The 2011 “Black Hat” Technical Security Conference was held this week in Las Vegas, and several of the presentations highlighted the rapidly increasing power of facial recognition technology, as well as the associated threat to privacy. Columnist Dominic Basulto of BigThink.com reports on selected conference presentations in a blog entitled “Does Facial Recognition Technology Mean the End of Privacy?”
“The researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed how a combination of simple technologies – a smart phone, a webcam and a Facebook account – were enough to identify people after only a three-second visual search. Hackers – once they can put together a face and the basics of a personal profile – like a birthday and hometown – they can start piecing together details like your Social Security Number and bank account information.”
Basulto’s analysis suggests that facial recognition technology presents challenges most of us do not yet understand, and he proposes that the future will be filled with opportunities for others to snap photos of us and thereby intrude into our daily lives in unwanted ways. “Cookies, spiders, bots and spyware will seem positively Old School by then,” he concludes. Bank privacy officers and those designated as “responsible” for privacy pursuant to Gramm-Leach-Bliley should take note. Do you know where in your data files those pictures are, and how well are they protected against data breaches?
Click here for the story: http://bigthink.com/ideas/39603
