Imagine being able to sit down in a bar, snap a few photos of people and quickly learn who they are, who their friends are, where they live, what kind of music they like ... even predict their Social Security number.
Now, imagine you could visit one of those anonymous online dating sites and quickly identify nearly every person there, just from their photos, despite efforts to keep their online romance search a secret.
Such technology is so creepy that it was developed, and withheld, by Google — the one initiative that Google deemed too dangerous to release to the world, according to former CEO Eric Schmidt.
Too late, says Carnegie Mellon University researcher Alessandro Acquisti.
"That genie is already out of the bottle," he said Thursday, shortly before a presentation at the annual Las Vegas Black Hat hackers' convention that's sure to trouble online daters, bar hoppers and anyone who ever walks down the street.
Using off-the-shelf facial recognition software and simple Internet data mining techniques, Acquisti says he's proven that most people can now be identified simply through a photograph of their face — and anyone can do the sleuthing. In other words, our faces have become our identities, and there little hope of remaining anonymous in a world where billions of photographs are taken and posted online every month.
"If we were able to do it, anyone is able to do it," Acquisti said. “The goal here is not to generate fear, but we are very close to a point where the convergence of technologies will make it possible for online and offline data to blend seamlessly ... and for strangers on the street to predict certain information about you from your picture."
With some 2.5 billion photos per month posted to Facebook, odds are very good that you can be recognized, he said.
"For most of us, there is already a photo of us online. It is close to impossible to take this data back," he said.
Using the unnerving term "augmented reality,” Acquisiti conjures up disturbing scenarios that involve law enforcement officials, marketers and other strangers constantly marrying offline and online data. Observers could overlay detailed information like political affiliation on pictures of crowds at protests, for example, creating a scary new form of crowd control, he suggested. Meanwhile, facial images could succeed in creating a national ID where enhancements to driver’s licenses have repeatedly failed, said Acquisti in his report, titled “Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality.”
“Notwithstanding Americans' resistance to a Real ID infrastructure, as consumers of social networks we have consented to a de facto Real ID that markets and information technology, rather than government and regulation, have created,” it said.
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