Important to note:
- they still need 1000 labeled samples per identity
- their network can only handle 4000 distinct identities (at 97.25% accuracy) at a time
It's still a very worrying development for online and offline privacy.
- they still need 1000 labeled samples per identity
- their network can only handle 4000 distinct identities (at 97.25% accuracy) at a time
It's still a very worrying development for online and offline privacy.
tl;dr: They don't need 1,000 labeled samples per identity (once done with the representation phase), and they achieved 97.25% accuracy on ~6,000 distinct identities, with only one training photo per identity.
They present both results, supervised and unsupervised (where unsupervised uses the SFC dataset to train). They achieved 95.92% accuracy LFW with unsupervised (section 5.3) - so they can train on SFC and then classify a single image in a different domain with 95.92% accuracy.
They achieved the 97.25% accuracy level was achieved as you say, when they let the pairs into the training set. But they overfit with LFW alone, and has to add an additional 100k identities with more samples (30) per identity. A very impressive measure, but not quite as good as being able to generalize with 97% accuracy from a single training photo.
The LFW benchmark protocol is described in the original tech report: http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/lfw.pdf
I also don't believe it's so much a privacy issue. If I upload pictures to facebook I actually want them to be seen by human beings. The face-recognition only helps with that.
If facebook recognizes me on a picture someplace else, I actually rather want to know about it. I'm not super famous, so unexpected pictures of myself can be more of a bad thing...
Automated facial recognition is a serious privacy concern, it's not just about the slimy despicable thing facebook is. For example, in the uk where there are more cctv video feed than people to watch them, an automated facial recognition can track you around constantly. Their current automatic number plate recognition is already a serious privacy concern.
Remember 7th cube's voyeur's dream[1] released in 2005? the same but with more camera now being able to identify you based on your facial features. [1]: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=16410
Usually it's easier to get the government in line than to prevent some technology to be developed...
This is simply the same trend as ATMs replacing (some) bank tellers many years ago.
Will it be easier to perform and abuse mass surveillance? Sure. Will people with something important to hide still wear disguises? I'd bet yes.
My stance is that we can't fight progress, but we can start fighting the people bent on abusing the powers that progress bring. Identifying them is another issue (perhaps some form of facial recognition? :)
Facial recognition systems can be (and are) trained to not be fooled by things like facial hair, hair changing, eyeglasses and sunglasses, hats, etc. Although it can obscure your features for sure.
If someone does something really odd to try to avoid the facial recognition (I've people posting things like making your hair non-symmetrical, or just avoiding the camera in the first place) then they just train on those things too. And that person gets flagged as being really suspicious. And things like full face masks are banned in some places already.
This will have two effects.
People who are truly suspicious for nefarious reasons will gradually stop being so.
On the other hand, many will be incorrectly flagged as suspicious and harassed without reason.
The trick is to strike a fair balance between the two. But who decides what's fair?
That's actually the more disturbing part about this: it require computational resources that only governments and large corporations can afford, so they are the ones who gain the most from it; and it gives them more leverage over the population.
And it doesn't look like the NSA for example is doing anything useful from its own perspective with the data they actually have...
All the data everyone is feeding into FB/G+/Twitter/etc about their friends and acquaintances could not have been collected on such a mass scale by the NSA alone.
If you're a privacy conscious individual, there's definitely reasons to be fearful of this approach to surveillance by any governmental intelligence agency.
If all they did was notify you, that would be OK, I guess, although I'm not totally cool with it. I'm more worried about them seeing my picture and tagging it as me without my permission.
I think the crux of it is that facebook is pretty much the least trustworthy, most give-an-inch-they-take-a-mile company out there as far as privacy is concerned...