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!

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