Facial Recognition Software

[Ernie]

If you know something about the capabilities and limitations of facial recognition software, please PM me. I need some advice on what pictures are suitable for the web and which ones are not.

[Ken]

I don't know what the limitations are, but it is already scary good.

Two years ago I posted to Facebook a group photo of me with about 10 friends who I was working with in Guatemala around 1988 when we were in our 20s. It wasn't even that great of a photo, but was scanned from an old slide.

Facebook automatically recognized and labeled 8 of the 10 people in the photo despite the fact that none of them had any photos posted online that were taken within 20-25 years of when that photo was taken. I didn't ask Facebook to do it, it just did. I have no idea what algorithms Facebook uses, but it was shockingly accurate, even over decades. I expect it has gotten even better in the intervening 2 years.

[Neto]

This was not facial recognition, but some other sort of spying/sleuthing. Eleven years ago I joined an Orthodox Jewish internet forum, and because I wanted to be up-front about being a follower of Yeshua, and because there were some glitches in the registration process, the forum admin & I exchanged a number of emails. (We each sent 8 emails to the other, over a 5 week period, some dealing with a similarity in our backgrounds, because both of us descend from families who lived in our respective colonies in what is now Ukraine, during the Russian Empire era.)
About a month ago her name appeared (with a picture) on FB in a list of "people you may know", suggestions for new FB friends. The only connection I can think of is that I used the same email address to register on both FB and the Jewish forum, which was closed down several years ago. She and her husband live in Israel, and I had never seen her picture - I just recognized the name. I have no idea if she also got an FB notice about me. The other thing is that I didn't use my legal name on that forum registration (as I did on FB), but rather my Banawa name, as I did here, and on a number of automobile related forums.
So what exactly did they have to go by to suggest her as an FB friend?
Did the FB spy machine read our emails from back in 2012?
Did they spy on our interactions on the Jewish forum?
In your estimation, is this of more, or less, concern than the capabilities of facial recognition?

[QuietlyListening]

Is she 'friends' on FB with any of your 'friends'? Many names appear on my people you may know and only connection is that they are friends of friends.

[Sliceitup]

It really is scarily good. I have an iPhone and it has a category in photos where it will automatically create a grouping of different people who show up frequently in my photos. It can detect my kids at different ages with scary degrees of accuracy. Hair cuts, glasses or no glasses, side profile or wearing a mask, shaved or a full beard. The photos span 10 years of time. Sometimes it will make more than one grouping for the same person, so it’s not completely accurate.

[Bootstrap]

I have been traveling, and some countries now have me insert my passport in a machine, then use a video camera to compare my face to my passport photo.

Translators who work in sensitive locations need to make sure that pictures of their faces do not show up on social media. They say this loudly in settings where people might take pictures of them.

[Josh]

My church group doesn’t take photographs particularly of people and living things (or at least we aren’t supposed to). I try to avoid having pictures of my children taken, but this is honoured more in breach than observance. (Amish people are the same way and I wish people would stop taking pictures of them.)

Facial recognition software is excellent and is available to anyone even through open source software. It is relatively trivial to set up a camera that could quickly identify anyone who walks by it, if that’s what you’re asking, Ernie.

An obvious shortcut is to wear a face mask and sunglasses.

[Neto]

Is she 'friends' on FB with any of your 'friends'? Many names appear on my people you may know and only connection is that they are friends of friends.

No, that interaction years ago is the only contact or connection between us. We DID interact on the forum off and on over the years that the forum remained on-line, but that's it. I never communicated with anyone else from that forum directly, nor did we (as far as I can recall) ever communicate by email again. I have no Jewish FB friends, nor do I know anyone who has also joined that or any other Jewish forum. That's what made it a real surprise to me, after I recognized her name.

[Neto]

My church group doesn’t take photographs particularly of people and living things (or at least we aren’t supposed to). I try to avoid having pictures of my children taken, but this is honoured more in breach than observance. (Amish people are the same way and I wish people would stop taking pictures of them.)

Facial recognition software is excellent and is available to anyone even through open source software. It is relatively trivial to set up a camera that could quickly identify anyone who walks by it, if that’s what you’re asking, Ernie.

An obvious shortcut is to wear a face mask and sunglasses.

As I do work on 'word processors' for Amish-owned businesses, I often see whole folders of vacation photos. Ten years ago I would say that the majority of these travel photos were of scenery, but more & more I see their photos of themselves boating, para-sailing, skiing, just about anything. Sometimes they go on work projects, like cleaning up or rebuilding after a disaster, and then there are pictures of the men working, the women painting and washing walls, etc. In short, they take more pictures of family than we do. But of course that isn't the case with every Amish family. I have no idea what the 'average' behavior would be. I see them when I'm doing a system re-build, and searching for all of their personal files and folders (to transfer back onto the new drive).

[Pelerin]

You might want to check out Fawkes. I don’t know how well it still works—two years of a lot of time right now when it comes to machine learning. They posted that they caught Microsoft specifically trying to circumvent it.

You could also have everyone wear anti-facial recognition shirts, but again it’s probably only a matter of time before those are defeated as well. If you read the article, the particular example it covers was developed by the bad guys so they could teach their model to overcome it.

It’s probably safest to just assume that “everything you post can and will be used against you.” What’s safe to post today might well be cracked tomorrow. I’m sure I remember a story a few months ago where parts of a photo that shouldn’t be visible were recreated from…shadows or refracted light or something like that—I can’t quite remember.

If you’re not sure you want something out there, change the sharing setting to private or to only share with people you’ve selected on Facebook for example. Collecting input photos for machine learning is pretty amoral right now when it comes to ethics and developers seem content to assimilate anything regardless of their usage rights, copyright, or consent. Making it unavailable to the public on the wider web should keep them at bay.

That leaves you to consider how you think Mark Zuckerberg calculates the cost/benefit analysis of violating his consent decree vs a couple million more dollars of shareholder value and also how likely government regulators are to hold him to account. Also weigh in how good you think he is at beguiling you into “consenting” that your pictures can be used for Meta-AI and double check whether he hasn’t already done so (or opted you in by default).