What if you could identify strangers and get access to their personal information, maybe even their Social Security numbers, by using face-recognition software and social-media profiles? It’s possible, according to a new study by Carnegie Mellon University’s Alessandro Acquisti.
He shared the results of his study Thursday at the Black Hat conference. His revelation comes at a time when Facebook is already under fire for its facial-recognition features. Germany claims the photo-tagging system violates both German and European privacy laws.
“A person’s face is the veritable link between her off-line and online identities,” said Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology and public policy at Heinz College and a Carnegie Mellon CyLab researcher. “When we share tagged photos of ourselves online, it becomes possible for others to link our face to our names in situations where we would normally expect anonymity.”
Foreshadowing the Future
Acquisti said his research team, which included CMU postdoctoral fellows Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman, combined three technologies — an off-the-shelf face recognizer, cloud computing, and publicly available information from social-network sites — to identify individuals online and off-line in the physical world.
Since these technologies are accessible by end users, the results foreshadow a future when we all may be recognizable on the street — not just by friends or government agencies using sophisticated devices, but by anyone with a smartphone and Internet connection, the study concluded. Cloud computing will continue to improve performance times at cheaper prices, and online people-tagging and face-recognition software will continue to provide more means of identification, researchers noted.
“The seamless merging of online and off-line data that face recognition and social media make possible raises the issue of what privacy will mean in an augmented-reality world,” Acquisti said. “Ultimately, all this access is going to force us to reconsider our notions of privacy….
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