Privacy SOS

“Augmented reality”: from a photo on the street to your social security number?

CBS has published a pretty scary assessment of facial recognition technology. When paired with data mining software and publicly available data on the internet, it appears as if a dedicated and competent person could find out a whole lot about you if they simply have a photograph of your face. The story cites a recent Carnegie Mellon University/Heinz College study:

"…it is possible to start from an anonymous face in the street, and end up with very sensitive information about that person." The results were "made possible by the convergence of face recognition, social networks, data mining, and cloud computing – that [is referred] to as augmented reality."

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