Advances in Facial Recognition Technology

Articles:
The Economist, Face Recognition: Anonymous No More
The Wall Street Journal, Face-ID Tools Pose New Risk, Julia Angwin

from HuffingtonPost.com

Imagine if you could instantly find out the name and identity of a stranger on the street simply by taking a photo of his or her face.  Imagine if you could take a photo of a roomful of people, upload it to your computer, then run software which would give you a list of names, home towns, birth-dates, and possibly even Social Security numbers.  It appears that in the not-so-distant future, using Facebook and commercially available facial recognition software, this could be a reality.

The two above articles refer to a study done at Carnegie Mellon University by Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman, in which they were able to identify faces with 30% accuracy, using PittPatt facial recognition software to compare them to faces on Facebook profiles.  This modest success rate is sure to improve as facial recognition software and overall computing power improve, and as the use of social networks becomes more ubiquitous.  And this is just with freely available commercial software: who knows what police and security forces are capable of doing today?  Will we see the end of privacy and anonymity in our lifetime?  Is this something to be concerned about, or just one more feature of modern life?  Or is the sad reality that for most of us who are not wanted criminals, celebrities or great beauties, no one would bother trying to identify us anyway?