Automated Facial Recognition


I remember this part in a Frederick Forsyth novel (The Fourth Protocol) where the Brits had a lady whose job was to look at photos of people and being able to map them to names in government databases (her job was to spot spies from the Soviet bloc). What struck me was that face recognition back then could only be done by humans.

Fast forward to today and software does it very well too. I had heard of Face.com that created this app you could install on your smartphone. The app could link to your Facebook account, scan photos of all your friends on Facebook and then start automatically identifying and tagging them in photos you took subsequently. Of course, this was an app you had to install on your phone, so not everyone used it.

And then Facebook bought Face.com, and decided to make Face.com scan all images on its databases and start tagging people automatically in any photo loaded onto Facebook. This meant that the facial recognition app had moved from acting only on photos taken on some phones to all photos loaded on Facebook.

Scary right? Which is why the protests started: many demanded that this feature be turned off by default on Facebook. Voluntary enrollment, in other words. So far nothing wrong.

And then the Europeans went overboard. Germany reacted to this automatic tagging by demanding that Facebook wipe out its databases of faces created in Germany to protect privacy. Huh? Doesn’t the German government understand that people can still tag their friends in photos on Facebook? Why not stop that too? But no, the German government only cared if a software did the tagging, not if humans did it. Surely tagging people in photos without their consent violates their privacy, regardless of whether a software did it or a human did it?

But apparently, that’s not how the Germans think. Weird and totally illogical. Or maybe it’s just anti-Americanism in Europe as usual. And as long as you see anti-Americanism in Europe, I guess you will never stop hearing the other side of the stereotype where Americans criticize Europeans for their “ungratefulness”, you know the “If it weren’t for us, they would all be speaking German”. Then again, Allied victory or not, the Germans still speak German!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more