Comment by dotBen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dotBen | Hacker News Reader

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There's going to be a day, and I mean a specific day, when Facebook, Google or someone launches a product that lets you search for all instances of your face on the Internet.

You'll type your name in, confirm some images of your face and then be returned with pages and pages of photos of you in them.

You'll see photos you recognize, photos you don't (ie ones that you were never formally tagged in) and photos with you in the background that you had no idea existed.

It's going to be a day of mixed emotions. Photos are memories, and they'll be happy memories of events and places you had totally forgotten about. They'll also be embarrassment as you are presented with situations you forgot existed or thought no one would ever know about - perhaps as tame as you being drunk at a college party or as serious as evidence you were at some event or place you shouldn't have been at or with some person you shouldn't have been with.

You'll then repeat the above for your friends, family, partners and co-workers. We all will.

The technology is already there, it's just not being implemented in this way yet. But this experiment just shows how close this is to happening. And the ethical, moral and legal issues it's going to raise.

It's going to be a very interesting day.

Yes, and a good portion of these people will be searching with SafeSearch turned off.

We as a society are either going to get a lot more puritan or a lot more tolerant.

Or somewhere in between.

I remember a company, polarrose.com, who offered a face search engine. After a while they where asking you for your Facebook credentials (would you please give me your FB ID and passwd, sir?), crawl your account for tagged faces to extend their database. Googling shows they got bought from Apple a while ago [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20017018-37.html] and the guy [http://www.maths.lth.se/~solem] moved to SF. There is also http://whozat.com , which searches social networks for names; I am pretty sure that at given moment they where doing face recognition.

I always thought of photos, videos, content etc. as ghosts-- bits of memories saved into disjointed systems.

These ghosts live out their lives too! Some are aggregated, some gets repurposed as scams for spam sites, some plucky ones get drafted as trending memes, and the rest just... exist.

We don't see all these ghosts everywhere but as you pointed out it's a matter of time before one day we all become ghost busters.

But the thing is I don't think we'll be any more non-plussed about it. Because the day when we can self-identify ourselves online that novelty wouldn't feel all that different from any other futuristic day we live in. What with jetpacks, heads up goggles, glass displays, electric cars and more.

Assuming we're on an exponential innovation scale towards singularity we will inevitably grow bored, internalize the change, accept it for what it is and move on to the next shinier toy.

The future is pretty nifty.

It would probably have to be Facebook, because they have most of the photos.

But picture this:

"Hello [name]! All non facebook-photos of you ever are all here: [link]! Sign up for our brand new social network today to 'organize' them."

If this site doesn't grow faster than Pinterest, I don't know what will.

I guess we can look forward to applying our anonymizing face-paint, or strapping infrared LEDs to our heads before going out in public.

I thought you were kidding, but the LED idea is already a real product.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.obe...

The face paint idea is also real: http://cvdazzle.com/

only for certain values of "real"

The really interesting day from a privacy perspective is the one when you can search and the algorithm will be advanced enough to do even partial face matches or even non-face matching identification.

There are quite a lot of people who upload photos of themselves to places like /r/gonewild (or send such pseudo-anon photos of themselves through unsecure MMS or email networks) that they think are non-recognizable because they only show the bottom 20% of their face or whatever.

IMO it won't be that long until you can plug in a photo of someone and get matches with fairly high degrees of confidence that don't even show the entire face (maybe none of the face at all, if the photos are high enough resolution and the technology gets advanced enough to do real 3D mapping it could be based solely off of small moles or other skin markings on eg. the neck).

This is actually an even easier problem than what the blog wrote about.

On facebook at least, any photo of you is extremely likely to have been uploaded by a friend or mutual friend of yours. This vastly limits the number of possibilities to the point of this problem being tractable.

A lot of the more interesting ones will be by people who you don't know.

Perhaps.. but given the huge number of possibilities, you won't ever be found.

Really? You don't believe facial recognition technology could ever get good enough?

Not at typical quality (resolution) on facebook. When you start considering hundreds of millions of people, you just look too much like others.

Honestly, I think it'd be awesome if Facebook showed me pictures uploaded by people I don't know that may have me in them. There are valid reasons why Facebook doesn't do this right now (random people able to see your photos even on false positive recognition), but I'd easily opt in to such a feature.

With webcams in all laptops, and iMacs - Cinema Displays too? - there's no need to upload a file. Push a button and allow the webcam to snap a photo, and there you go.

It really bothers me than I can't opt out of getting a laptop with a webcam.

>>It really bothers me than I can't opt out of getting a laptop with a webcam.

If you feel this way just paint the camera lens with a permanent black marker.

I put tape on it, and I plan on getting a vinyl sticker for my MacBook, but unless I decide to specifically design one, it's going to look ridiculous.

It already exists: http://www.theipatch.com/

Have to be honest, though, I don't fully understand the concern. Is it that malware will secretly snap photos of you?

That and my own stupidity.

You can opt out. You just need to shop for a "business" laptop from HP or Dell.

Add Lenovo ThinkPad to the list. I always order mine with no camera.

I currently opt out of having a webcam using a piece of electrical tape.

Google+ is halfway there already: http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=nam...

Let's hope reddit allows a custom robots.txt for subreddits by then... or else there is going to be some unexpected results showing up from /r/gonewild

There's going to be a day when I can point my phone at you, and know your name.

Ha, they have something like that already http://face.com/blog/klik-is-alive-and-we-have-the-party-pic...

That is completely awesome! Very cool.

I bet the DHS is working on this right now - that is if they do not already have such a system.

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