
Russia’s new FindFace app identifies strangers in a crowd with 70% accuracy - Libertatea
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/18/russias-new-findface-app-identifies-strangers-in-a-crowd-with-70-percent-accuracy/
======
andyjohnson0
Previous discussion (yesterday) with 90 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712197)

------
axx
That's the thing with personal pictures online. Most people can't imagine what
is going to happen in the future. People on Hacker News well understand this
issue, but ask your non-computer friends and family.

If you'd tell them, that you can take a picture of a random person and search
that picture out of a pool of people and get their contact info (as a private
company / random programmer with enough data), they won't believe you or tell
you that something like this is only possible in movies.

Even today it's no problem to analyze the Facebook picture of some random
person and calculate a chance of that person being an alcoholic in X years
based on the number of party pictures they share.

Before sharing personal information online, people should not ask themselves
what could be done with that data now, but what is possible with that data in
the future.

If Facebook is going out of business (just as a thought), their data has a lot
of value. Don't think that they will delete everything. It will go to the
highest bidder!

~~~
aub3bhat
This is an unbelievably ridiculous argument, the government has data on almost
entire population thanks to all sort of identification cards and other
innumerable sources of data. Why should corporations and other people be
denied the same access & privilege.

You are spreading pure FUD, out of ignorance and misplaced sense of
paternalism. The reality is that most people correctly understand the trade-
off between privacy and utility. That's why they share information on social
networks. They are not paranoid running around fearing government conspiracy
theories. They just want to enjoy their short lives.

~~~
axx
So what you're saying is, just because our governments collect everything,
everybody else should be allowed to do it too, or stop worrying?

The fight for privacy is not for us, it's for generations to come.

~~~
aub3bhat
>> So what you're saying is, just because our governments collect everything,
everybody else should be allowed to do it too, or stop worrying?

Yes, Strong corporations and public rights, are necessary to ensure, that
government does not becomes too powerful. And there is at least some balance
of power.

>> The fight for privacy is not for us, it's for generations to come.

Please define "us"?

"us" or "people" or "generations" are rhetorical devices, with little basis in
reality. The romantic notion of "people" quickly disappears when those people
either organize into corporations or political parties. At certain level
Corporations & Governments are people, or aggregate expression of will of the
people. The economies of scale necessitates strong corporations which can
protect "people" from government and vice versa.

~~~
jmcmichael
> Yes, Strong corporations and public rights, are necessary to ensure, that
> government does not becomes too powerful. And there is at least some balance
> of power.

Are you suggesting here that corporations are a meaningful brake on state
power?

Given that corporations are a legal fiction only made possible by the state
institutions of law, currency, markets, international treaties, trade, and
war, I don't see how this assertion can be supported; the origin, future,
incentives, and fortunes of states and corporations have always been
inextricably linked.

'Anarcho-capitalist' and libertarians solutions for non-state corporations
have always appeared to me to be shallow hand-waving (speaking as a former
anarcho-capitalist and hand-waver myself).

------
acaloiar
Excuse me – Russia's new FindFace app? I'll have to research this on The
United States of America's Google app.

~~~
bhouston
It is distinctly russian because it works on the social network that is only
popular in Russia, VK.

~~~
snaky
You may be surprised, but Google too is not quite popular in Russia.

------
MasterScrat
Now aggressively poll the new images with GPS location from
Instagram/Twitter/Facebook, identify every face in sight, and build a realtime
map of everyone everywhere!

(Actually for a lot of shots you could probably get by without the GPS
location by recognizing some landmarks in the background)

~~~
nxzero
>> "Actually for a lot of shots you could probably get by without the GPS
location by recognizing some landmarks in the background"

Yes, this is already being done.

EDIT: Curious, why this is getting downvotes, any thought on why?

EDIT-2: Here's an example, though the general gist is you grab millions of
photos with geo-location meta data, then train against this to ID the location
of photos without the location meta-data:

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/25/11112594/google-new-
deep-l...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/25/11112594/google-new-deep-
learning-image-location-planet)

~~~
GavinMcG
Because the comment suggests, without offering any evidence, that there is a
coordinated or automated large-scale effort underway to carry out the previous
comment's plan.

------
dclowd9901
> The algorithm comes from Moscow-based NTechLab, which recently boasted it
> bested Google’s recognition software at MegaFace, a technical challenge
> hosted by the University of Washington.

It's a bit baffling to me why University of Washington was trying to
accelerate this capability. I'm all for pure academia, but this is just
fingerprinting someone's face. The real tech is in being able to map a face
from a 2D image, so why not make the contest about _that_?

~~~
moheeb
Fingerprinting turned out to be one of the biggest crime-fighting tools of the
20th century. Does that debaffle it a bit?

------
vdaniuk
FindFace is already used in Russia to find, identify and attack gays, sex
workers and porn actresses.

One of the incidents [https://globalvoices.org/2016/04/22/facial-recognition-
servi...](https://globalvoices.org/2016/04/22/facial-recognition-service-
becomes-a-weapon-against-russian-porn-actresses/)

------
clentaminator
I wonder how effective systems like
[https://cvdazzle.com/](https://cvdazzle.com/) are against this. Will we all
be putting on masks or face-paint in the future when we go outside?

~~~
3v3rt
Whenever I see some of these 'countermeasures' I usually run them through some
high end commercial face recognition algorithms I have access to. In many of
the cases the countermeasures are completely ineffective. They may fool some
things like opencv DIY algorithms, but not the expensive stuff :). For those
the most effective strategy is to just tilt your head to the left or right a
lot, though that will possibly give you a sore neck and you'll definitely look
silly.

~~~
bsenftner
just shave off your eyebrows, or makeup to make them appear gone. Most (nearly
all) facial feature finders expect eyebrows of some kind. (I work in facial
recognition.)

------
wangii
>> “With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less
than a second from a normal computer,”

With Intel Core i7 5960X (238,310 MIPS at 3.0 GHz), it only takes 238
instructions for a photo?

~~~
aub3bhat
The Google FaceNet and other similar system typically perform an approximate
nearest neighbor search in a ~128 dimensional embedding of faces.

Here is the paper for the reference:
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03832v3.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03832v3.pdf)

Also 70% accuracy is like really really bad.

Here are results from MegaFace Challenge, which involved identifying face in
presence of Million distractors:

[http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/fgnetresults.html](http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/fgnetresults.html)

~~~
matheweis
That was with the FGNet dataset... Ntech labs (incidentally the algorithm
behind FindFace) beat Googlr on the FaceScrub dataset.

[http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/facescrubresults.h...](http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/facescrubresults.html)

------
cm3
With all the data being collected, has anyone been able to use it to defend
themselves based on location and time recorded? I tend to think that if we're
recording all of it, it ought to be immutable and sealed so that one can at
least use it as evidence, but the cynic in me thinks this isn't something the
governing powers have any interest in allowing.

~~~
ryangittins
I think if (more likely, when) we get to the point where people can have an
alibi in this way, it will quickly turn sour. When you're accused of a crime
and you _can 't_ be located during that time, it'll be used to make you look
guilty—not just neutral.

~~~
cm3
My primary concern is who records and stores the data and how trustworthy it
is. If a judge reasonably just believes a printout from
law_inquiry@facebook.com, how am I able to prove the data is wrong? Therefore,
we need standards and tamper proof records just as they are created on a
device or even on servers. It's funny that so much of our ability to live a
somewhat free life without getting locked up depends on cryptography.

------
jernfrost
This is just one of many indicators that Edward Snowden is right about the
importance of privacy in this day and age. With so much of our lives online,
and the ability of technology to interpret that information, allowing spying
agencies free pass to all your online data, is the equivalent of making it
legal for them to install camera's in every room in your house and office.

There needs to be strong privacy rules and transparency on what degree spying
agencies access data about random citizens.

We can not leave it completely to technology to solve this issue for us
because regular users will never have the competency to understand how to
secure their digital presence.

~~~
greggman
I agree with you .. but, the first thing that comes to mind is comparing the
futility of staying private with the futility of stopping piracy.

Most tech people seem to believe piracy (music, video) is effectively
unstoppable. What makes the end of privacy any different?

Of course I want privacy. For current sized cameras I'm pretty sure none are
on (not 100% sure though) but as they get smaller and cheaper and people post
more and more photos and eventually livecast their lives or at least large
chunks of it (it seems like coming eventually whether we want it to or not),
how will we stop the end of privacy anymore than we can stop piracy?

------
fsloth
It sounds that this would be a great tool for street scammers. At least the
performance of the malevolent fortune tellers should be improved considerably.
Find a gullible mark, research their life a bit and then perform the act.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_telling_fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_telling_fraud)

------
known
[https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/face-
api](https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/face-api) AND
[https://how-old.net/](https://how-old.net/)

------
angelbob
Lifestyle business idea: wear somebody's printed-out paper face at a place it
can be recorded (public photos to Flickr feed, etc) as a service.

A customer who uses services of this kind can "prove" they're anywhere in the
world at a given time.

Useful for celebrity misdirection, criminal alibis and the like.

------
MasterScrat
From a purely technical point of view:

Does anyone knows what they are using for face matching? their results sounds
excellent.

~~~
GFischer
There was an article recently on that, light on actual technical content
though.

[http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/russian-startup-n-
te...](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/russian-startup-n-techlab-
upstaged-google-in-face-recognition-562635061.html)

[http://ntechlab.com/](http://ntechlab.com/)

[http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/](http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/)

HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11491264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11491264)

------
id122015
technology is a double edge sword. We'd better adopt a Snowden mindset.

~~~
benevol
Honestly, this evolution became obvious more than 10 years ago.

Btw, Snowden is about illegal mass surveillance by the government (in
collaboration with tech corporations). The app mentioned in the article
however only connects publicly and legally available data (the consumer's
fault).

~~~
fixermark
Agreed with everything except "The consumer's fault." It's the data age now;
information about you will make its way into the global repository without any
direct action on your part.

\- If you're a professional, someone is providing a way for your customers to
audit interactions with you

\- If you're a driver, someone is tracking your car's movements

\- If you buy products, someone is tracking you bought them

\- If you ever communicate online, someone has logged that communication

\- If you're ever seen in public, someone can tag your face

... and after all this, if you piss an individual off enough, that individual
can create a pastebin and drop as much of your personal info on there as they
care to.

We're already past the event horizon of private (easily-gleaned) information
staying private; it's time to re-organize the solution space around the
assumption that the information is public.

~~~
id122015
buying products means tracking card payments. Maybe that was just the start,
then fidelity cards followed, and even Amazon tracks what you search. And
Google to sell you ads.

------
mtgx
If this app can do it with 70% accuracy, then Google, Facebook, and
Microsoft's tech (which may not be currently used for this) can probably do it
with 90%+ accuracy.

------
pasbesoin
Well, I'm glad I kept my FB profile photo too small for automated recognition
(not enough detail), and disabled automatic tagging (I have to approve others'
tags of me before they apply).

Flipside? I'm waiting until waitstaff start refusing to seat Goldman Sachs
assh-les. I can dream, can't I? (Yes, this second paragraph is somewhat
rhetorical, but also with a legitimate point about the possibilities of such
technology.)

------
axelfreeman
If this will be a problem and it's getting abused it will be illegal. It's
also illegal to clone a human from your hairs.

I don't get it. I can also search in a phone book for names or i can contact
goverment help to find. The problem is what happens after you got the
information and this is regulated in laws.

If your data is not on the internet it doesn't mean you are invisible.

------
bhanu423
Can anyone point me in the direction of algorithms and papers involved in
implementing facial recognition over a fairly large audience.

------
jellicle
From three years ago:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/state-
pho...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/state-photo-id-
databases-become-troves-for-
police/2013/06/16/6f014bd4-ced5-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html)

------
kdamken
They must be improving - a few minutes ago on HN this headline read they did
it with 49% accuracy.

------
svig
Theoretically can't Facebook can create a similar app with about 99% accuracy?

On a tangential note, privacy is going to have interesting connotations as we
build wearables and work to forget different ways of socially connecting them.

------
dovdov
Stalkers delight

------
transpy
Ok, it seems this step is done. Face recognition, check. What's next? Does
somebody knows the state of voice recognition (in the sense of ID'ing someone
by his/her voice)?

~~~
soared
70% is pretty bad.

------
jdimov10
Technology increasingly exposes the superficial nature of concepts like
privacy and security. In nature, these things simply do not exist. They are
also completely non-essential to human well-being. Our emotional attachment to
such concepts is not doing us any favours.

Also, you can't be rooting for transparency AND privacy at the same time. You
have to give up on one of these, and when you think about it, you have to
conclude that the losing idea is that of "privacy".

~~~
jdimov10
Yes, I fully understand that I am the ONLY anti-privacy advocate on HN. I
accept all of your downvotes and hold no grudges :) But you are all wrong.

~~~
hack_edu
> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and
> it makes boring reading.

> Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce
> that you expect to get downvoted.

Consider the guidelines regarding worthwhile contributions next time, please.
:)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
jdimov10
My comments are anything but boring.

~~~
LunaSea
Could you please give me your full name and address?

Providing the information publicly shouldn't be an issue since you don't
believe in the concept of privacy.

~~~
jdimov10
My full name and address are already publicly available in countless places,
if you had any legitimate interest you should have been able to find them in
less time than it took you to write that comment. Btw., so are yours.

~~~
LunaSea
Sure I don't pretend that that mine are no accessible but this is most of the
time a conscious choice. I still have privacy but I just choose what
information I make public.

Also for example my address is probably nowhere public because I didn't choose
to publish it.

~~~
jdimov10
All I'm saying is, sure, privacy is comfortable and we are fond of it and we
all have our insecurities, BUT... it's going away, whether we like that or
not. And really, it never actually did exist. But that's okay because we
should still be able to get along just fine without it (to the extent that any
people on Earth ever did get along...) Moreover, I feel that we would actually
be better off and able to move forward faster by giving up on concepts like
privacy and security.

~~~
LunaSea
What do you mean by "giving up concepts like security".

Should banks get rid of vaults and stack money on the street curbs?

------
praeivis
But only if you published your photos in public. If you dont spread your
photos around the web you still safe in crowd.

~~~
mikewilliams
Findface can't identify you, who are you, why are you walking past my house? I
have never seen you before, I'm going to call the police, you're acting
strange.

~~~
Dolores12
Do you expect police to come every time you see a stranger?

~~~
EliRivers
I can imagine things getting to the stage where someone not being findable on
the face register is considered suspicious enough for police attention.

~~~
Dolores12
Being recognized by police and being recognized by random John Doe are
different things.

~~~
EliRivers
They won't be.

------
himanshuy
I downloaded this app yesterday and tried it multiple times. Every time it
gave me wrong result.

