Why Facial Recognition Really Is Creepy

The following is an interesting post from the The Social Graf by Erik Sass, posted August 7, 2011

While lots of people have been wringing their hands about Facebook's deployment of facial recognition technology, which strikes many as a breach of privacy, I have generally been more sanguine: as long as it all occurred within the social network, and as long as you could disable the facial recognition if you want, it didn't seem like that big a deal to me. But a new study by Alessandro Acquisiti of Carnegie Mellon University points out that facial recognition raises privacy concerns that aren't so easy to dismiss.

For one thing, facial recognition can clearly be applied to images found across the Internet, not just Facebook, and then used to match information from one location with images found on another. Here, Acquisiti and his team were able to use standard, off-the-shelf facial recognition software to compare photos from Facebook and dating Web sites and identify individuals, even if they tried to obscure their identities by using different names.

Even more disturbing, from my perspective, was a second experiment in which Acquisiti and his team took photos of individuals and then compared these offline and online images; this time, they were able to discover the identities of people on Facebook with photos they provided themselves. This effectively extends the reach of photo recognition from the online world to the offline world: it's not hard to imagine someone surreptitiously snapping photos of someone out in the "real world" and then feeding them into image identification software to pull up their Facebook profile or other identifying online information.

Building on the real world-online bridge created by facial recognition, Acquisiti's team then was able to "infer" a surprising amount of data combed from other online sources, demonstrating "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.'" Acquisiti's study represents a warning about the still largely untapped power of "this blending of online and offline data -- made possible by the convergence of face recognition, social networks, data mining, and cloud computing."

Facial recognition also adds yet another lay of permanence (not necessarily in a good way) to the online "paper trails" people leave behind them, for good or ill, in the social media universe. It's bad enough to have your name attached to some thoughtless remark online; now you don't even have to provide your name for people to be able to link your picture to incriminating content. On that score, Acquisiti writes: "Google's Eric Schmidt observed that, in the future, young individuals may be entitled to change their names to disown youthful improprieties. It is much harder, however, to change someone's face."

Permission

In order to move ahead with life, sometimes we think we need permission  Don Mintzer, Life Coach suggests  that it is important, and then provides his readers and clients with a permission note. A great idea, and one that you may want to act on so you can move forward and leave your old life behind. If you need permission here is the link to his  note.

Who are you?

I think, therefore I am. or as Decarte said I am, therefore I think. Which of these is true? Do we exist because we think or do we think because we think? Difficult questions, which brings me to my thoughts about loss of self. The loss of self is areal tragedy. It is seldom addressed by medical  profession yet it is a loss so profound that many never recover from it. When we lose memory of who we are we are stripped of a lifetime of learning, of personal identity, and personal power. 

The loss is a soul shattering experience, intense and intimate. It is so intimate that society as a whole averts its eyes and closes its ears to the pain, and despair of such a naked soul. It is a soul bedeviled by infantile demons, the very stuff from which neurosis and psychosis is made. 

Intellect and intelligence are so associated with knowledge and facts that memory loss can easily lead to a feeling of loss of intelligence. If you are someone who is highly educated and who relied on intelligence and ability to remember facts and creatively use them to solve problems and envision solutions, an inability to remember is a devastating blow. No place is it more devastating than to your image of yourself. Where is your legitimacy? Where is your worth? Where is your purpose?

Only those who love you enough to dare be close to your suffering and your anger and your pain are left. Strange, but true, by losing the facade you lost some friends and relatives, but in return you lost the capacity to pretend. Now that's a return worth paying for.

So those of have lost sense of self it is ok to  be angry at the right things and be sure that it is not at yourself. Be sad and disappointed over the right things and be proud you don't ever need to be disappointed in yourself. You nee not pretend any more. You and your struggle are present and true for those who dare come near.