are allowing for the frequent capture of high-quality facial images “on the move.” Second, software is now available that is capable of indexing vast numbers of photos, allowing for the creation of biometric databases.
As Internet giants Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. race to expand their facial-recognition abilities, new research shows how powerful, and potentially detrimental to privacy, these tools have become.
Armed with nothing but a snapshot, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh successfully identified about one-third of the people they tested, using a powerful facial-recognition technology recently acquired by Google.
Mug-Shot Industry Will Dig Up Your Past, Charge You to Bury It Again
Philip Cabibi, a 31-year-old applications administrator in Utah, sat at his computer one recent Sunday evening and performed one of the compulsive rituals of the Internet Age: the ego search. He typed his name into Google to take a quick survey of how the internet sees him, like a glance in the mirror.
There were two LinkedIn hits, three White Pages listings, a post he made last year to a Meetup forum for Italian-Americans in the Salt Lake City area. Then, coming in 10th place — barely crawling onto the first page of search results — was a disturbing item.
“Philip Cabibi Mugshot,” read the title. The description was “Mug shot for Philip Cabibi booked into the Pinellas County jail.”
When he clicked through, Cabibi was greeted with his mug shot and booking information from his 2007 drunk-driving arrest in Florida. It’s an incident in Cabibi’s life that he isn’t proud of, and one that he didn’t expect to find prominently listed in his search results four years later, for all the world to see.
Developments in Facial Recognition
Eventually, it will work. You’ll be able to wear a camera that will automatically recognize someone walking towards you, and a earpiece that will relay who that person is and maybe something about them. None of the technologies required to make this work are hard, it’s just a matter of getting the error rate down low enough for it to be a useful system. And there have been a number of recent research results and news stories that illustrate what this new world might look like.
The police want this sort of system. I already blogged about MORIS, an iris-scanning technology that several police forces in the U.S. are using. The next step is the face-scanning glasses that the Brazilian police claim they will be wearing at the 2014 World Cup.
“A bunch of vigilantes are organizing a Google Group dedicated to using recently revealed facial recognition tools to identify looters in the London riots. While Vancouver discussed doing something similar after the Stanley Cup riots, the city never actually moved forward on it. Ring of Steel London, though, is far more likely to incorporate FRT into its investigative work.”
“Although we think it’s generally a pretty nifty feature, valid concerns over the misuse of Facebook’s auto-recognition tagging have lead Germany to ban it entirely. That’s right — Facebook in its current state is now illegal. The German government, which possesses perhaps the world’s most adamant privacy laws as a result of postwar abuse, considers Facebook’s facial recognition a violation of ‘the right to anonymity.’”
Face recognition
Anonymous no more
You can’t hide—from anybody
IF YOUR face and name are anywhere on the web, you may be recognised whenever you walk the streets—not just by cops but by any geek with a computer. That seems to be the conclusion from some new research on the limits of privacy.
For suspected miscreants, and people chasing them, face-recognition technology is old hat. Brazil, preparing for the soccer World Cup in 2014, is already trying out pairs of glasses with mini-cameras attached; policemen wearing them could snap images of faces, easy to compare with databases of criminals. More authoritarian states love such methods: photos are taken at checkpoints, and images checked against recent participants in protests.
But could such technology soon be used by anyone at all, to identify random passers-by and unearth personal details about them? A study which is to be unveiled on August 4th at Black Hat, a security conference in Las Vegas, suggests that day is close. Its authors, Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman, all at America’s Carnegie Mellon University, ran several experiments that show how three converging technologies are undermining privacy. One is face-recognition software itself, which has improved a lot. The researchers also used “cloud computing” services, which provide lots of cheap processing power. And they went to social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, where most users post real names and photos of themselves.
Facial monitoring
The all-telling eye
Webcams can now spot which ads catch your gaze, read your mood and check your vital signs
IMAGINE browsing a website when a saucy ad for lingerie catches your eye. You don’t click on it, merely smile and go to another page. Yet it follows you, putting up more racy pictures, perhaps even the offer of a discount. Finally, irked by its persistence, you frown. “Sorry for taking up your time,” says the ad, and promptly desists from further pestering. Creepy. But making online ads that not only know you are looking at them but also respond to your emotions will soon be possible, thanks to the power of image-processing software and the ubiquity of tiny cameras in computers and mobile devices.
Uses for this technology would not, of course, be confined to advertising. There is ample scope to deploy it in areas like security, computer gaming, education and health care. But admen are among the first to embrace the idea in earnest. That is because it helps answer, at least online, clients’ perennial carp: that they know half the money they spend on advertising is wasted, but they don’t know which half.
That’s it! I am sticking electrical tape over the lenses of all my webcams.
Face Recognition Makes the Leap From Sci-Fi
FACIAL recognition technology is a staple of sci-fi thrillers like “Minority Report.”
SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facial detection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specific bar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where to go. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.
As SceneTap suggests, techniques like facial detection, which perceives human faces but does not identify specific individuals, and facial recognition, which does identify individuals, are poised to become the next big thing for personalized marketing and smart phones. That is great news for companies that want to tailor services to customers, and not so great news for people who cherish their privacy. The spread of such technology — essentially, the democratization of surveillance — may herald the end of anonymity.
And this technology is spreading. Immersive Labs, a company in Manhattan, has developed software for digital billboards using cameras to gauge the age range, sex and attention level of a passer-by. The smart signs, scheduled to roll out this month in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, deliver ads based on consumers’ demographics. In other words, the system is smart enough to display, say, a Gillette ad to a male passer-by rather than an ad for Tampax.
“I just noticed that not only are all Afghans going to have their biometric data (fingerprints and iris scans) recorded but the government plans to share it with the U.S. From the article: ‘Gathering the data does not stop at Afghanistan’s borders, however, since the military shares all of the biometrics it collects with the United States Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security through interconnected databases.’ Talk about ‘know thine enemy’ (or I guess, for now, friend). Does this foretell the near future when the U.S. govt. (and by extension, Chinese hackers) have the biometrics of almost everyone alive?”
Plate Readers Abound in DC Area, With Little Regard For Privacy
A small magazine in Victoria, BC just uncovered a massive public traffic surveillance system deployed in Canada. Here’s a quote from the article: ‘Normally, area police manually key in plate numbers to check suspicious cars in the databases of the Canadian Police Information Center and ICBC. With [Automatic License Plate Recognition], for $27,000, a police cruiser is mounted with two cameras and software that can read license plates on both passing and stationary cars. According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy. … In August 2011, VicPD Information and Privacy Manager Debra Taylor called me to explain that, even though VicPD had the ALPR system in one of their cruisers, the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] ran the system, and I should contact them for any information. “We actually don’t have a program,” Taylor said. “We don’t have any documents per se.” … A month later, Taylor handed over 600 pages. … [The claim they kept no documents] was apparently only in reference to digital information. VicPD had kept 500 pages of written, hard-copy logs of every ALPR hit they’d ever seen.
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