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Subway photographer connects random photos to people's social media profiles | Privacy Online News

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Егор Цветков (Egor Tsvetkov), a photographer in Russia, has taken photos of random people on the subway and connected them to social media portraits and complete profiles using face matching technology.

From Subway photographer connects random photos to people's social media profiles | Privacy Online News

Right now, he’s using some software that matches faces against the pictures on vKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, and it is getting a 70% match rate even against photographs taken from angles and under different lighting.

Think what this means.

When I walk into a conference, my Google glasses will be able to tell me who everyone is and scan their LinkedIn profiles. I’ll get it to put green ticks next to people who influence the budgets at banks and red crosses next to mouthy but powerless middle managers such as myself. Come on, you’d all do it. It’s embarrassing enough meeting people that you’ve forgotten meeting, or remembered their names wrong or you didn’t know that they work for you (all of which have happened to me).

It would certainly be helpful for a run of the mill pervert looking at women on the subway to know whether they are single, straight, living on their own, where they work, what their address is, whether they are going out later and so on. Instead of having to do any donkey work, they’ll just iPerv or some similar app to get the details there and then.

There is no answer other than the immediate mass production of Facebook-blue burkhas for us all.

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