I was just became aware that Facebook is going to use
facial recognition technology on its large collection of members' photo database. Facebook claims that it will help identify people for their members through use of this new service. Facial recognition biometric technology has been available for a while and it works well. The technology has been used by passport offices all over the world, DoD, DMV, varies of law enforcement agents and private sectors.
Facebook has an estimated 60 billion photos from individuals in its database, and it is already has knowledge of every individual member's relationship with each other. If Facebook is going to perform facial mining through facial recognition technology to all of its members photos, it will further expand Facebook's knowledge onto its members and non-members.
What are the problems, you may ask?
Firstly, Facebook can extend its knowledge of its members. With the biometric technology it's able to identify all of your friends in your photos including those who are not members of Facebook. It can then link those non-members with other members that may have relationships. If this happen Facebook will suddenly expands its knowledge of its members through this discovery process. I am sure this will be a good tool for law enforcement agents and criminals to connect the dots and will have some good use of this information on a massive scale. We just hope that this data will never be able to be hacked by anyone. The same applies to the geocode (you GPS location tag) that is embedded in your photo that your may have upload to Facebook. Good privacy means: Collect no data, do no evil.
Can it then prove the
six degrees of separation is really statistically sound? May be I don't want to know the answer through this way....
Secondly, those individuals that have been uniquely identified may further be exploited by Facebook or others (if they sell the data, since those individuals may not have agreements with Facebook). What Facebook can do to those identified non-members? Does the member agreement include those identities? May be one day police officer will knock on your door and ask you to help release your friend's information, because a few of your photos have included that individual! Facebook can also scan the web and try to co-relate those individuals' identities with blogs, personal home pages, Linkedin etc. Those are public data anyway, so they can "face mining" you and everyone! The privacy issue here is their huge collection of photos, relationships knowledge and its ability to expand it knowledge. Even though those non-members' identities may be anonymous as a label, but it can be easily to discover its real identity at a later time with external sources - such as LexisNexis? Or FBI? That makes me wonder what else can we do with it?
"Facebook's more than 500 million users have been automatically included in the database, but the company is allowing each person to choose whether to be identified by toggling a pane in the account's privacy settings.
The tool would still scan that person's face and figure out who it is, but it won't display that information. People can still manually tag friends."
The above shows that Facebook has no option for the member to stop Facebook from using this data, it just gives the member an option not to show the suggestions. It does not seem they allows their members to remove what has been collected from the members. What happens to this information that Facebook collected? I found no trace of how Facebook is going to use those gathered information and who has the ownership of the data.
Thirdly Facebook plans to give its members an opt-out option for this service! It should be an opt-in option, so that Facebook does not have the ability to abuse their members' rights. Because most users are not aware of the privacy and risk issues associated with this service. An Opt-out option, means that Facebook can force most if not all of their members to use this new technology without asking. Good privacy practices are always asking the user to opt-in before providing service, why not Facebook? They should send out a message to each member to announce this new facial recognition service and how it will use the data, then ask their member to enable (opt-in) this feature.
Fourthly, the data belong to whom? The photo is mine, the content belongs to me, now what about the relationship information? What about this newly discovered individuals' relationship between non-connected members? I think it should belong to their members. But then I cannot find any statement from Facebook to address this issue. If you find it, please correct me by sending me a comment here.
The problem of this facial recognition technology with Facebook is its privacy practices. It seems that enabling this technology quietly to members' private collection (photo albums) has violated everyone's rights and trust. Since there is no membership/end-user agreement that initially included this type of technology to process member's photos. I have not found any privacy statement on how Facebook is going to use the technology on members' photos either.
Don't get me wrong, I do like the facial technology and I have been working in biometrics industry for years and I embrace the technology. But then their use of this technology has brought out a lot of privacy issues when they are not carefully utilizing it. Technology itself has no privacy issue. It's how they using the technology. I like Goolge's free photo management tool Picasa 3 that includes facial recognition technology, but it only works under my control and does not share my friends' identity with anyone.
Reference News:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/privacy-group-urges-investigation-of-facebook-facial-recognition-tool/2011/06/13/AGSUQCTH_blog.html
http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2011/06/13/lets-face-facts-about-facial-recognition-technology-inside-and-outside-of-facebook/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/229742/why_facebooks_facial_recognition_is_creepy.html
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-06-07/tech/facebook.facial.recognition_1_facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-facial-recognition-face-recognition?_s=PM:TECH
