Hacker News Reader

Comment by justsaysmthng | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why this can't be done in real time. Point your phone towards a person in a cafe and immediately figure out her name, age, maybe relationship status, social class, augmented reality style.

5 minutes later accidentally bump into her .. and start a conversation, armed with lots of private info about the person.

Or even more basic - thieves picking their targets - is this woman's purse likely to contain a lot of money and jewelry ?

I guess you could even write a tool which picks all the faces from a photo, and detects who's probably richest, most popular, most followed, etc.

But this is unavoidable, right ? We just have to accept it as a fact of life and adapt to it..

View on HN

How long before anti-facial recognition makeup, hair, and accessories becomes fashionable? https://cvdazzle.com

That doesn't seem like it would work at all. The makeup and hair styles suggested would make you stand out even more! Sure, 1990s-style facial recognition won't work as reliably, but surely today's systems would flag you right away!

I haven't tested it myself but according to CVdazzle it works. So the next question is how long before facial recognition technology overcomes efforts to confound it. Or how long until legislators get involved.

Yes the looks are ridiculous, but most fashion starts out that way. People often look for ways to stand out and being "retro" could enhance the cool factor.

What does someone care if a mugger's facial recognition software "flags" them? And who exactly is being flagged? And if a security surveillance system flags you what is the consequence? Who does that consequence apply to?

>And if a security surveillance system flags you what is the consequence? Who does that consequence apply to?

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35111363

> "What you can do now is link your face-recognition system to Facewatch and it will pull down the watch list that's relevant for your premises and your group," he says. "Then, if someone walks into your premises, it will send you an alert."

So if you have a criminal record, or your face somehow ends up in that database, you could find yourself followed around shops and asked (or told) to leave. These sorts of massive watch lists aren't feasible with merely human recognizers.

"Flag you" as what? It doesn't need to completely "fool" the system & make it believe there is no face. It simply has to get the system to believe that "makeup style A" and "makeup style B" applied to the same face are, in fact, two different faces. This is a pretty low bar, and one which I suspect will be achievable for quite some time.

Note this is designed to fool facial detection, not recognition. Detection generally uses much simpler algorithms because in most cases it needs to be orders of magnitude faster.

I was working on a project with OpenCV a few years ago. After a few embarrassing incidents I had to add a kludge whereby if it detected a small face directly above a big face, it was to discard the big one.

It turns out that the torsos of portly women with large breasts make ideal face candidates.

Holy moly, that's a very curious side effect of technology on culture. Crazy cyberpunk look necessary to avoid computerized detection. I can see this being the norm or strictly banned in the future.

my bet is on such looks being banned.

What do you have to hide? /s

Banks in the US already have signs on the door prohibiting hats and sunglasses.

Or how long before everybody starts wearing burqas? Islamic women are ahead of their time :)

or before burqas become illegal like in some Europeans countries where men were wearing burqas to slither into woman only areas.

Source?

Let me google it for you:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/man-disguised-woman-we...

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/suicide-bomber-disgu...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/1...

www.express.co.uk/news/uk/585432/White-man-burka-arrested-bomb-town-centre-Watford-army

I'm reminded of the comic book/graphic novel Private Eye[1].

[1] http://panelsyndicate.com/comics/tpeye

It's just a matter of time. With implications we can barely imagine today.

Think about it in reverse. Think about every photo in existence anywhere that has you in it, or has your stuff in it. Imagine all of that being tagged and cataloged as being tied to you. A selfie your friend took in your house with your kitchen in the background. Somewhere somehow the data is crunched, algorithms are leveraged, and these things are figured out. A lot of this isn't even a particularly hard problem, your social graph is already known, your address is known, people share their locations all the time, the people you hang out with is known, it's a simple problem of deduction to figure out all this info. And then there's an amazing degree of data that can be extracted. Imagine a database containing a list of everything you are known to have in your house, and when, and changes to that. Imagine tracking your whereabouts and who knows what else by the presence, or absence, of your self or your accouterments or your car or what-have-you in various locations in the backgrounds of other images.

We really don't have a good sense for the implications of this level of data becoming available to anyone and everyone.

Take a look at this video by Jack Vale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqeOnfQmZPY

He stalks people on social websites and then strikes conversations with them.

If you are interested in exploring a world where something like what you suggest is a generally-accepted part of life, check out the book Super Sad True Love Story. http://supersadtruelovestory.com/

This novel is set in a world that takes current social and sharing trends and extrapolates out a dozen years or so. Depending on your thinking, it could be seen as an extreme or a reasonable guess of what might happen in the future.

I was just going to suggest this. Totally Super Sad.

This describes almost exactly the world of the video game Watch Dogs. Didn't necessarily use a photo though, just a connection to the other person's phone.

In the world of the video game, people did adapt to it. However, there was a faction that actively tried to destroy that system.

This is something that caused Google/Eric Schmidt to say they were going to hold back on facial recognition back in 2011.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/01/facial-recognition-...

> But this is unavoidable, right ? We just have to accept it as a fact of life and adapt to it..

For a woman with a lot of diamonds in her purse i would suggest wearing a burqa, it would prevent most biometrics from being spotted by the cam. On the more serious note, what methods did he really use?

> But this is unavoidable, right?

I don't think so, if you're happy to remain off social networks.

I mostly stay off of social networks, with the exception of HN, but other people put pictures of me on them anyway. I say don't put that on FB and people just laugh because they think I'm kidding, but what can you do?

Exactly, it's frighting how everyone is assuming they have to change their public persona in order to protect their online version!

Don't Facebook already construct "ghost" profiles of people who aren't on FB but are mentioned/tagged in others' content? So when you eventually sign up they already know stuff about you, in which case even abstaining is not enough!

You think Zuck doesn't have this on his phone?

Or, just refuse to be one of the sheep?

Personally, I see nothing wrong with one internet picture for all these social sites. I wear huge women's sunglasses on my one picture I put out there. It's probally against TOS, but who really cares? There's always another website.

That said, I've never had anyone pick me on my looks.

I need to put in time writing, or talking. It's a pain, but I've never liked knowing anyone in the world can download my image.

Actually, I don't like anyone taking my picture. My only pictures in school was k through 8th grade. I wasen't present for picture day in high school. College did get my mug.

My hope is it will become socially frowned upon to take anyone's picture without their consent.

Whenever I see that Shutter bug at social functions--I just with they would put down the camera, or take it out at end of the hootenanny?

Wearing sunglasses makes us look difficult-to-recognize to humans, because we tend to focus on the eyes, and recognize people by their eyes more than other parts of their face (relatively speaking). However, these algorithms have no such biases. It's more difficult because there's less information to work with, sure, but they can identify you just as easily by the shape of your nose, mouth, and the distance between reference points on the lower half of your face, as the top half of your face. You might as well be covering your mouth and chin and nothing else, for all it matters.

> just refuse to be one of the sheep

careful with that edge, you might cut yourself

Reply on news.ycombinator.com