Social networking giant Facebook has controversially enrolled its 750 million members to use its facial-recognition software without asking for prior consent. The revolutionary software, partially funded by the US Army, uses biometrics to identify users and automatically tag them in photos.
A number of researchers presented their findings at the Black Hat Technical Security Conference in Las Vegas on Friday. Using the photographs of volunteers at the conference, the researchers cross-referenced the images with a database of 25,000 Facebook profile photos and successfully identified 31% by name.
Another test compared 277,978 Facebook profiles against nearly 6,000 profiles extracted from an unnamed dating website. 10% of users -- almost all of whom use pseudonyms -- were correctly identified.
Carnegie Mellon University researcher Alessandro Acquisti also presented an app for the iPhone that can "take a photograph of someone, pipe it through facial-recognition software, and then display on-screen that person's name and vital statistics." In his report Acquisti stated: "Facial visual searches may become as common as today's text-based searches" and that has "ominous risks for privacy."
This new technology has drawn a number of critics from privacy groups and lawmakers. Facebook has recently been threatened with legal action in Germany after it claimed the facial-recognition software violates privacy laws. If Facebook wants to keep the feature in place it must change it, German officials told the Guardian, saying the social network "must ensure that only data from persons who have declared consent to the storage of their biometric facial profiles be stored in the database."
However, in its early stages the software is far from perfect. Here at BD we have experienced varied results from the facial-recognition software, with one female friend incorrectly tagged as a drag queen. Despite this, the software has been fully introduced to Facebook and further developed by Google, Apple, and the US Government.
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