This face recognition company is causing havoc in Russia—and could come to the U.S. soon

[Kablooie]

Last month, a Russian software developer named Andrey Mima announced that he had been able to track down two women he’d taken a photo of in 2010, with nothing more than their faces. Mima posted on Vkontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, that he’d used a facial recognition app called FindFace. All he had to do was input the photo and FindFace’s face recognition software did the rest, scanning publicly available Vkontakte photos and finding the two women, so he was finally able to send them the photo he’d taken.

Photographer Egor Tsvetkov took photos of strangers on the St. Petersburg subway, then ran those photos through FindFace, and was able to successfully identify 70 percent of the people, according to RuNet Echo. Tsvetkov hedged on whether or not his project was potentially dangerous, saying, “I think we should wait and see how it develops.”

In early April, it got more dangerous. Posters on Dvach, the Russian variation of the anarchic imageboard 4chan, learned about FindFace and used it to out Russian porn actresses against their will.

FindFace is ostensibly meant to help people make friends. The logic is that if you have a photo of someone, you can find their social media profiles, and learn more about them before trying to become friendly with them; it’s a business model based on second-order Facebook stalking, which is definitely not creepy at all.

What makes FindFace so alarming is its effectiveness in making matches, which has little to do with the FindFace team. That high success rate in identifying strangers’ faces is due to the face recognition technology that FindFace is using, which was developed by a little known startup from Moscow called NTechLab.

“We’re going to launch the cloud face recognition software platform, which will be available for every business to plug into and use for their own recognition tasks,” NTechLab told me. “But we will thoroughly monitor its usage schemes and ban those organizations and people, who will try to use it inappropriately. To determine these cases we’re now developing algorithms that will help us detect an inappropriate usage.”

More:

http://fusion.net/story/295539/ntechlab-findface-facial-recognition-accuracy-doxing/

[Califonz]

1. "Dazzle" makeup will become popular

[2naSalit]

2. HA!

That's exactly what I was thinking by the end of the first paragraph!

[mmonk]

6. .

[JohnnyRingo]

3. I believe it's used at least privately here.

I live near Youngstown where a bank was robbed last week. The bank got pix of the robbers and the police posted their mug shots from previous arrests after issuing a warrant.

Yesterday, they were found at a nearby West Virginia casino and arrested. The first thing I wondered was how they knew they were there. I believe cameras in the casino used the technology to pick them out of the crowd and alerted police in Ohio. It's easy to do, there's no law against it, and the casino identifies people they don't want for expulsion, or in this case arrest.

[dembotoz]

4. i was at a trade show last week where i wore a lanyard with my name on it and

i found it disquieting that the booth reps would say hi to me and use my name....

could you imagine walking into a car dealer and being greeted by a salesperson who not only knew your name and address but also your credit and employment history

[Victor_c3]

5. I'm glad I never signed up for a facebook account

If you don't have to pay for it, you're the product being sold

[Califonz]

7. FB gets around this...

by allowing other people to click on photos of you they post (with your permission or not) and "tag" you by name in a text box.

It's better to be named John Smith. Or maybe Winston Smith.