Face recognition app taking Russia by storm may bring end to public anonymity

[TheIrishman]

Face recognition app taking Russia by storm may bring end to public anonymity

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/17/findface-face-recognition-app-end-public-anonymity-vkontakte

<< If the founders of a new face recognition app get their way, anonymity in public could soon be a thing of the past. FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability. It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts. In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks.

In the short time since the launch, Findface has amassed 500,000 users and processed nearly 3m searches, according to its founders, 26-year-old Artem Kukharenko, and 29-year-old Alexander Kabakov. (...) Unlike other face recognition technology, their algorithm allows quick searches in big data sets. "Three million searches in a database of nearly 1bn photographs: that's hundreds of trillions of comparisons, and all on four normal servers. With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer", said Kabakov, during an interview at the company's modest central Moscow office. The app will give you the most likely match to the face that is uploaded, as well as 10 people it thinks look similar. >>

[Shiroslullaby]

We are living in a much different world then even 20 years ago.
Most people have a huge digital footprint- facebook, phone with GPS, online banking, and soon cameras on every street corner.
You don't need to put a chip in people to track them when they give you the information willingly.  
The internet is a dream come true for the government.

[alyssa85]

People will just become more careful - make their Facebook pages private, be more careful about what they upload and share. It has always been foolish to expose so much of your life online - lots of people do it only because they are exhibitionists.

[Evildrum]

Dammit,do these people have no respect for privacy! So sick of reading new tech that rips my core being out and puts it on parade for all to see.

Why do they not put more effort into maintaining privacy,last thing I saw do anything close was a hoodie that scrambled your face on video cameras.

This also will make taking creepy photos of people the norm as they just want to learn more about your 6 year old daughter.

People will just become more careful - make their Facebook pages private, be more careful about what they upload and share. It has always been foolish to expose so much of your life online - lots of people do it only because they are exhibitionists.

Facebook resets their privacy permissions what like every 3 months without telling people about the changes?
Stopped using them when I realized it was allowing all the people I wanted to stay out of my life back in.

[gentlemand]

This is an inevitability and no doubt a totally flawless one will show up sooner than we expect. Luckily I'm not sure there's one single identifiable photo of me on the internet anywhere, and I certainly don't do that social shit. I just hope it doesn't pick up my numerous appearances on xhamster, then again it might get me more fans.

[Evildrum]

I signed up for some dating sites years ago and never took them to seriously and deleted them about 5 years ago.
In the habit of googling myself as I have a enemy that used to be a friend till he did some stuff that cost me significant amount of money and he likes to troll from time to time. So I search and came across my name on a site for reconnecting and it ended out it was connected to another site I signed up for relating to classmates.
So it took me a good week to get them to take my name off their site but that was the only thing that showed up in a google search for the longest time.
The only photos I have are ones at weddings that people tag me in and never ask if its alright. Bet you have some of those as well that you do not know about.