This facial recognition app will make you rethink the privacy you believe you have.

The international hype of posting photos of yourself in various life situations has expanded over the past 10 years. People are posting more and more photos of themselves in all different situations and less or more directed scenes.

This phenomenon was an inspiration for Russian photography and art student Egor Tsvetkov. He took photographs of random people and ran them through the facial recognition app he created himself. This project literally burst the illusion of privacy that many people think they actually have.

The project was titled “Your face is important information” and in its basics, it’s very simple. Εgor Tsvetkov first took photos of 100 random people on the subway.

He claims that the majority of them did not even react when he was taking photos of them. Most of them had their mobile phones in front of them and did not pay much attention to anything going on around them.

It was strange that people did not pay attention to being photographed because it’s inappropriate to take photos of someone without their permission. This was the first point that this student found interesting in this social experiment.

The best part of this project was when Egor ran the photos through the facial recognition app called “FindFace” which he created. This was also a unique opportunity to test the application.

The project actually helped him to determine whether the application could identify photographed people on the popular Russian social network Vkontakte (“in Touch”).

It turned out that the experiment with the application had excellent results. Some 70 percent of people on the subway were easily found on this growing Russian social network.

The amazing fact about this is that people looked quite differently in Egor’s photos when compared to the photos which they chose to upload to the social network.

See the results of Egor’s social experiment with facial recognition app and judge for yourself:

facial recognition app

facial recognition app

facial recognition app

facial recognition app

facial recognition app

facial recognition app

facial recognition app

It’s obvious that people tend to upload only the best photos of themselves. They are often using selfies and photos which represent them in a positive way. A smile on a face can change a lot, a good angle even more.

But the modern applications are giving one million solutions on how to fix even the worst photos which we are eager to share with the rest of the network.

The fact that people like to post more and more photos of themselves is giving us a clear image of how this can change the future.

Finding someone is no longer a job for secret agencies or police. An average person can perform basic research and find enormous information about a significant person based only on a photo of themselves.

This gives a great opportunity for sociopaths, stalkers, and criminals. Our security and our privacy are in great danger thanks to our obsession to share photos of ourselves.

“My project is a clear illustration of the future that awaits us if we continue to discover ourselves on the Internet to the extent that we do today,”

Egor Tsvetkov concluded.

References:

  1. Bored Panda
  2. PC World

Copyright © 2012-2024 Learning Mind. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact us.

power of misfits book banner desktop

Like what you are reading? Subscribe to our newsletter to make sure you don’t miss new thought-provoking articles!

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Kostas

    Hi Valerie. Very interesting read. I would like jut to highlight that the findface app is not created by the photographer-student (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FindFace). He actually uploaded the photos of the strangers in the findface web application. The findface app is actually a face recognition model created using photos of people in the Russian social network. Extending your read and knowing that Meta (WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook) violates privacy policies, we can imagine how this can be exploited…

Leave a Reply