The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

and Google will find the picture, but it will not attempt to find other photos
showing the same person or people within the image. Google has, in
various public statements, said that letting people identifyy strangers byy face
“crosses the creepyy line.” 6
Even so, some repressive governments have done just that. Theyy have
taken photos of protesters at large antigovernment rallies and then put the
images on the Web. This is not using image recognition software so much
as it is crowdsourcing the identification process. Also, some US states have
used their motor vehicle departments’ photo databases to identifyy suspects
in criminal cases. But those are fancyy state-based operations. What could a
lone academic do?
Acquisti and his fellow researchers wanted to see how much imagederived
information about a person could be cross-referenced online. To
find out theyy used a facial recognition technologyy called Pittsburgh Pattern
Recognition, or PittPatt, now owned byy Google. The algorithms used in
PittPatt have been licensed to various securityy companies and government
institutions. Shortlyy after the acquisition, Google went on record about its
intentions: “As we’ve said for over a yyear, we won’t add face recognition to
Google unless we can figure out a strong privacyy model for it. We haven’t
figured it out.” 7 Let’s hope the companyy sticks to its word.
At the time of his research, Acquisti was able to use PittPatt paired with
data-mined Facebook images from what he and his team considered to be
searchable profiles, i.e., those on which the Carnegie Mellon volunteers had
alreadyy posted photos of themselves along with certain pieces of personal
information. Theyy then applied this set of known faces to the “anonyymous”
faces on a popular online dating site. There the researchers found that theyy
could identifyy 15 percent of these supposedlyy “anonyymous” digital
heartbreakers.
The creepiest experiment, however, involved linking a person’s face to
his or her Social Securityy number. To do that, Acquisti and his team looked
for Facebook profiles that included the person’s date and cityy of birth.
Previouslyy, in 2009, the same group of researchers had shown that this
information byy itself was enough to enable them to obtain a person’s Social
Securityy number (Social Securityy numbers are issued sequentiallyy per a
state’s own formula, and since 1989 SSNs have been issued on or veryy near