Tag Photo. Lose Identity.

Facial Recognition technology is advancing rapidly and finding its way into everyday applications. Indeed, we are in discussions with media companies about deploying Imprezzeo to enhance their image search capabilities. However, there are some serious security implications for such technology when coupled with Social Media.

A recent study by Carnegie Mellon University demonstrated how using an off-the-shelf face recogniser, cloud computing and publicly available information from social network sites, anyone with a smart phone and an internet connection could harvest people’s personal information, even their Social Security numbers, starting with nothing but an image of their face.

Just imagine, innocently tagging your friends in Facebook (or now Google+)* might lead to the theft of their identity.

*Updated 9 Dec 2011

“The Facebook Manual Auto-tag” is copyright (c) 2010 Ambuj Saxena and made available under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 license

Sean Murphy

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