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Face recognition app FindFace may be the ultimate stalker tool
Russian face recognition app FindFace might be one of the scariest apps we have seen in recent years. According to the app’s developers, FindFace can identify a person from a photograph with 70 percent accuracy and track them down on social media.
FindFace works by analyzing a photo of a person’s face and comparing it to images on VK.com, a Facebook-like social media site popular in Russia. If the app finds a match, it returns the person’s VK profile, along with the profiles of 10 similar looking people. Effectively, this gives anyone with a smartphone the ability to cyberstalk random strangers on the street.
While this is certainly a scary scenario, it is hard to deny that FindFace’s capabilities are impressive, and company co-founder Alexander Kabakov recently told The Guardian just how much data the app is able to sift through.
“Three million searches in a database of nearly 1bn photographs: that’s hundreds of trillions of comparisons, and all on four normal servers,” Kabakov said. “With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer.”
Kabakov explained that the purpose behind the app is to make it easy to track down someone you like to send them a friend request. Slightly more creepy, Kabakov also said that because the app returns 10 similar looking people in its results, you can instead use it to find people who look like a celebrity you have a crush on. Doubly more creepy, Kabakov said you can also use it to find people who look like your ex. Yikes.
The functionality of FindFace raises some serious privacy concerns, but Kabakov believes that the disappearance of privacy is unavoidable, and people will need to get used to that idea sooner or later.
“In today’s world we are surrounded by gadgets,” Kabakov said. “Our phones, televisions, fridges, everything around us is sending real-time information about us. Already we have full data on people’s movements, their interests and so on. A person should understand that in the modern world he is under the spotlight of technology. You just have to live with that.”
Photo by @lattefarsan
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