Facebook's Photo Archive Can Identify Users In Real-Life

[Mr Lee]

Are you sure you want to be on facebook and share your photos? While facial recognition might not mean much to those who are from and live in the Philippines because photo id's are not common place and most that are, are probably not entered into the facial recognition database, but those of us who travel on a passport, or who have id's such as drivers license from many countries, will usually find that we have been entered into the facial recognition worldwide software system, so therefore can be matched to our online photos. A study has revealed it is now possible for face recognition technology to match a webcam image of your face and identify it to your Facebook profile.A technology team of researchers from Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania proved that by using an off-the-shelf face recognizer, cloud computing and publicly available information from social network sites such as Facebook, it is possible to identify individuals online and offline in the physical world. At a recent Black Hat seminar in Las Vegas, researchers showed how they took photos from 277,978 Facebook profiles and then compared them to almost 6,000 profiles from a dating web site. The technology managed to identify 10 percent of the site’s members. In another test, 25,000 photos were taken from Facebook profiles then face recognition software identified 31 percent of those faces after an average of just three brief comparisons. The college warns that comparing facial recognition software with social media profiles, the risk of identity theft increases. With these technologies available to anyone the study forebodes a future when one day we may all be recognizable on the street.IT privacy expert, Alessandro Acquisti explained, "A person's face is the veritable link between [one's] offline and online identities, when we share tagged photos of ourselves online, it becomes possible for others to link our face to our names in situations where we would normally expect anonymity."