Displaying items by tag: Facial Recognition

The organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced their concern that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is planning in the near future to have a visual database with photographs of people's faces.

It’s been said that if you have something that you don’t want the entire world to hear, don’t say it online.  In today’s world, online privacy is a vanishing commodity and perhaps nowhere is that privacy more at risk than Facebook.  When you combine a site that contains personal information on over one billion people with the highest traffic of any site on the Internet (sorry, Google), concerns are bound to rise.  The latest privacy issue to come to public attention is facial recognition, specifically in Europe.

Google on their official blog released some details about the Google Glass glasses and privacy protection. Many have rightly begun to wonder how will the mass distribution of Glass, when glasses are commercially available, affect the privacy of people in everyday life.

Looks like an even bigger impact on privacy from Facebook has been stopped, or at least delayed for now in Europe. The facial recognition tool has been suspended due to a recommendation by the Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland, Billy Hawkes, from the last year that Facebook should make some changes first. Even though Hawkes didn’t asked for the tool's total removal it is delayed until October 15 for now. He said that “Facebook is sending a clear signal of its wish to demonstrate its commitment to best practice in data protection compliance.”

The FBI is getting on the biometric bandwagon as they are moving forward with a program to help them catch bad guys. The problem with the program, as always, is that these same systems that are intended to keep us safe can be abused. The new program dubbed The Next Generation Identification program is a $1 Billion “upgrade” to the national finger print database. The new system adds in a few items that could be very helpful in tracking down and catching the “bad guys”. The new data includes pictures, voice prints, iris scans, DNA and potentially more.

When Facebook purchased Instagram there was more than a little talk that the move was simply to lock out the competition and prevent someone like Microsoft or Google from getting their hands on the technology behind it. This appeared to be supported as Facebook then went out and released their own camera app that mimicked the features of Instagram. Now Facebook is at it again, this time with Face.com the facial recognition company that Facebook just picked up.

Facebook has finally bought facial recognition company Face.com. For those of you that do not know Face.com are the people behind the facial recognition API in Facebook and their Apps for both iOS and Android. This technology (that is also used in a few other apps) has brought about a wave of privacy concerns (as is tagging of any kind really). It is known that Face.com stores face information in a database and is capable up dating facial information as more pictures of an individual are tagged. This can be used to create a very accurate likeness model of someone regardless of what they do to change or conceal their appearance (with the exception of radical plastic surgery or prosthetics).

Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich has finally been launched. This new version of Android which will officially be Android 4.0 is supposed to not only bring new features to the table, but it also going to address some items that have been lacking on Android. According to many sources this new version of Android will touch every native app in some way. We can only hope they did something to improve the poor email app that currently is in Honeycomb, but we will have to see about that once the update is available for our Transformer.

Aside from the updates to all of the native apps we are hearing that there will be some very cool new features including a facial recognition lock. This will allow you to use the built in front facing camera to interrogate your face and compare it to an image stored on the device. If it matches you can access the device, if not; well you can figure that one out on your own.  Android 4.0 will also feature a new NFC-enabled feature called Android Beam. This will allow you simply tap two phones or devices together to share files, links and other information. Google is saying that this is being designed to work with a number of app that are already in the market so you won’t have to wait long to start bumping phones.

Next up is an overhaul of the camera app. This is also a very welcome feature as the current default one is very immature.  With the new interface you can access the camera right from the lock screen (if you choose to). You also FINALLY get a zero shutter lag in a mobile phone camera, this combines with the continuous focus and face detection. Android is also adding touch to focus and exposure lock. These are features that many phone makers have tacked on (like HTC) but are now showing up in the native app as well. Android did not stop with the Camera though, you also get some nice new features in the gallery including filters and a built in Photo Editing app which allows you to make changes and still maintain the original file for later tinkering.

We are sure there is a lot more to Android 4.0 that we are missing in our roaming around the net, but you can be sure we will be taking it for a test drive and comparing it to what you get with Apple’s new iOS 5 just to see if Android is lagging behind or actually catching up. If it is the latter then we can see the Android Tablet market picking up, especially with the Holidays coming up quickly.

Source All Over the Internet

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Anonymous has announced they intend to bring the social networking (notworking?) site Facebook down on November 5th.  You might be wondering why Anon would go after Facebook when its founder Mark Zuckerberg has been idolized as a geek and a hacker in many biograph

ies and books.

Plus isn’t Facebook a place where information is freely shared by those that want to share it? Most would have thought that Facebook of all places would be safe. However, it is not and here is why.

This first thing is that Facebook has in the past taken liberty with its user’s images, personal information and has been rumored to pass information along to government agencies in people or groups that may use, let’s say inflammatory language. It has also been rumored (one that no one has been able to confirm) that Facebook maybe allowing advertiser (or governments) to view users preferences and possibly actual pages.  We do know that Anonymous believes this at the very least. Now all of this would be good enough reason for the group of hackers with a cause, but there is more and this is possibly one of the real reasons. You see Facebook is getting ready to launch a facial recognition API that can pull data on people tagged in pictures from sources around the net. It is also rumored to be able to match aliases from dating sites, forums, etc. as long as the API can link the real name with the screen name. This massively privacy invading bit of software has already been declared illegal in Germany and w

e have hopes that other countries will follow.  We believe this is what Anonymous is actually alluding to when they say “for the sake of your own privacy”.  

Much of the rest of their press release (shown in its entirety below) also has truth in it. According to the same German lawmakers that want the Facial Recognition API removed, Facebook makes the removal of the data collected by the software almost impossible to delete even after the image that person was tagged in it removed from the profile.  We think this is what Anon is talking about when they say “your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time”, but it is also true that what you put in Facebook stays on Facebook even when you leave.

So will Anon bring down Zuckerberg and his social networking/ information collection site, or is this another threat that the group will lose interest in before the date they have set aside. A date that hold special meaning to the British and which was immortalized in the move “V for Vendetta”. Will Zuckerberg prepare and harden the Facebook servers? I guess we will see on November the 5th.

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There are times when companies just forget about the impact to consumers. Most times these little oversights are caught and removed before the products or services are dropped on the unsuspecting consumers. Still there are times when these things get pushed out because the company in question is too big or too arrogant to believe they can’t do what they want.

A good example of this is Google Street View. There is nothing like a free service that allows anyone to see your home, the cars you drive etc. Google even had the temerity to send their cars onto clearly marked private roads.

Now let’s move forward to today, Facebook wants to put facial recognition software into their API to quickly tag people in photographs. The problem is that this software collects data about the people in the pictures. There is also no easy way to remove this data by the user. Facebook thinks that collecting this and other data is ok (as it is not in violation of any US law which are notorious for not protecting privacy or fair usage). However, Facebook did not count on some very strict (as they should be) privacy laws in Germany. Germany has actually declared the new feature illegal and is going after Facebook to disable the feature and to remove all data collected by the service.

I only wish that there were laws this protective of the average citizen in the US.

Source Fudzilla

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