The government is
watching, your boss is watching and your friends are helping them.
Every time someone takes your picture and posts it to Facebook or
wherever it gets posted on social media some sort of facial
recognition software is watching. Pictures are scanned and attempt to
automatically tag you when your face is recognized in a picture and
that makes it easier for people to watch you and know what you've
been or are currently doing.
So for all the
tin-foil hat types out there a solution may be on the horizon. AVG
(the same AVG that makes the anti-virus software that Stevens puts on
our laptops) has been experimenting with glasses that will mess up
facial recognition software. The glasses currently have infrared LEDs
for messing with a camera's light filter and a reflective coating to
combat flash photography, both of these aspects concentrated around
your eyes should mess up facial recognition software pretty bad.
The glasses are
currently a prototype and different types of cameras produce varied
results and there probably will not be a consumer product very soon.
But is there something more behind this? Is the automatic facial
recognition the real enemy? Judging by the pictures in the article I
link to the glasses will not completely obscure your face, in fact it
hardly seems to. So even if it does beat the automatic tagging it
will not stop people from recognizing you in pictures, and it will
not stop your friends from manually tagging you.
What is so wrong
about being tagged though? Being tagged in photos lets your friends
see the pictures of you. This is probably a good time to check your
privacy settings, make sure you know who can see what about you.
Also, it's probably a good time to check who you are “friends”
with and why. If you are “friends” with your boss ask yourself
why and if you really want him or her to be able to see pictures of
you the same as your real friends.
Now there will
always be exceptions to the situation I have suggested, but the basic
idea is the same and will be valid for everyone. If you have
something embarassing or incriminating that you want to hide from
people, the internet is probably not the best place for it. But if
you really want to put it on the internet (or if your friend did
without your permission) then you should make sure you know who will
be able to see it. All of this goes for future employment situations
too, some people feel the need to look you up either at some point in
your selection process for a job (and sometimes for good reason,
security jobs should definitely be filled by trustworthy people) but
if there is something that should not be seen then it either should
not be on the internet or should be locked behind some privacy
settings.
The glasses are a
really neat idea, but they will not make you invisible, and to the
real people who can recognize you, they will probably make you look
pretty goofy too (depending on the setting of course).
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