Not Just Another Face in the Crowd
Using currently available facial recognition technology, Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University has shown that he can link people (in this case, student volunteers) to their Facebook profiles within 3 seconds, just by photographing their face. For the experiment, Acquisti and his team built a cloud-based database of CMU students using publicly available pictures and their associated information on Facebook, complete with images, names, hometowns, occupations and other identifying features. After researchers took a volunteer's picture, the facial recognition software matched the person in the image with their online identity via the database.
The demonstration involved only a finite population at the university, and it took some skill to pull together the technologies. But as facial recognition software gets more accurate, cloud computing abilities expand and connection times get faster, the ability to ID that stranger across the room gets easier and easierespecially now that Facebook changed its policy to require that all profile pictures and names be public and therefore searchable. In the U.K., for example, the Metropolitan Police have tried to use an approach much like Acquisti's to identify suspects who were photographed during the recent riots in London, and Scotland Yard is streamlining its facial recognition techniques in anticipation of policing the 2012 London Olympics.
Facial recognition software isn't just for law enforcement, either. In addition to Acquisti's experiment, there are many other places where facial recognition software is finding a homesome a little creepy, some downright strange and some in which the software recognizes images beyond human faces.