Carnegie Mellon's Alessandro Acquisti shows how to use Facebook to ID people
on dating sites and on the street
(Credit:
Declan McCullagh/CNET)
LAS VEGAS--Facebook's online privacy woes are
well-known. But here's an offline one: its massive database of profile photos
can be used to identify you as you're walking down the street.
A
Carnegie wholesale abercrombie and
fitch clothing Mellon University researcher today described how he assembled
a database of about 25,000 photographs taken from students' Facebook profiles.
Then he set up a desk in one of the campus buildings and asked willing
volunteers to peer into Webcams.
The results: facial recognition
software put a name to the face of 31 percent of the students after, on average,
less than three seconds of rapid-fire comparisons.
In a few years,
"facial visual searches may become as common as today's text-based searches,"
says Alessandro cheap moncler Acquisti, who
presented his work in collaboration with Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman at the
Black Hat computer security conference here.
As a proof of concept, the
Carnegie Mellon researchers also developed an iPhone app that can take a
photograph of someone, pipe it through facial recognition software, and then
display on-screen that person's name and vital statistics.
This has
"ominous risks for privacy" says Acquisti, an associate professor of information
technology and public policy at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University.
Widespread facial recognition tied to databases with real names will erode the
sense of anonymity that we expect in public, he said.
Another test
compared 277,978 Facebook profiles (the software found unique faces in about 40
percent) against nearly 6,000 profiles extracted from an unnamed dating Web
site.
About 1 in 10 of the dating site's members--nearly all of whom
used pseudonyms--turned out to be identifiable.
Facebook christian louboutin
outlet isn't the only source of profile data, of course. LinkedIn or Google+
might work. But because of its vast database and its wide-open profile photos,
Facebook was the obvious choice. (Facebook's privacy policy says: "Your name and
profile picture do not have privacy settings.")
Facial recognition
technology, which has been developing in labs for decades, is finally going
mainstream. Face.com opened its doors to developers last year; the technology is
built into Apple's Aperture software and Flickr. Google bought a
face-recognition technology in the last few weeks, and Facebook's automated
photo-tagging has drawn privacy scrutiny.
In the hands of law
enforcement, however, face recognition can raise novel civil liberties concerns.
If university researchers can assemble such an extensive database with just
Facebook, police agencies or their contractors could do far more with DMV or
passport photographs--something that the FBI has been doing for years. (The U.S.
Army partially funded the Carnegie Mellon research.)
Acquisti is the
first to admit that the technology isn't perfect. It works best with frontal
face photos, not ones taken at an angle. The larger the database becomes, the
more time comparisons take, and the more false-positive errors arise.
On
the other hand, face recognition technology is advancing quickly, especially for
nonfrontal photos. "What we did uggs on sale
on the street with mobile devices today will be accomplished in less intrusive
ways tomorrow," he says. "A stranger could know your last tweet just by looking
at you."
Just because they were pranks doesn't mean they weren't harmful,
though. Hypponen demonstrated a number of early computer viruses from which he
had removed the infectors, including one called Disk Destroyer. This particular
piece of nastiness would copy the contents of your hard disk into the RAM, then
wipe your drive. It then loaded a rudimentary slot machine-style. game, and gave
you five chances to win. If you won, it would reload your data back onto your
hard drive. If you lost, your data was permanently wiped out.
Though
viruses continued to get more and more complex, it wasn't until 2003 that things
began to change. First, Microsoft began to take computer viruses seriously, he
said, because worm infections were causing serious Internet traffic packet loss
and causing real-world damage. Trains in 2003 were stopped around Washington,
D.C., because the Windows computers controlling the signals and routing systems
had crashed. "This is the basic reason why serious problems like these were
finally taken seriously," Hypponen noted.
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