With a cellphone camera and improved facial-recognition software, the stage is set for tech-savvy folks to take pictures of people on the street and identify them — and their personal information.
A study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 used off-the-shelf facial-recognition software to try to identify people from both online-profile pictures and photos taken in real time with a webcam.
Given the variables involved and that technology is still developing, it’s unlikely that process can be repeated easily at this point, said Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon who worked on the study.
“Conceptually, it’s possible,” he said. “It’s not entirely possible just yet, but technology is progressing to do it, though.”
The first experiment used photos from a dating website that hides personal information, and the second experiment took photos of participants in the experiment. In the second experiment, the software made a correct match between a Facebook photo and the fresh photo 31 percent of the time.
From there, the researchers used an algorithm to guess the first five digits of the Social Security numbers of the participants in the second experiment. The algorithm correctly predicted the first five digits of a Social Security number 27 percent of the time on its fourth try.
Acquisti said that some apps for phones use facial-recognition technology, but they aren’t that effective yet.
The team characterized its findings as the potential “democratization of surveillance.”