
How to Find Facebook Users on Match.com by Using Face Recognition Tools - khakimov
http://artemyankov.com/post/18307807152/how-to-find-facebook-users-on-match-com-by-using-face
======
dotBen
There's going to be a day, and I mean a specific day, when Facebook, Google or
someone launches a product that lets you search for all instances of your face
on the Internet.

You'll type your name in, confirm some images of your face and then be
returned with pages and pages of photos of you in them.

You'll see photos you recognize, photos you don't _(ie ones that you were
never formally tagged in)_ and photos with you in the background that you had
no idea existed.

It's going to be a day of mixed emotions. Photos are memories, and they'll be
happy memories of events and places you had totally forgotten about. They'll
also be embarrassment as you are presented with situations you forgot existed
or thought no one would ever know about - perhaps as tame as you being drunk
at a college party or as serious as evidence you were at some event or place
you shouldn't have been at or with some person you shouldn't have been with.

You'll then repeat the above for your friends, family, partners and co-
workers. We all will.

The technology is already there, it's just not being implemented in this way
yet. But this experiment just shows how close this is to happening. And the
ethical, moral and legal issues it's going to raise.

It's going to be a very interesting day.

~~~
kmfrk
With webcams in all laptops, and iMacs - Cinema Displays too? - there's no
need to upload a file. Push a button and allow the webcam to snap a photo, and
there you go.

It really bothers me than I can't opt out of getting a laptop with a webcam.

~~~
felipemnoa
>>It really bothers me than I can't opt out of getting a laptop with a webcam.

If you feel this way just paint the camera lens with a permanent black marker.

~~~
kmfrk
I put tape on it, and I plan on getting a vinyl sticker for my MacBook, but
unless I decide to specifically design one, it's going to look ridiculous.

~~~
eli
It already exists: <http://www.theipatch.com/>

Have to be honest, though, I don't fully understand the concern. Is it that
malware will secretly snap photos of you?

~~~
kmfrk
That and my own stupidity.

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joering2
this would be a great idea for the dating website, although it wont solve
chicken-egg problem.

most women i ever went out from match had pictures with their boyfriends on
their profile that looked pretty similar to me! it would be an interesting
approach: you upload a picture of yourself and reverse-match.com searches
through database of pictures (that women with their boyfriend upload but dont
have to be visible anywhere on the site) and as a result you getting list of
women that had pictures with guys that look similar to you.

~~~
joering2
apparently Im still learning HN. any idea why I got downvoted here?

~~~
bpodgursky
Seems pedantic, but a lot of people use punctuation as a signal. Couldn't hurt
to capitalize properly.

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spoiledtechie
I have thought about this too and while not to break from the Match.com
discussion.

This is a big dilemma where I work, but not for match.com. Women are finding
themselves being placed online with pictures of themselves in different
positions from their camera phones. Mostly from Ex BFs or people that just
wanted to be upsetting to that person. We are actually dealing with facial
recognition to try and find those women through various websites and make sure
they know their pictures have been placed online. There is a small amount of
money that can be made through lawyers to have the perp who placed them online
sued.

One day, you will be able to search facebook with all your "dirty" images and
find those 18,19,20,21 year olds that well didn't want their pictures made
public....

------
alapshah
I do this in reverse quite frequently. I'm on OKCupid and when I want to find
out more about someone I'm interested in, I use Google Images reverse image
search (<http://www.google.com/imghp>) - click on the little camera and dump
the img url. I would say about 30% of the time it leads me to their same photo
on some other site, after which I have their full name and can do more
background checking.

~~~
okamiueru
I assume you're aware of TinEye (<http://www.tineye.com/>), which sometimes
gives different results. Google is generally better, but can't hurt to double-
check.

------
jfarmer
Artem should add

    
    
      pre code {
        white-space: pre-wrap;
      }
    

to his CSS, so the code doesn't cause a horizontal scrollbar to appear.

~~~
blhack
Comments like this are why I love HN. It's absolutely no surprise to me that
your account is as old as it is.

~~~
jcr
Have you discovered the super cool part of jfarmer's suggestion?

You can select and copy the wrapped text (code), and the lines, when pasted,
are not wrapped. In other words, the line breaks in the original text/code
remain intact.

With a bit of userContent.css manipulation in firefox, you can force this on
all places (<pre>, <code>, ...) where it's useful.

------
retube
> What we need to do is to run HTTP requests asynchronously. There is a number
> of way to achieve that (no, using threads is not a way)

\- why is threads not a possible solution? Is this something to do with Ruby?

~~~
gerrit
Yes ruby threads will block on all IO

------
kenrikm
Interesting, so then the few people who still use match.com (after you filter
out scams and such) don't even have to pay for it because they can contact the
other person though Facebook once they match the photos.

~~~
dotBen
No because Face.com will only search from a master list of photos you provide.
If you go the route of using your Facebook account, it will only identify
faces from the pool of your friends.

Technically, they could go further but they don't.

So specifically, this hack is telling you which of your friends are on Match.
If you don't already know someone you find on Match, this isn't going to help
you (unless Face.com change the way their tool works)

------
akozak
Keep in mind that it could be a violation of both sites' ToS to do this.

------
vain
what works rather well is google reverse image search. While it doesn't seem
to do face recognition, if the image is a resized version of one on facebook,
as they often are, it'll straight to the user's facebook profile.

------
pavel_lishin
Can anyone recommend a face-recognition algorithm that I could run locally?
I'd like to tag a lot of my photos, but I'm afraid I'll hit rate limits.

~~~
khakimov
This can help to figure out [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/953714/face-
recognition-l...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/953714/face-recognition-
library)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Thanks!

------
nithinpb
We did this last year in our research. We used Pitt Patt software instead of
face.com. Here is the link: [http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/face-
recognition-study-FA...](http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/face-recognition-
study-FAQ/)

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four
Excellent piece of work. Useful, quick and subversive. I look forward to your
next off-the-cuff project!

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alpb
Great job! I am wondering how does this process take for Match.com case?

