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Facial Recognition Software Takes One Glance at You and Brings Up Your Facebook Profile

• Rebecca Boyle via PopSci.com
 

Worried about privacy on the Internet? It may be even worse than you thought — with rapidly improving face recognition technology, your automatically tagged Facebook pictures could help a stranger, or the authorities, quickly identify you on the street.

A simple system that compares Facebook pictures and webcam snapshots can make a positive match after less than three seconds, according to Carnegie Mellon University researchers. Alessandro Acquisti and colleagues presented their findings at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas.

“A stranger could know your last tweet just by looking at you,” Acquisti told CNET’s privacy blog.

The system was able to correlate Facebook profile pictures to webcam shots, and to otherwise anonymous photos on a dating website. The Facebook-webcam system identified about 31 percent of users, and only 10 percent of the dating site users, but the message was clear — anonymity is becoming harder and harder to maintain.

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by David Jackson
Entered on:

    Facebook my ass!

    Even at this late date, I still fail to see the psychotic facination people seem to have with any social substitute website. Or, why anyone believes that there is any such thing as security on the internet.

    More ominously, how could anyone wven pretend to believe that the government wouldn't exploit or abuse the surviellance  potental of such things.

    Everyone would be better for the effort if they just started talking to people, especially their so-called friends. Even the loss of a single life, due to bullying and other mindless crap, is reason enough for everyone to simply say, Enough!

     For those who can't seem to resist anonimous communication, try writing a letter with a phony return address?

     Don't be surprised when the thought police come to visit!



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