(Natural-News) Have you ever been "tagged" by someone - a friend, a co-worker, or perhaps someone you don't really know that well but who may be a friend of a friend - on Facebook? You may want to rethink that whole concept, thanks to a little purchase the social media giant made recently.
NSA social spy network Facebook to use facial recognition technology to track individuals across photos, videos
Saturday, June 23, 2012 by: J. D. Heyes
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/036267_Facebook_facial_recognition_tracking.html#ixzz1yfyiVkbz
Facebook has purchased Face.com's facial recognition technology, which techies say will make it faster and easier to tag photos, but which privacy experts say could become an issue, according to a report in InformationWeek.
The social media company, whose stock price has steadily fallen since its initial public offering in mid-May, paid between $55-60 million for the Israeli-developed mobile recognition technology, Techcrunch.com, adding that it "could potentially allow you to upload a photo to Facebook while on the go, instantly receive suggestions of whom to tag, and confirm the tags with one click."
"This is important to Facebook because right now there's probably a ton of untagged mobile photos getting posted. Those are lost opportunities for engagement because when you get notified that you've been tagged in a photo, you probably visit Facebook immediately to check it. These tags also help Facebook understand who a photo is relevant to, so it can feature it in the news feeds of your closest friends," Techcrunch.com reported.
There is something sinister here
In addition to the new programming, Facebook launched a new app - Facebook Camera - in late May, which is described as "a standalone photos app where you can shoot, filter, and share single or sets of photos and scroll through a feed of photos uploaded to Facebook by your friends."
What makes Facebook's purchase of facial recognition tools even more ominous is the company's earlier $1 billion purchase of Instagram, which, Techcrunch.com notes, can be tied to Face.com's program.
How good is this technology? Think three letters: "C-I-A."
Face.com's technology allows users to recognize faces even when conditions are poor, such as low lighting. So now Facebook has a) a super-advanced facial recognition program; b) a brand-new camera app; and c) the ability to post photos instantly.
All because the company believes the "next big thing" in social media is being able to post pictures in real-time so that your friends can quickly latch onto them?
Maybe, but this is pretty high-tech stuff for a social media site and, given Facebook's (and Google's, and other sites') penchant for ripping off your personal information and invading your privacy, there is plenty here for concern.
No doubt the additions will make it easier for Facebook users to identify friends in photos and video - especially those on mobile devices - and that businesses could benefit by being able to better track "when and where their products are being talked about and promoted, especially with the rise of social sharing sites like Pinterest," InformationWeek reported.
But at what cost to privacy? And how much easier will these technology additions make it for government snoops to "tag" and track you?
To tag or not to tag?
"Facebook's page on photo tagging provides advice to users on how to limit or eliminate visibility of photos they are tagged in, as well as on how to remove tags, but the process can quickly become complicated and hard to keep up with," says the IW report. "Businesses must take care to ensure that increased use of tagging does not result in increased privacy concerns for customers."
There is legitimate concern this technology will most likely be used to deepen network databases already developed to conduct passive domestic surveillance on Americans by documenting relationships between people.
Imagine being "tagged" in a photo of someone who, without your knowledge, is involved in criminal activity. Since you are tied to that person, will that be justification for authorities to pry through your personal life, which they will justify by saying they were only trying to conduct a "thorough investigation?"
Think before you tag (or allow yourself to be tagged).
Sources:
http://www.informationweek.com
http://techcrunch.com
http://www.informationweek.com
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/036267_Facebook_facial_recognition_tracking.html#ixzz1yfuJ6guq
Replies
(NaturalNews) In what may be the most ironic thing to happen all year, tech giant Google - a serial privacy violator - says the company is experiencing what it describes as an "alarming" increase in the number of censorship requests being received by Western (in particular, the U.S.) governments. Seems the Leviathan - also known to regularly violate privacy rights (see increased use of drones and other surveillance devices) - doesn't like to be held to account, either.
Besides wanting to censor Internet search results, governments are also looking to tamp down YouTube videos, Google said in a recent "transparency report."
"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," Dorothy Chou, a senior policy analyst at Google, wrote in a blog post, as reported by CNN.com.
"For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors," she wrote. "In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn't comply with either of these requests."
A 718 percent increase
A staggering number of requests came from none other than U.S. government agencies. Google reports that, in the final half of 2011, U.S. agencies made requests to have 6,192 content pieces removed from search results, blog posts or archives of online videos, the report noted.
That was a whopping 718 percent increase from the 757 items requested removed by U.S. agencies in the first six months of last year.
In addition, Google said it received 187 requests from law enforcement agencies and courts to remove content between the months of July and December, a 103-percent increase from 92 requests received in the first half of the year, the report said.
Moreover, many of the requests were trivial and aimed more at trying to protect the integrity of the department - not for some noble reason like, say, removing content that is simply untrue (and even that would be make the removal a first amendment free-speech issue).
In one example cited in the report, an American law enforcement agency wanted Google to remove a blog that merely "allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity."
Google says it denied that request.
In a separate incident, another police agency asked the tech giant to remove 1,400 YouTube videos (a company which Google owns) because of "alleged" harassment. In still another case - this one in Canada - the government's passport office wanted Google to delete a YouTube video "of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet," the report said.
High compliance rate
Google said it did not comply with either of those requests either, but astonishingly, the company did comply with a large plurality of requests from the U.S. - 42 percent of them - in the last half of 2011.
But even that large percentage is better than in previous years. The company says in the second half of 2010, it complied with an alarming 87 percent of U.S. requests to remove content.
In its report, Google said that "[s]ome content removals are requested due to allegations of defamation, while others are due to allegations that the content violates local laws prohibiting hate speech or pornography. Laws surrounding these issues vary by country, and the requests reflect the legal context of a given jurisdiction."
It appears, however, that many of the requests the company is receiving have nothing to do with legitimate issues.
Sources:
http://articles.cnn.com
http://www.usnews.com
http://www.huffingtonpost
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/036263_government_censorship_Google.html...