Facebook Terminates Face Recognition Tool in Europe, While Depleting Privacy in the US

*Source: RT

 

US social media giant Facebook is deleting facial recognition data collected from European users and plans to terminate the feature there soon. Meanwhile, the software is gaining traction in the US, attracting apps that now recognize faces in public.
­When users “tag” a friend in a photo uploaded to Facebook, the service stores and remembers facial features that identify that unique individual. Facebook is then able to suggest “tags” on newly uploaded photos to match pictures with names.
Since 2011, the Ireland-based Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has led an investigation into Facebook to see if the social media giant complied with European privacy laws. The DPC initially responded to complaints by a user group in Austria. Facebook’s European headquarters are located in Ireland, making the DPC the ideal leader in the investigation. The commissioner recommended Facebook implement a number of changes throughout the European Union, including suspending its facial recognition tool.
The DPC said the social media company has so far made most of the improvements it requested, providing greater transparency for users in how their data is handled, control over settings, more clarity on the retention periods for deleting data and greater ease for users to access their personal data.
Facebook has now also agreed to switch off its facial recognition tool, which many say is a threat to individual privacy.
“This is a big deal,” University of California law professor told the New York Times. “The development of these tools in the private sector directly affects civil liberties. The ultimate application is going to be – can we apply these patterns in video surveillance to automatically identify people for security purposes and maybe for marketing purposes as well?”
Facebook said in a statement that it will do what it must to be in agreement with European data protection laws, but the company plans to bring facial recognition software back to the European market once it figures out how to make it comply with European privacy laws.
“It’s worth us reiterating that once we have an agreed on approach on the best way to notify and educate users with the DPC, we hope to bring back this useful tool,” a Facebook spokesperson told Tech Crunch.
About 25 percent of Facebook users are European and one third of the company’s advertising revenue comes from Europe, making it a crucial market for the company.
Ireland’s privacy regulator Billy Hawkers said in a press release that Facebook was “sending a  clear signal of its wish to demonstrate its commitment to best practices in data protection compliance.”
On Oct. 15, the tool will be switched off for users in Europe. It is already unavailable to new users on the continent.
But so far, the company has not made any promises about switching off the facial recognition tool in the US. At a hearing in July, Sen. Al Franken called Facebook the “world’s largest privately held database of face print – without the explicit consent of its users.”
Facebook enabled the facial recognition feature in June 2011 without announcing the change and opting in all users.
“I believe that we have a fundamental right to privacy, and that means people should have the ability to choose whether or not they’ll be enrolled in a commercial facial recognition database,” Franken said. “I encourage Facebook to provide the same privacy protections to its American users as it does its foreign ones.”
But rather than protecting privacy for Americans, Facebook may allow more features that collect data from Americans.
An Atlanta company, Redpepper, is currently developing an application that would build on the facial recognition software and allow Facebook users to be identified by cameras installed in stores and restaurants. Users with the application can then be tracked in the “real world,” a blog post by the company said.
“They are pushing the edges of what privacy rules may allow, just as an aggressive driver might with parking rules,” Brian Wieser, an analyst at the Pivotal Research Group, told the Times. “You don’t know you’ve broken a law until someone says you’ve broken a law.”

FBI Launches $1Billion Nationwide Face Recognition Project

*Source: Now The End Begins

“FACE recognition is ‘now’,” declared Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in a testimony before the US Senate in July. It certainly seems that way. As part of an update to the national fingerprint database, the FBI has begun rolling out facial recognition to identify criminals.

It will form part of the bureau’s long-awaited, $1 billion Next Generation Identification (NGI) programme, which will also add biometrics such as iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification to the toolkit. A handful of states began uploading their photos as part of a pilot programme this February and it is expected to be rolled out nationwide by 2014. In addition to scanning mugshots for a match, FBI officials have indicated that they are keen to track a suspect by picking out their face in a crowd.

Another application would be the reverse: images of a person of interest from security cameras or public photos uploaded onto the internet could be compared against a national repository of images held by the FBI. An algorithm would perform an automatic search and return a list of potential hits for an officer to sort through and use as possible leads for an investigation.

Ideally, such technological advancements will allow law enforcement to identify criminals more accurately and lead to quicker arrests. But privacy advocates are worried by the broad scope of the FBI’s plans. They are concerned that people with no criminal record who are caught on camera alongside a person of interest could end up in a federal database, or be subject to unwarranted surveillance.

The FBI’s Jerome Pender told the Senate in July that the searchable photo database used in the pilot studies only includes mugshots of known criminals. But it’s unclear from the NGI’s privacy statement whether that will remain the case once the entire system is up and running or if civilian photos might be added, says attorney Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The FBI was unable to answer New Scientist‘s questions before the magazine went to press.

Current RISC responses include the Red/Yellow/Green flag, the category of hit, the FBI number, the master name and the response caveats. The RISC Rapid Search supports multi-tiered enrollment and dissemination policies and maintains unique identities for the individuals enrolled in the repository. (See diagram above.)

The FBI hasn’t shared details of the algorithms it is using, but its technology could be very accurate if applied to photographs taken in controlled situations such as passport photos or police shots.

Tests in 2010 showed that the best algorithms can pick someone out in a pool of 1.6 million mugshots 92 per cent of the time. It’s possible to match a mugshot to a photo of a person who isn’t looking at the camera too. Algorithms such as one developed by Marios Savvides’s lab at Carnegie Mellon can analyse features of a front and side view set of mugshots, create a 3D model of the face, rotate it as much as 70 degrees to match the angle of the face in the photo, and then match the new 2D image with a fairly high degree of accuracy. The most difficult faces to match are those in low light. Merging photos from visible and infrared spectra can sharpen these images, but infrared cameras are still very expensive.

Of course, it is easier to match up posed images and the FBI has already partnered with issuers of state drivers’ licences for photo comparison. Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union urges caution: “Once you start plugging this into the FBI database, it becomes tantamount to a national photographic database.”