Ok this is a bit, uh, unsettling. For 'find my face' to work they have to already classify your face in images regardless of your 'opt in' status. And of course if you turn it on it pretty much instantly knows which pictures have your face in them.
I would like to see the first national security letter that demands Google hand over all pictures with the following 'face' in them. But I won't because the first rule of NSLs is you don't talk about NSLs.
I hope that when it gets abused by the government Google rips it out rather than allowing itself to be used in that way.
(apparently I woke up on the paranoid side of the bed today)
The difference is that other photo sharing sites don't hold a huge amount of behaviour and associative data about you.
To put it in a context you have to consider the fear involved when countries like China have already been caught breaching Google systems.
It might not mean much to us westerns as generally we aren't afraid of your government and it has at least they have some due process. Many totalitarian governments don't and from what the media spread they aren't afraid to arrerst everyone you associate with as well.
You can pretend that it isn't happening, but it is, and china isn't alone. Processes like this lead to industrialised abuses of power and perseuction of innocent people that have may have signed upto services without considering the full impact of just being snapped in a photo with someone else they barely know... and what evidence do they have this person is guilty? well like any normal person they probably read up on the news, where shocked about a few things, and all of a sudden you can pull items out of context and have a history of being involving with undesired behaviour.
One reaction to "evil foreign governments broke in to steal tasty data" would be to get rid of said tasty data.
Another reaction would be to go full-throttle into obtaining and then creating even more tasty data the likes of which have never been seen before. It won't happen again! Oh no.
I think we know which way the wind blows in Mountain View these days.
I think there is an essay in there somewhere. The tools for looking for and correlating data are getting better faster than we can respond intelligently to them. I recall how silly I felt the government's TIA (total information awareness) plan was but its less silly now. But governments aside, what happens when person A takes a picture of person B who is sharing lunch with them, and behind them at a booth is Person C having a lunch with person D who should not be associating with person C. The tool picks up both person C and D's face and tags three recognizable people, B, C, and D in the photo. And person E, perhaps the spouse of person C, gets 'C was tagged in a photo' showing up in C's stream and it comes as a rude surprised to person E.
First of all, find my face is opt-in, so person 'C' and person 'D' would have had to explicitly opt-in for this to happen.
Second you can control who can tag you in pictures - so person 'C' and person 'D' would have the opportunity to review the tagged photos before the tags become public.
Third - Find My Face won't create tags automatically. When person 'A' uploads the picture, Find My Face will look for faces in the photo and if it finds a person who has opted in to the feature it will suggest that the person be tagged. So person 'A' will see a prompt of the form 'Is this a picture of <person C>'? Most likely person A's response will be 'I have no idea' and they won't create the tag in the first place. This is especially true since tagging someone in a photo automatically shares the photo with them.
I'm glad to see Google taking this route when adding new features to its social network.
I am _infuriated_ by Facebook opting me in to every new sharing feature when they add it. It is a constant maintenance headache for people like me who want to simply have a presence on Facebook without participating on a day to day basis.
Could this mean in the future that simply showing your face in a picture will provide the world the means to find all sorts of information about you? Imagine a future where high-resolution cameras are common and anyone's identity can be drawn from a photo. On one hand, perhaps it could be used to quickly identify criminals. Public cameras or bots scouring publicly posted photographs might alert officials to recent uploads helping to pinpoint their location. In an entirely different scenario, the people participating in protests would be doxed; perhaps their frequency would be recorded somewhere. Soon it would become obvious who the loudest voices are.
Side note: Not even WaPo can seem to get it right. The unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil" not "Do no evil", which is what they have as one of their photo captions.
Is it really respectful of privacy rights to allow me to opt-out of tagging? People should be able to photograph me, attach my name, and share with their friends without my intervention. What happens in public is public.
I would like to see the first national security letter that demands Google hand over all pictures with the following 'face' in them. But I won't because the first rule of NSLs is you don't talk about NSLs.
I hope that when it gets abused by the government Google rips it out rather than allowing itself to be used in that way.
(apparently I woke up on the paranoid side of the bed today)