Damn.

[azekeil]

Looks like they've done it again. I'll have to reconsider my policy of using my face in my icons, although I think that (initially, at least), the system will only work if people identify the faces to start with, which are taken from other sites. At the moment I don't think there are pages with my face and full name on, so I should be OK (for now).

Comments

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

I'd be amazed if it worked with any modicum of accuracy, having seen things like the "matches" from "what celebrity do you look like?" type of memes. I mean, the images that you have to copy letters from to sign up for stuff are largely inpenetrable to computer understanding and there's way more variation in what a photo of someone could look like with different angles, lighting, hairstyles and the likes coming into play.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Well this company's betting on it. Would you bet your identity on it NOT working? I'm inclined not to.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

I would, personally, but then I'm probably not a great example as I don't really fear losing privacy the way a lot of people seem to. I know people who won't use store cards because they don't want their habits tracked, and don't want their fingerprints in databases and the likes. I don't care about that sort of stuff, although I'm highly cynical over much of it being useful for the purposes it's collected for.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm one of those people. I post stuff publicly to the internet with my face on it. Some of it I wouldn't be happy for present/future employers to read (which I mostly lock in any case). I like to be able to choose who knows who I am and where to find me in real life, rather than have someone else choose that.

[samoth.livejournal.com]

Ummm, you say 'mostly lock' - surely the maxim here has to be that if you've got stuff that you don't want your present/future employers to find out, then you shouldn't post it publicly on the internet (or even 'not publicly' unless it's behind some proper peer reviewed crypto).

Surely this is much more what you should be concerned about, rather than people making technology which makes your (already false) presumption of anonymity/privacy on the internet become even more false?

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

At the end of the day, I really don't have anything to hide. If you drew a line with paranoid über geek at one end, and clueless AOL n00b at the other, I'd be roughly in the middle.

I never made any presumption of anonymity/privacy on here. My mother has an LJ account and reads (at least) our three journals.

The reason for the post is that I set up my journal with the presumption that easy/free searching for identity by facial recognition was not a reality. It looks like people are making serious attempts to get around that, so I need to reconsider how I keep my identity hidden from the casual observer (which in the end is all I'm really interested in), much like you lock your front door to deter the opportunist thief, but you realise that a determined burglar will still be able to get in unless you make your life a misery of security.

It's all about balance and personal choice at the end of the day.

[samoth.livejournal.com]

The reason for the post is that I set up my journal with the presumption that easy/free searching for identity by facial recognition was not a reality.

I guess this is the thing that puzzles me. Do you really think that your journal is now *more* vulnerable in some way due to this technology than it was previously?

I tend towards the opinion that it's just as vulnerable as it was before, it's just that the 'new technology' is making people go 'oooh scary'.

If $PEOPLE_YOU_DON'T_WANT_READING_YOUR_JOURNAL want to find it, I suspect all the good old traditional methods of finding it are probably a damn site easier than some shonky face recognition crap. Especially if you're worried about employers as you stated in a previous post - they're liable to find it much easier to google for names/address/personal details than they are to have a photo of you and search for it.

The more general point of whether you can camphone someone and then find their journal is probably more real, but that seems a different issue, and is already addressed by my previous comment - i.e. this internet stuff isn't private, and acting like it is due to relative obscurity is an entirely false sense of security.

I don't think the 'locking door' analogy is really correct. It's more like living in a greenhouse, and assuming people previously didn't notice your private life becase 'they probably won't look this way as they walk past'.

If you want to keep your identity hidden from the casual observer, having a public livejournal *at all* is probably a bad idea. Tools like this aren't like 'determined burglars', they're just highlighting that you were relying on obscurity rather than security before.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Hm, valid points I'll concede. I am au fait enough with general security to know that security by obscurity is a bad idea, and yes, in essence, that's what I'm doing. But, consider this. Going along with your analogy, yes, I have a greenhouse, and in fact I even arrange flowers into displays for passers by to look at and perhaps interact with me over. I'm clearly not wanting to be hidden from view - I want to promote interaction.

Now clearly even if I don't use icons of myself, or post pictures with my face in them (severely restricting my ability to interact, I should point out), I will be posting enough information in terms of how and what I write about, and possibly photos of locations for a determined detective to find out who I am (if not at least narrow down the possibilities enormously).

I accepted all these risks when I signed up for a journal. But my need for interaction (in this manner) I feel outweighs my need for identity security. I take reasonable precautions.

Coming back to the point of it all, an assumption I made at the outset (facial recognition was not free/easy) looks set to change. This particular method seems to rely on users entering information on a photo into a database.

So in reality the situation is actually far worse - rather than relying on 'shonky facial recognition software', a user with a grudge could take any (or all) of my icons, upload them to this service and plaster my name and address all over them. Bang. Identity now revealed for anyone who chooses to use this service, and there's nothing I can do about it, other than remove all pictures of my face from my journal.

[samoth.livejournal.com]

So in reality the situation is actually far worse - rather than relying on 'shonky facial recognition software', a user with a grudge could take any (or all) of my icons, upload them to this service and plaster my name and address all over them. Bang. Identity now revealed for anyone who chooses to use this service, and there's nothing I can do about it, other than remove all pictures of my face from my journal.


Err, they could do that *now*, this service doesn't change that. The only thing the service adds is that someone with a photo of you can ask the service to use the shonky facial recognition to try and work out your identity from the photo.

Someone linking your photo to your identity is possible *now* - and in fact, you do it yourself every time you post pics of yourself near anything with your name on it.

I don't really see what's changed...

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Which is precisely why one of the things I do is never associate, directly or indirectly, my name or address with my online identity.

Sure, you can associate pictures to my online identity, but that doesn't matter nearly so much.

The point is if there's a central service, like google is for text, it means any joe bloggs who decides he wants to make my life a misery can do as I said before.

The analogy are those people who DID post their names/addresses on their blogs/myspace/whatever, then got upset and wondered why their potential new boss was making lewd suggestions as if he already knew their private life because they took 5 minutes to google the name before interviewing. The same possibility is becoming a reality for photos of faces, too.

Rightly or wrongly, I fear the bungling incompetence of a joe bloggs (in the scenario I describe above, for example) far more than a private detective assigned to trace my identity. Joe bloggs gets a whiff of power and makes my life hell in 5 minutes flat; whereas if I've done something wrong enough (or right enough) to warrant someone spending a bunch of money working out exactly who I am then I'm inclined to let them get on with it.

[gerald_duck]

Yes, I'll bet on it not working, even with passport-quality photos. With photos like your userpics, compared with the kind of picture you'd get on a camera phone of someone walking down the street, there's absolutely no hope.

Especially now you've grown a beard!

I expect the most they can hope for is, given passport-quality photos, narrowing the field to 1% of the population. So if someone got a good photo of you walking around Cheltenham and, say, 10% of Cheltenham's population has good photographs on the web associated somehow with the word "Cheltenham", you could narrow it down to a hundred possibilities.

However, there are also a lot of photos of people who don't live in Cheltenham but might somehow be linked. And there would be many photos on the web of each of those hundred people, without any way of grouping them by individual. Odds are they'd have to trawl a few thousand photos.

All in all, it'd be far simpler to follow you for a bit. Sooner or later you'd get home, or climb into your car, or use some plastic with your name on it.

Oh, and if a prospective employer wanted to find you online, your Livejournal is the first of two Google hits for 1977-08-28 cheltenham. :-p

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Damn. I'd forgotten about my DOB. I should really remove the year. Still, that doesn't tell you my name, or where I live..

I should post another photo, as I've since shaved the beard off and gone with.. uh.. styled mutton chops. I guess.

My problem with it is it'll become easier, so I must make it harder. I'm under no illusions that someone could if they tried hard enough even without this 'advancement', but I'm not prepared to hand it to them on a plate. It's all about reasonable precautions and risks, right?

[kattiwampus.livejournal.com]

Mine is on my work website. I know people who have had theirs removed as they have received threatening emails and the like - but that would have happened whether their photos were online or not.