Friday, September 30, 2011

Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying


From The Atlantic

From Slashdot:

"With Carnegie Mellon's cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person's online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it's a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities. ... '[C]onceptually, the goal of Experiment 3 was to show that it is possible to start from an anonymous face in the street, and end up with very sensitive information about that person, in a process of data "accretion." In the context of our experiment, it is this blending of online and offline data — made possible by the convergence of face recognition, social networks, data mining, and cloud computing — that we refer to as augmented reality.


Face scans match few suspects


The software employed at Super Bowl has had limited success, yet Pinellas' Sheriff's Office got millions to use it.

Viisage Technologies, provided the software that studied the faces of thousands of fans who attended the big game and compared them to police databases of criminal suspects, even pictures of terrorists. 

http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Security/Viisage-Technology-Face-Invaders/


Viisage Technology
Headquarters: 30 Porter Road, Littleton, MA 01460
Phone: (978) 952-2200
Ticker: VISG (NASDAQ)
URL: www.viisage.com
Employees: 160
Founded: 1993

Viisage looks like it's changed names to L-1 Identity Solutions
http://www.l1id.com/pages/18


http://www.pittpatt.com/

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