Enhanced image: A prototype app for smart phones matches live images of people to stored profiles and shows icons for social networking sites around their heads.
The Astonishing Tribe
A new app makes it possible to identify people and learn about them just by pointing your phone.
An application that lets users point a smart phone at a stranger and immediately learn about them premiered last Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Developed by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a Swedish mobile software and design firm, the prototype software combines computer vision, cloud computing, facial recognition, social networking, and augmented reality.
"It's taking social networking to the next level," says Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at TAT. "We thought the idea of bridging the way people used to meet, in the real world, and the new Internet-based ways of congregating would be really interesting."
TAT built the augmented ID demo, called Recognizr, to work on a phone that has a five-megapixel camera and runs the Android operating system. A user opens the application and points the phone's camera at someone nearby. Software created by Swedish computer-vision firm Polar Rose then detects the subject's face and creates a unique signature by combining measurements of facial features and building a 3-D model. This signature is sent to a server where it's compared to others stored in a database. Providing the subject has opted in to the service and uploaded a photo and profile of themselves, the server then sends back that person's name along with links to her profile on several social networking sites, including Twitter or Facebook. The Polar Rose software also tracks the position of the subject's head--TAT uses this information to display the subject's name and icons for the Web links on the phone's screen without obscuring her face.
"It's a very robust approach" to facial recognition, says Andrew Till, vice president of marketing solutions at Teleca, a mobile software consulting company in the United Kingdom. "It's much, much better than what I've previously seen."
Till says that applying image and face recognition to the trend of posting photos on social networking sites opens up interesting new possibilities. "You start to move into very creative ways of pulling together lots of services in a very beneficial way for personal uses, business uses, and you start to get into things that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do," he says.
Polar Rose's algorithms can run on the iPhone and on newer Android phones, says the company's chief technical officer and founder, Jan Erik Solem. The augmented ID application uses a cloud server to do the facial recognition primarily because many subjects will be unknown to the user (so there won't be a matching photo on the phone), but also to speed up the process on devices with less processing power.
A malicious site can find out what social-networking groups you belong to--and then figure out your identity.
Researchers plan to offer more than just directions with innovations in software and hardware.
I find it hard to believe that this could work against a database covering more than a handful of people. Face recognition technology is the holy grail of intelligence and law enforcement agencies - the ability to identify the face of a known criminal from a crowd would be invaluable - but no-one has been able to make it work without an unacceptable level of false positives.
If this really works, they'd make far more money marketing it as a law enforcement tool than as a social networking add-on.
The privacy problem would not be such if the application allows the person to be “identified” to accept to be searched. For example, if it allows creating users and they can accept others to “identify” them with the same application. The application obviously needs more development, but it should be in the hands of the person to be searched to allow access to their lives.
Those are well-intentioned ideas, but this technology will be abused very quickly and most certainly without the consent of the victim. Your best approach is to limit your exposure by opting out of such databases, assuming you've not already been added.
These guys are only linking to profiles in various services. If your FB profile is closed to people outside your network then what difference does this product make to your need for privacy? If you don't want to make something public don't add it to your public profile - simple.
e.g. if you don't want random people to know what your last.fm listening preferences are then just don't add it to your profile.
I think this will be amazing at conferences etc. I can create a contact entry with some limited info, maybe my linkedin public profile and link that in this app. Coolness follows :-)
Anyone pointing a cell phone or any other device in my direction to try to "identify" me better be prepared for a either a law suit or a punch in the face.
Umm... suppose it is a hidden camera on their (name one):
pen in front pocket
tie clip
jacket button
jewelry pendant or ring
briefcase
side of sunglasses
in particular, pen cams are popular and are getting smaller and harder to see.
In the end, how is this any different from your brain recognizing people?
I suppose this would be due to the limits of our brain to remember people and we don't (yet) have brain links aka borg to an outside database
I can see this working for a dating site. You go to a public place, point your phone and walk out happily ever after.
I see a lot of potential here for this kind of technology within a few years of becoming ubiquitous turning into a serious privacy issue. As usual the developers, once latched onto a neat idea that they think can generate some revenue, will steadfastly refuse to acknowledge or adequately prepare for the worst. As usual. In the end the public will suffer from yet another invention that was rushed to market without proper planning. As usual. This of course is just a guess. But it's one that is based on all known prior experience, and so I'm thinking it's a pretty damn good guess. I wish the developers would just stop and think ahead for once. But of course it's not their fault either. It's the way our market-driven world is constructed.
Nevertheless here is an adage for this age: Not everything that can be done should be done.
Camera phones were the beginning of the end of offline privacy. Now any nutbag can take a picture (and sometimes video) of you for who-knows-what-reason. If they are savvy enough, they can then upload it and use it for matching someone later. Even on social networks, not everyone reports their location (of if they do use a fake or false one). GPS is another potentially problematic technology. The fact that most of these technologies are on by default and must be turned off manually is a bad precedent. Always it should be opt-in (and at least the peopel working on the program inthis article are aware of this). It's open for abuse by stalkers, law enforcement, ex-significant-others.
Even if you are not opted-in to this program, your picture is still taken. What happens to it if it doesn't match? Is it saved for later just in case someone, who may match in however a superficial way, opt-in?
You can be that the government will be looking to use this technology (law enforcement included).
Are there potentially beneficial uses for this technology? Sure, the the few times it is is far outweighed by the times it isn't. Just like the illegal wiretaps which are done everyone first then sorted later, this is rife for abuse of the same order. Storing information for later matching regardless of the fact that at the time the information is first received, the person is innocent, is a gross abuse of an individual's privacy.
The really sad thing is that most people don't even care or think that this is an issue. The "I don't have anything to hide" crowd do not get it. The point is not about secrecy, it's privacy.
While "1984" was the wrong year, the concept is getting closer to becoming reality.
A New Dimension of Identity Theft
Anyone could take your photo, "volunteer" you to participate in the photo DB, and link it to a bogus facebook account with all kinds of unpleasant stuff in it.
Think about what ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, ex-wives, ex-husbands could do to each other with this!
Re: A New Dimension of Identity Theft
Not to mention future employers, officials, and as medical records go online ... etc. The havoc potential grows expodentially over time.
it´s one thing, if you add a photo of yourself in that database for recognition by recognizr, but i doubt it will remain that user-controlled. maybe you heard of a facerecognition-system for flickr to identify people. And now guess who developed this ... http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10224607-2.html
This combination makes recognizr a real "1984"-tool
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bj
50 Comments
Privacy Invasion
This is beyond scary. Stalkers and psychopaths will love this product. Not to mention law enforcement, especially on the federal level.
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