
Face recognition app taking Russia by storm may bring end to public anonymity - mr_sturd
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/17/findface-face-recognition-app-end-public-anonymity-vkontakte
======
keiferski
_Kabakov says the app could revolutionise dating: “If you see someone you
like, you can photograph them, find their identity, and then send them a
friend request.” The interaction doesn’t always have to involve the rather
creepy opening gambit of clandestine street photography, he added: “It also
looks for similar people. So you could just upload a photo of a movie star you
like, or your ex, and then find 10 girls who look similar to her and send them
messages.”_

Sounds like neither of the founders has been on a date lately.

~~~
informatimago
Indeed. The latest fad in dating is smell dating

[http://uselesspress.org/things/smell-
dating/](http://uselesspress.org/things/smell-dating/)

Waving an electronic nose around is even more inconspicuous. Now you could
have an app that would match the current odors smelled around and your state
of mind, and automatically match them with a database to point you to people
giving you good feelings.

~~~
Kristine1975
Is this from this year's Stupid Hackathon?
([http:////www.stupidhackathon.com/](http:////www.stupidhackathon.com/))
Because it totally could be.

~~~
kough
Same people involved in both Useless Press and the hackathon

------
joshfraser
Facebook has the capability to do these types of visual searches internally
and they've almost certainly shared some of those tools with the US gov.
Remember, Facebook took money from In-Q-Tel (the CIA's VC fund) and have close
ties with lots of three letter agencies.

In a way, what's happening in Russia is better for society because it means
the general public is aware of the technology and it's implications. Here in
the US we presume we have a lot more privacy that we actually do.

~~~
mverwijs
Reminds me of "Right now, your government is doing things you think only other
governments do."

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wU92eycwmxY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wU92eycwmxY)

~~~
teddyh
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU92eycwmxY#t=3m41s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU92eycwmxY#t=3m41s)

“Right now, our government is doing things we think only other countries do.”

------
sologoub
This feels like the makings of an off-line equivalent of a supercookie -
people that visited X-store must be interested in Y-goods, plus you can cross-
ref your customer data with such a database and create a deep profile. You
don't need a social network corpus for that, though one would make matching
and new customer identification easier.

And unless you are into serious plastic surgery, there isn't really a clear
cookies button with this tech.

EDIT: a.k.a. the Minority Report billboard/storefront that changes based on
people around it.

Same works for any kind of identification of interests, including political -
if your CCTV network captures faces of people who attended an opposition
rally, you get to match them to other venues, spot patterns and recognize
leaders/organizers.

~~~
drdaeman
Customer tracking's already a big thing, except for using a personal tracking
devices (like mobile phones; based on identifiers their radios scream out
loud) instead of facial/gist recognition.

Not to say your favorite taxi or banking app may include some unadvertised
extras that _cough_ "improves your customer experience" by enhancing your
device screams.

~~~
sologoub
As well as apps listening to human-inaudible signals to identify TV content
being viewed.

Most of these have some sort of counter-measures, such as being able to turn
off features of the phone. The facial thing is both universal and very hard to
"disable".

------
jedberg
Facebook and Google have been able to do this for years, and you used to be
able to also using their platforms.

For Facebook, does anyone remember when they released their auto-tagging
feature, it would tag people who weren't your friends too? They quickly
removed it when it started auto-tagging random people in pictures you took in
public.

For Google, this was an initial feature of one of their mobile apps (I forget
which), which they removed because people were creeped out by it.

------
awinter-py
This will backfire. Institutions (large corps as well as police & intelligence
orgs) think they want this information to use for 'precrime' projects and also
to use as evidence in court.

However -- bureaucracy has always been vulnerable to its own overreach. An
invasive legal system is a tax on productivity & innovation. If laws are
society's immune system, an invasive police state is a society with an
autoimmune disorder.

Tiny countries that can offer alternative systems will become destinations for
a new generation of skilled or wealthy expats. Delaware offers benefits to
corporations; Estonia is offering benefits to tech expats; this phenomenon
will increase.

~~~
xiaoma
Was Russia really drawing many foreigners to begin with?

~~~
awinter-py
it's not a russia issue, it's an everywhere issue. snowden stuff aside, police
just got caught installing automatic listeners in california. texas police are
trading license plate capture data to camera makers in exchange for free LPR
equipment.

Private companies are using surveillance technology on their employees and on
their users.

~~~
PeterisP
So how will this backfire?

If it's an everywhere issue, then I doubt that it will result in e.g. mass
migration towards the few places that won't do it; people have shown in
practice that they do not "vote with their feet" (or with revolutions) unless
the abuse escalates to either _very_ severe state violence or _very_ severe
economic hardship.

Sure, a minority of idealists will do so, but in the thousands, not in the
millions. That doesn't matter in the large scale - to do so, it would have to
match something like the jewish and other refugee flow from central europe in
1930ies. Currently, for every talented person that would consider leaving USA
for political reasons, there are ten or hundred talented people that would
rather come to USA for economic reasons, even if their current country doesn't
do much or any surveillance.

~~~
awinter-py
The primary issue isn't the fact that people will leave, it's their reason for
leaving -- surveillance-based policing makes life uncertain and work
inefficient. Top-down societies will fail whether or not their innovators jump
ship.

Look at the shenzhen special economic zone in china; it evolved into something
special because entrepreneurs were able to act without extreme government
control at every step.

It's forgiveness vs permission. It's easier to ask forgiveness than
permission, i.e. it's more efficient. But surveillance-based law creates a
permission society. Opportunities to fail or break the rules are also
opportunities to succeed. You can't say 'we're only going to allow you to run
the experiments that will work'.

------
eyko
My initial thought was that privacy conscious people will begin to partially
cover their face, but I can see where technologies like these are headed:
given a full body image, they can match height / body mass and reduce the
possible number of matches. It could even learn what clothes you wear and
match even further. Given a small enough sample, it's won't be that difficult
(for a machine) to create a graph of where your possible movements. Scary!

~~~
alanwatts
Height and weight are dynamic and can be spoofed.

Personal identity is not an exact science, no matter how much we would like it
to be, there are always ways to fake it given the right tools.

Consider the roots of the concept: the word "person" originates from the
ancient Greek _persona_ , meaning a theatrical mask worn by actors.

Per+sona

Per: that through which

Sona: sound goes

~~~
jkaunisv1
Gait is pretty hard to spoof. Maybe people could do it for a short people of
time but eventually you fall back into your normal way of walking.

~~~
ashitlerferad
Put rocks in your shoes, like the characters in Cory Doctorow's "Little
Brother" stories.

~~~
drdaeman
It's plain inconvenient to walk like this.

The problem is, this doesn't scale. While this could be acceptable for a
person some may call a "tinfoil-hatter", it's certainly unreasonable to think
of general population to walk with rocks in their shoes and heads masked.

So, this doesn't solve the issue.

~~~
ashitlerferad
Everyone in the book did and it seemed reasonable.

------
bargl
It will be interesting to see how this further affects our society as public
anonymity starts really going away. I have been reading The Great Gatsby.
There was an interesting moment in the book where Gatsby shows the main
character a medal from the war as well as a photo of him in Oxford.

THAT was how he proved that he went to Oxford. Nowadays, if you want to know
where someone went to school you'd do a quick search and take the first thing
you find. If you are more diligent you'd dig deeper.

It's also very clear that Gatsby treasures his anonymity and the reputation
he's built around being mysterious.

The reason I bring this up, is that it represents (in my mind) an indicator
that there is an argument to be made that public anonymity has already changed
so much in the past 20 years. Granted there were still ways of verifying all
of this information before it was just a lot slower.

This post just stirred up some thoughts that I had this morning while reading.
The internet more drastically technology have changed our culture so much it's
almost impossible to realize the effect.

Just thought I'd share some musings I had this morning that tied into the
current topic.

------
TheAlchemist
Numbers look strange.

500,000 users and 'only' 3m searches ? That's 6 per user - way lower than what
I would expect (or one of the numbers is false).

~~~
ch4s3
500,000 users =/= 500,000 Active users, I imagine.

------
gioele
Is this really different from what Face.com offered in 2010? They claimed >90%
hit-rate.

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

One nice mashup of that Face.com and Facebook APIs was the "AutomaticDJ": the
computer will start playing the favorite music of the person in front of the
PC, great for parties:

[https://github.com/gleitz/automaticdj](https://github.com/gleitz/automaticdj)

------
rodionos
It's going to play out just like in the anti-spam/anti-virus domain. Someone
is going to develop a face-CAPTCHArizer service that throws bitmaps at a photo
to make life difficult for commonly used face-recognition and feature
extraction algorithms.

Upload a photo, toggle a true/false positive control, get your online-safe
photo back. Looking forward to an announcement on HN.

------
facepalm
How do they get the data, is it just because that Russian network allows
scraping?

I had an idea like this before, actually I think it might even work with just
descriptions (no photographs needed). Like if you see a stranger on a train -
you don't need that many bits of information to identify them. But you need
the data of all people living in a city...

~~~
informatimago
Exactly. For a city with 200,000 people you only need 18 bits. For the whole
planet, you only need 33 or 34 bits.

~~~
pavel_lishin
But you have to select the bits very carefully for that population. If you're
playing "Bitwise Guess Who?" against Moscow's population, there are going to
be many combinations of bits that result in zero matches (ethnicity: African,
hair color: red, eye color: blue, height: 4 feet) and many combinations of
bits that result in many matches (ethnicity: Slavic, hair color: blonde, eye
color: blue, height: 5'8")

------
Grue3
Glad my decision not to use VKontakte is paying off.

~~~
genericacct
Happy VK user here. If this algo can recognize my face in the avatar I use on
it (which is a panoramic shot) I will gladly eat my hat.

~~~
alephnil
Now I don't know vkontakte, but facebook at least let users tag their photos
with who's on them. That should be pretty good training data for a machine
learning algorithm, so your profile photo is not necessarily needed.

------
bronz
fuck this. services like this one are not some inevitable result of having
high technology. if they are, then governments tracking the movements of every
citizen with face recognizing security cameras is inevitable as well. its ok
because it stops terrorism, right? no. i think it needs to come to a halt.
laws must be enacted. the sanctity of our privacy must be protected
deliberately now that it is not protected by barriers of technical
infeasibility.

~~~
throwaway160303
So. You want prevent, through the use of force and the rule of law, private
citizens from taking photographs of people in public places and comparing
those photographs with a voluntarily provided corpus?

Enforcing such rules would take nothing short of a totalitarian state.

There was no privacy when we lived in villages, and we will return to that
state in the mid-term future. The anonymity of the modern metropolis and the
accompanying sensation of privacy in our day-to-day lives is but a temporary
aberration in the history of the human experience.

Do not get used to it. It is not long for this world.

~~~
thingification
Can you explain why it's necessary to prevent people doing those things, or to
impose a totalitarian state, in order to prevent identification of random
citizen x by random citizen y?

It seems what's actually needed to prevent that is controls on the creation
and use of large databases in order to identify faces (except under some list
of acceptable uses). People who work in IT often express disbelief that laws
like that could work. In fact, factors that humans understand like scale and
intent are an important part of law, and laws written in those terms are
commonplace.

Re villages: another thing commonplace in the past was brutal violence. In the
past, it was obvious that brutal violence was inevitable. Then, we made it
illegal, and it largely stopped. We should do that again, in this case.

------
StanislavPetrov
Except that this technology can easily be defeated with a .50 cent plastic
nose from the Halloween store.

~~~
maxaf
Will you wear it every moment you're outside of your own private home or
office? I thought so. :)

~~~
ak4g
Just to pile on... are your home and office windowless?

~~~
maxaf
He he, no, they aren't. The difference is that in public there's much room for
opportunistic, untargeted data collection, which is a lot more creepy under
the right (wrong?) circumstances than targeted or random surveillance over my
private spaces.

I'm more worried about untargeted collection of data because it produces a
larger data set, which can be used to data-mine all sorts of juicy tidbits
about people's lives.

------
TheArcane
What if someone makes this for Facebook?

~~~
yAnonymous
Facebook doesn't allow this, but even if they did, there are many laws in
place in western countries regarding photographs of people in public, that
would make creating and/or using such an app illegal.

~~~
timlyo
Or in other words, something that only people with good enough lawyers could
use.

------
EGreg
I tried the app just now. Where is this "70% accuracy"? It just shows you a
huge list of vkontakte users with the same facial features (eg a beard) and
ratios between the eyes, nose and mouth etc. What is the accuracy claim based
on??

------
rodionos
Anyone tried how FindFace et al fair against a cvdazzle.com-type outfit?

------
shmerl
Don't post your photos in public accounts, that's about it.

~~~
vitd
Not really. Many of these people are being found because they're in the
background of one person's photo untagged, and they're in the foreground of a
friend's photo and tagged. The person in the picture may not even know there
are any pictures of them on the internet and they need not have posted any
photos themselves.

~~~
drdaeman
Just having a photo on the 'net isn't enough. A photo must be tagged. Tagging
usually requires a social network profile, and I think all mainstream social
networks don't conceal the fact one was tagged.

So, if you search for yourself and don't see any photos of you - all chances
are you're somewhat "safe". For a time being.

(A good thing about photo tagging is that a lot of tags go on memes and random
pics just to gain the tagged person's attention. This must generate some
noise.)

~~~
pessimizer
> Tagging usually requires a social network profile

I don't think this is true. Tagging with a reference to a social network
profile requires a social network profile, but just like you can tag a bear
"the bear," you can tag a photo with someone's name without them knowing,
being on the site, or even being alive.

~~~
drdaeman
Well, yes.

If you have a profile, it's most likely there will be a link rather than just
a text note. And the value of text notes ("here's John") is generally much
less than of a profile link.

Still - you're correct - it's well possible that someone tags a photo with a
full identity information - and that person won't know it. But I think it's
quite uncommon.

------
fighting
Friends dont let friends use social networks.

Russia heading fast to dystopia is not surprising, really.

~~~
criddell
I would love to have a contact lens that projected information about the
people around me onto my retina. Serious question - what's dystopian about
that? I realize there's often a fine line between utopian and dystopian and
for me, facial recognition (especially as my vision deteriorates) seems
solidly on the utopian side of the line.

~~~
drdaeman
I'm really lost on this debate.

Even though I'd really like to have control over the information that concerns
me, I also find it highly morally questionable to restrict others ability to
see, know or remember, either naturally or technologically assisted[1]. Even
for those who are unfriendly or outright malicious. That just feels unnatural
to me.

And if someone shares their knowledge[2], while I fully reserve the right call
them assholes if what they do caused me grief or worse, I'm also not sure it's
still morally right to demand for me that they shut up.

Still, if I can apply this sort of logic to myself (i.e. I surely can decide
for myself that I can't complain if my photo was published and is a part of
some database), it would be plain wrong and even inhumane to apply this to
anyone else. Can't impose this sort of thinking on others, especially given
that the general expectation and attitude seems to be drastically different
with all those "right to be forgotten" and other privacy laws and stuff (which
- I'll be honest - feel just unnatural to me, but, heck, I guess I can't
really argue with majority).

This damned dilemma sucks. /rant

___

[1] And where to draw a line? Glasses for poor eyesight? Pen-and-paper
notetaking? PDAs (phones or whatever)? PDAs with cameras? Networked PDAs?
Those sci-fi brain implants concepts that don't exist but would probably
happen in the future?

[2] Given that it's about valid true facts that literally anyone who sees me
in public can obtain. So this is drastically different from the restricting
what others say when what they say constitutes a defamation.

~~~
thingification
Where to draw the line? How about "people you have seen"? But the line is less
important than the reason for the line being where it is -- and that is about
things like the principle of least authority, stability against tyrrany,
whether progress is held back even a little by chilling effects, etc.

It isn't necessary to restrict others ability to see, know or remember _per
se_ , but only to prohibit the application of those powers -- by means of
large computer databases collected by many people -- to particular purposes.
In exactly the same sense, it isn't necessary to constrain people's ability to
move their arms and hands in order to prohibit strangulation.

Perhaps your dilemma is caused by something along the lines of a tacit
incorrect assumption that moral principles are not constrained by other moral
principles. Can you think of a moral principle about freedoms that is not
restricted in any way by harm caused to others and to society?

I think you are right to say that "it just feels unnatural" is not a good
argument, but I don't think that's because you are arguing with the majority:
the majority are often wrong.

