Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Cloud Privacy The Internet Technology Your Rights Online

Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying 286

oker sends this quote from The Atlantic: "With Carnegie Mellon's cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person's online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it's a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities. ... '[C]onceptually, the goal of Experiment 3 was to show that it is possible to start from an anonymous face in the street, and end up with very sensitive information about that person, in a process of data "accretion." In the context of our experiment, it is this blending of online and offline data — made possible by the convergence of face recognition, social networks, data mining, and cloud computing — that we refer to as augmented reality.'
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying

Comments Filter:
  • by 605dave ( 722736 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @10:56AM (#37567174) Homepage
    This is why Google shelved their version of this tech. The implications were too big.
    • by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:09AM (#37567322) Journal

      This is why Google shelved their version of this tech. The implications were too big.

      Having studied this in college and witnessed many failed implementations of it [slashdot.org] I casually ask: Where are the recall rates [wikipedia.org] (see also sensitivity and specificity [wikipedia.org]) of these experiments?

      Because when I read the articles, I found this instead of hard numbers:

      Q. Are these results scalable?

      The capabilities of automated face recognition *today* are still limited - but keep improving. Although our studies were completed in the "wild" (that is, with real social networks profiles data, and webcam shots taken in public, and so forth), they are nevertheless the output of a controlled (set of) experiment(s). The results of a controlled experiment do not necessarily translate to reality with the same level of accuracy. However, considering the technological trends in cloud computing, face recognition accuracy, and online self-disclosures, it is hard not to conclude that what today we presented as a proof-of-concept in our study, tomorrow may become as common as everyday's text-based search engine queries.

      How you want to decide Google passed on continuing down this road is up to you. Frankly, I would surmise that the type I and type II errors [wikipedia.org] become woefully problematic when applied to an entire population. Facial recognition is not there yet, not until I see some hard numbers that convince me the error rate is low enough. Right now I bet if you were to snap pictures of 10,000 people, you would incorrectly classify at least 100 of them leading to wasted time, violated rights and wasted opportunity (depending on the misclassification).

      • But the challenge is what people consider acceptable, you may have misclassified 100 people right now but there are plenty of people out there that would argue that if you stop one terrorist or criminal it may be worth the "inconvenience" endured by 1%
        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Depends what the inconvenience is. If it's a quick background check with no lasting effects (i.e. not being added to a do-no-fly list or terrorist watch list or your record or subjecting you to public humiliation or arrest), then perhaps... If it's a 5 year vacation in Guantanamo without access to legal counsel, then no way--that would be a horrible perversion of justice!

          Consider this question: Do only famous people have look-a-likes? Why would that be, especially since famous people often look non-aver

          • ...that Python had it right LONG ago...

            the importance of NOT being seen [youtube.com]

          • Depends what the inconvenience is. If it's a quick background check with no lasting effects (i.e. not being added to a do-no-fly list or terrorist watch list or your record or subjecting you to public humiliation or arrest), then perhaps...if we start applying this tech to the population at large, we had better be certain that the consequences of a false match WHEN IT HAPPENS are acceptable, legally, ethically, and morally, or we shouldn't do it at all, IMHOP.

            Not to get on my political soapbox, but have you been living under a rock for the last ten years -- or at least the last one year? You don't think being felt up by TSA at the airport is "subjecting you to public humiliation"? How about this [wordpress.com] woman [washingtonpost.com] who was removed from a Frontier Airlines flight, cuffed, detained, strip-searched, interrogated and finally released? Her crime was nothing more nefarious than sitting next to two men of Indian (the country, not Native American) descent, one of whom wa

        • The problem is scale. 1% of people in the USA is 3 million false positives. With 100,000+ people flying everyday, that is 1,000 false positives from 5,000 possible airports

          That would be 30,000 jobs just to track down those false positives.

          • No, the problem is justice. I don't give a @#$@!! how many jobs it takes to track down the false positives. If you wreck even three hundred lives because your technology isn't accurate enough, that's three hundred too many.
            • If you wreck even three hundred lives because your technology isn't accurate enough, that's three hundred too many.

              That statement is correct, yet you have slanted it the wrong way.

              You seem to think the worse error is in false positives. But all that happens is that the person would be selected for extra screening. How is that "wrecking" someone's life?

              Compare that to not trying anything and letting someone take down a place with a few hundred people. Would you not admit that people who die on a place are

              • by element-o.p. ( 939033 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @02:49PM (#37570536) Homepage
                There are two logical fallacies in your argument. First, you are presenting a false dichotomy. Second, you are comparing a worst-case scenario (terrorist takes down an airplane, killing hundreds or thousands of people) to a best-case, or nearly best-case, scenario (innocent passenger gets their luggage swabbed).

                What we are talking about is risk management. Risk management is not just a matter of comparing scenarios; it is a matter of multiplying risk probabilities to risk weight (i.e., the severity of that risk), then summing all of the results of that operation. For example, a hijacker crashing an airplane into a building is a very severe risk -- it killed over three thousand people ten years ago -- but it has only happened *ONCE* (okay, four flights) in what...fifty? sixty?...years of airline service. That's a really, REALLY low probability times a really, really severe risk weight, which I'd argue results in a moderately low OVERALL risk. There is also the possibility of a hijacker murdering individual passengers until his (her) demands are met. That's happened significantly more often than a 9/11 hijacking (although still rare, in terms of number of hijacked flights vs. number of uneventful flights), but it directly affects (comparatively) fewer people. However, because it is more common, I'd argue that this scenario results in roughly the same OVERALL risk. Then there is the risk of an unruly passenger. That's much more common than the other two risks, but the risk weight is comparatively minor, which again results in an overall low risk.

                As far as scenarios you are comparing...if all that happens is a false positive gets the luggage swabbed, then I really couldn't care less. If a false positive gets removed from an airplane, cuffed, locked into a cell, strip-searched and interrogated before finally being determined to be a false positive and released [washingtonpost.com] then I have a MAJOR problem with it. Consider it this way: if there were 520 people detained in Gitmo [npr.org] and the error rate for false positives (as assumed in the above thread) is 1%, then that means there were likely at least 5 innocent people detained at Gitmo. THAT is what I meant by "wrecked", and I maintain that's an accurate description. Ms. Hebshi's life may not have been wrecked, but I'd say that it has been severely and negatively impacted.

                So, yeah. I do think that the worse error is false positives because the risk probability is significantly higher, and the risk impact is moderate to severe as well, which leads to a much, much greater overall risk than a one-in-twenty-million probability of 9/11, even when multiplied by the impact of the death of 3,000+ people.
      • 98% Accurate! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bigtrike ( 904535 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:24AM (#37567536)

        You mean to tell me that 98% accuracy when trying to spot terrorists in airports isn't good enough? That's only 200,000 false positives per year for a typical airport.

        • by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:38AM (#37567772)

          You mean to tell me that 98% accuracy when trying to spot terrorists in airports isn't good enough? That's only 200,000 false positives per year for a typical airport.

          Perhaps the false positives at airports are OK? Rather than randomly choosing people for more attentive searchers, and the occasional grandma to give the facade of fairness and not profiling, we could focus on the 2% who are higher probability. Of course 2% are unfairly inconvenienced but isn't that better than 100% unfairly inconvenienced? Clearly a negative/negative decision.

          Of course this is all academic and falls apart if the false negatives are at a non-trivial level.

        • Re:98% Accurate! (Score:5, Informative)

          by Pieroxy ( 222434 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @12:20PM (#37568440) Homepage

          Let's take JFK. From Wikipedia:

          In 2010, the airport handled 46,514,154 passengers

          2% of that is almost a million people. Every year. Now, let's assume handling each these false positives is the work of an hour on average. That's about a million hours spent.

          Let's assume a workday of 8 hours, and 250 workdays a year. That's about 2000 hours a year for an average worker. So it'll take 500 people to track these false positives at JFK.

          I think it's a little unacceptable, but YMMV of course.

          • First off. facial recognition is already widely used -- by casinos. The way it works is that if it matches you to a known cheat (or maybe MIT Math Major) then they just either watch you or bar you from the casino. They don't waste any time chasing down false positives. They just continue to improve their software, which is probably better than the commercial stuff now.

            The simplest thing is for TSA to do is to just make an extra check on your documentation and bar you from flying if anything is amiss. Why

            • When has the TSA ever had to reveal or explain anything they do?

              When they get a call from an angry congressperson about the treatment their relative/friend/self just received.

              A private business is allowed to deny you entry to their property for no reason at all. So far, we have been operating under the assumption that the government is *not* allowed to deny you passage on a private airplane for no reason at all. Yes, they have tried, but the truth is they are not yet completely above the law.

              Of course, personally, I don't feel the need to give them that opportunity.

        • Sorry but this pop-culture fixation on "terrorists" has been hijacked by the US Government to facilitate the systematic abrogation of all civil liberties and constitutionally guaranteed rights with the approval and assistance of the oppressed, (US).

          We are no safer, the rogue government is infinitely more dangerous to the American people than "terrorists".

      • Right now I bet if you were to snap pictures of 10,000 people, you would incorrectly classify at least 100 of them...

        thats only a 1% error... is that supposed to make me feel more comfortable? Sounds like the technology works pretty well, pragmatically...
        Anyway, sounds mildly-moderately threatening to general privacy. Who's paying for this?

        FTFA, grants from:
        National Science Foundation, grant # 0713361
        US Army Research Office, contract # DAAD190210389

        How much?
        • Right now I bet if you were to snap pictures of 10,000 people, you would incorrectly classify at least 100 of them... thats only a 1% error... is that supposed to make me feel more comfortable? Sounds like the technology works pretty well, pragmatically... Anyway, sounds mildly-moderately threatening to general privacy. Who's paying for this? FTFA, grants from: National Science Foundation, grant # 0713361 US Army Research Office, contract # DAAD190210389 How much?

          We'll never get any better if we don't try. That's what these grants are for: improving the state of the art.

      • by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:43AM (#37567870) Homepage

        How you want to decide Google passed on continuing down this road is up to you. Frankly, I would surmise that the type I and type II errors [wikipedia.org] become woefully problematic when applied to an entire population.

        I dunno. I bet if you combine the location of a photo with what Google knows about where you live/hang out the results would be pretty good.

    • by rwa2 ( 4391 ) * on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:26AM (#37567574) Homepage Journal

      This is why Google shelved their version of this tech. The implications were too big.

      I don't know... I fed my pr0n directory to Picasa's face recognition, and the results were pretty awesome.

      • by AliasMarlowe ( 1042386 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:32AM (#37567686) Journal

        This is why Google shelved their version of this tech. The implications were too big.

        I don't know... I fed my pr0n directory to Picasa's face recognition, and the results were pretty awesome.

        You mean there are people with noses shaped like... that?

      • by jasno ( 124830 )

        Bingo... just wait until this tech isn't restricted to just faces - why can't you use other body parts or background objects as well to refine the search? One day you might not even need a face to get an identity... I hope everyone is OK with their naked sexy pics coming back to haunt them in 20 years.

    • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      They shelved it, did they? Why would they do that?

      Government would pay good money for it, as would many larger corporations (for internal use, of course).

  • by wiggles ( 30088 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:00AM (#37567218)
    It was only a matter of time. This has been one of the most sought after anti-terrorism tools of the last 10 years. Imagine the security implications! I'd be shocked if NSA didn't already have a version of this operational 5 years ago.
    • Because terrorists all have facebook accounts? I would assume most of them have very little online presence, pictorially anyway.

      • Duh, of course they don't have Facebook. They have Terrorbook, and most of their faces are partially covered with handkerchiefs or some other items.

        • Dude, seriously...please don't give me ideas. I have enough projects that I'll never get to already. Creating a web site lampooning Facebook as you described above would be hilarious -- or at least it could be; whether or not I have the comic chops to pull it off is open for discussion :)
      • by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:47AM (#37567928)

        Because terrorists all have facebook accounts? I would assume most of them have very little online presence, pictorially anyway.

        Oddly whenever a new terrorist is discovered and remains at large law enforcement and the mass media seem to be able to come up with a facial photo. Perhaps there are sources of photos other than facebook, in particular sources available to government agencies. DMV photo, passport photo, school photos, team photos, etc.

        The experiment is facebook centric because it is an academic project that needs to stick to info made public by the individual to avoid privacy issues.

    • That is the cool but unnerving part of government tech. It is hard to tell how much is over estimated (like 2001's flights to the moon style overestimation), how far they are genuinely ahead and how much of the bleeding edge is released.

      New York was revealed in the media recently to have the tech to track down everyone wearing a "red jacket" through their camera security systems.

  • I already don't like it.

  • But Facebook... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:03AM (#37567240) Homepage
    is not dangerous. There is no danger from posting all of the intimate details of your life, with pictures, and pictures of other people (often taken without their permission) using real names.

    Look, I am not a paranoid man. I am perfectly willing to give out private and personal information - for a reasonable fee.

    I give out private information to my bank all the time. In exchange, I get financial services.

    Facebook offers - a) a blog, b) email, c) games, d) convenient log in

    The first 3 are available for free elsewhere, the last is not worth much.

    I'm not paranoid, I'm just not cheap. And Facebook is asking way way too much for the minimal services it provides.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by killmenow ( 184444 )

      pictures of other people (often taken without their permission)

      One of the reasons I have a facebook account is so I can untag photos others say are me.

      • That's a lot of work. Didn't you know you can change your privacy settings so that tagged photos of you aren't searchable by other people? http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=267508226592992 [facebook.com]

      • pictures of other people (often taken without their permission)

        One of the reasons I have a facebook account is so I can untag photos others say are me.

        This is one of my arguments for maintaining a public presence on the internet: control over my image/likeness. When someone Googles my name, the first things they see are my professional webpage, personal webpage, and Facebook account. Anyone else with the same name is pushed to the second page of results. Anything not under my direct control is pushed to the bottom of the first page of results.

        With a Facebook account and publicly available webpages, I am able to broadcast my side of the story and drown

      • I tag random photos of others as me. They can't untag a photo that you say is yourself ;)

        I call it FaceBombing (combination of Photo Bomb and Facebook). I wish I could trademark the phrase.

  • public pics? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by killmenow ( 184444 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:04AM (#37567248)
    This is why I always use a picture like this [imgur.com] for any online public pics.

    Note that the pic in question (a) does not show a face clearly and (b) may or may not be me.
    • Makes no difference on Facebook. While you're doing that your auntie/mom/friends are busy uploading and tagging hundreds of pictures of you.

  • And what is the error rate when you get a few million people into the database? It's all well and good to say we can identify who someone is against a population of a few dozen, or a couple hundred, but give it all the people in New York City to churn through and I somehow doubt that your false identification rate will be 0.
    • So long as the expert witness tells the jury that the error rate is zero, conviction statistics will prove... And I'm talking prove here, the fancy kind with numbers and and computers and shit, that the error rate is zero.

      By the standards of some of the dodgier corners of forensics, this stuff will be downright impressive...
  • Face it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by boristdog ( 133725 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:06AM (#37567268)

    The first real-world, publicly available use of this will be an app that lets you:

    1. Take a picture of someone with your smart phone
    2. Find naked pictures of this person online

    BRB, heading to the local college campus...

    • by labnet ( 457441 )

      And the next app will be a virtual reality overlay that delivers whatever metrics you like. Health, wealth, criminal history. This will be a boon for criminals!

  • by pvt_medic ( 715692 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:07AM (#37567282)
    Think about how much raw power computers have today, and how for the most part we are just using that for word processing/email/internet/music/video. This is just an example of how to utilize this power. Its all about software now, this is just another example of how databases will continue to interact more and more. There are great possibilities for how this can be used (and horrible options as well) but think about medicine being able to identify a John Doe who is brought into the Emergency Department, or your home security system identifying who is knocking at the door. And of course, this technology is not new, its just finally coming out for public usage.
    • by mikael ( 484 )

      Out of curiousity, I found and tried running one of those old PC magazine performance test programs from the 1990's (SpeedPro or something similar) on a modern PC (3 GHz, dual-core Intel). Performance was 120,000 faster than the original IBM XT, not taking into the use of GPU's. Tests were doing things like random disk access, FFT transform, memory operations.

      Given that for some tasks a GPU is 100x faster than a CPU, and cloud computing puts together a grid of thousands or such PC's, that is an insane amou

  • when you get an anonymous email telling you you have a booger hanging on the end of a long nose hair

  • There was once a time that startrek predicted future technology. CSI is now doing it. And it is far less benevolent than the cell phone and portable medical diagnostic devices.

  • Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:08AM (#37567300) Homepage Journal

    Time to start dressing like The Stig again.

  • by oneiros27 ( 46144 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:10AM (#37567330) Homepage

    Of course, they just managed to link to *someone* ... did they then ask the person to confirm if they were correct?

    I have a LinkedIn page, but without a picture. My twin brother on the other hand, uses Facebook, while I don't. (I'm rather sensitive about my info being out there, after having a stalker during undergrad) So, it's entirely possible that they would've gotten information from my face ... but unlikely that it'd have been my information

    In this case, the error might still lead them to me, as my brother would recognize me if they showed him the picture ... but how many other incorrect matches might there have been? Just getting *a* match is not the same as getting the *correct* match.

  • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:11AM (#37567344) Journal
    As always, the completely innocent, not socially related to anybody not completely innocent, totally conformant with local and regional cultural and lifestyle standards, possessing enough money to not be of interest to debt collectors; but not so much as to be of interest to marketers, not being followed by any stalkers/vindictive exes/etc., people have Absolutely Nothing To Fear!

    Fucking luddites. Go tighten your tinfoil hats.
  • by condition-label-red ( 657497 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:13AM (#37567362) Homepage
    Burkas [wikipedia.org] for *EVERYONE* !!!
  • by circletimessquare ( 444983 ) <circletimessquar ... m minus language> on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:13AM (#37567374) Homepage Journal

    you did

    it's funny that the tech industry holds some of the most privacy-concerned individuals, yet all their dedication to their craft has done is provide the most privacy destroying entity ever to exist

    privacy is dead as a doorknob. just forget about the concept. really, you needn't bother about privacy anymore, it's a nonstarter in today's world. big brother? try little brother: every joe shmoe with a smart phone with a camera has more power than the NSA, KGB, MI6, MSS: those guys are amateur hour

    i'm not saying it's wrong, i'm not saying it's right. i'm just saying it's the simple truth of the matter, right or wrong: privacy is dead. acceptance is your only option now. you simply can't fight this

    and government didn't kill it, you paranoid schizophrenic goons

    your technolust did

    • by Kazymyr ( 190114 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:28AM (#37567616) Journal

      it's funny that the tech industry holds some of the most privacy-concerned individuals (..)

      That is only if you believe the all-caps paragraphs on all the EULAs and TOS you click through. Often the following paragraphs will contradict the bombastic declarations of commitment to privacy - on the same page.

    • Technological advance is the purview of many, not only technophiles, academics, or governments. Technology to monitor and correlate just advances. Other than that, I agree with you.

      More data goes online every day, even aside from what we put there ourselves, data sourced a myriad ways, ways multiplying constantly. It's a(n ever more) digital life.

      There's no pulling the plug. There's only learning to cope. It's just fact that our lives, the lives of everyone, grow ever more transparent.

      So, how will we a

    • by gclef ( 96311 )

      Large group of people stubbornly refuses to act in uniform manner. Film at 11.

  • by feenberg ( 201582 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:16AM (#37567396)

    They say the false accept rate is .001, or one in a thousand. That is, they can extract about 10 bits of information from a picture. From those 10 bits they claim to get the SSN? Or, they have the picture of a person, and need to identify them in a sample of a million people, they will get back 1000 possible matches.

    The complaints about privacy seem greatly overblown. In essence they are saying that if you post a picture with your name, and then another picture without your name, someone with a million dollars of software might recognize the similarities. Of course they might without the computer too. This is just another in the long line of "security" scares which presume that items of public knowledge such as your appearance, name, DOB and SSN can be turned into a secret passwords after 40 years of being public knowledge. The security experts should be spending their time convincing banks not to pretend an SSN is a secret, rather than enabling them by agitating for legislation to make it so.

  • by SirGarlon ( 845873 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:17AM (#37567420)
    The implications of this look big enough to concern even the apathetic, non-technical majority. Perhaps this will finally motivate the long-needed policy reform on privacy in the digital age.
    • Finally, a wake-up call on privacy policy?

      I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. The article talks about them matching a picture taken in public, with information such as images from facebook which are also set as public. Where is the violation of your privacy?

      If you don't want random people in the street to be able to look at your facebook pictures then don't put them online, or make them as private.

      Aggregating public information doesn't suddenly create privacy violations.

  • This isn't going away. The only real answer is to clog the information channels about you with what you actually want the world to know.

    Does this pose a problem for, say, pseudonym online dating? Yep. Unless you're willing to drop the pseudonym and link out to your dating profile, alongside your work profile, your hobby blog. It's time to stop pretending that we can post to Facebook and compartmentalize it -- the service providers do not want to do this, and increasingly are unable to provide this even if w

  • So now I can trace my date to see wether she ever did a porno ?

  • They've been doing this on shows like CSI and NCIS for years. :) You mean... they were just making it up? Wow. My faith in Hollywood's technical advisers is shattered forever.

  • by aestheticpriest ( 2002576 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:26AM (#37567578)
    I am a good looking female. When I was a waitress I had a stalker at my workplace. Because the schedule was posted in view-- not a clear view, but view enough for him to find an opportunity to read it without looking suspicious-- he consistently showed up during work hours and tried to follow me home. I didn't have a car, so I walked home alone in the middle of the night; I worked 3rd shift at a 24-hour diner. This might seem like a poor choice, but I desperately needed a job. With this technology a stranger could find out who I am through a picture of me taken with his cellphone. This is also dangerous for people in the sex industry who are already way more vulnerable to stalking than I was walking home from 3rds at a diner. I'm now doing amateur porn-- difficult to resist when it earns an unskilled laborer a grownup sized income for part time hours-- but my image is everywhere online.
    • by HangingChad ( 677530 ) on Friday September 30, 2011 @11:42AM (#37567862) Homepage

      I am a good looking female.

      On Slashdot? Are you lost?

      • by gknoy ( 899301 )

        Girls can be nerds too. News flash, at least some of them are likely to be attractive.

    • I'm now doing amateur porn-- difficult to resist when it earns an unskilled laborer a grownup sized income for part time hours-- but my image is everywhere online.

      What? No links???

      If you've got a pr0n website for $$...I'd have to think a link on Slashdot would bring a fortune in a day....if it could handle the slashdotting....

      • if it could handle the slashdotting....

        Hot server pounded all night by gang of horny geek studs (5 stars)

    • I understand that unwanted attention from anyone can be unpleasant, upsetting and in some cases dangerous. But your experience shows that this kind of technology isn't required for that to be the case. A guy stalked you, tried to follow you home and made you feel threatened, and he didn't need to look you up online to do that.

      He could well have searched for you online. Finding out your name could be as easy as overhearing a co-worker calling for you, or reading your name badge. But to a large extent the amo

  • There are companies actually selling access to large stocks of video surveillance. Imagine combining facial recognition software with the video from thousands of security cameras. You could do all kinds of scary things.

  • FTA:

    I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

    It's just too much of a binary approach to the matter; either you accept being part of the network and are fine or you choose not to join and are hiding something. The fact is that there are grey areas on this matter; It's not often that there's something I don't want anyone to know, but there are thousands of things I don't want some people to know.

    Likewise, I don't think it's entirely appropriate to have you automatically opted in. Suddenly, everyone is a part of a network whether they want to be or

  • the wealth of data accessible in the cloud (by which we basically mean the Internet).

    Then why on earth didn't they just say "the Internet"?!? Are we really going to see the term "cloud" replace "Internet"?

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz

Working...