 same building. Cameras in the elevator and around the neighborhood recorded how the duo entertained themselves.
When local police declined to open a criminal case, the tenants of the house took matters into their own hands: They took screenshots showing the culprits’ faces and used FindFace to locate them on social networks.
The amateur detectives reported their findings to the police, and as a result, the young men were charged. In Ren TV’s (Russian TV channel) report , one of the tenants said that they had enough data and evidence to send message to friends of the hooligans, and to their places of study and work.
Though the Petersburgers had enough patience to ask police for help, not all Internet users are as level-headed. And where there’s a will, there’s a way — to bully people. If you’ve heard of FindFace, you know about its most infamous use case: when members of the anonymous 2ch image board used it to hunt porn actresses online. The trolls found the women’s social media pages and sent scandalous messages to their friends and relatives along with corresponding images.
— Kaspersky Lab (@kaspersky) April 29, 2016
At the same time, the founder of FindFace Maxim Perlin is sure that nowadays people literally need to pay to preserve their privacy. In a television interview, he said that people who want to wipe their data from FindFace’s database will have to buy a premium account. A month of privacy on the service costs about $8.
5. There is a thin line between security and disaster
Many experts are sure: biometrics will replace passwords and make the world even more secure. So in the future, people will let the systems scan their irises, fingerprints, and even face prints to replace the process of entering complicated combinations of symbols.
Microsoft is already developing technology that allows users to authorize with selfies. NEC is researching the use of facial recognition to secure electronic payments. MasterCard is working on a selfie identification system that lets users send money without passwords.
We’ve already written about the downsides of dactylography , so let’s now focus on weaknesses in facial recognition. It’s really comes down to recent advances in 3D printing: Today you can print a really realistic copy of a person’s face. Developers of new identification systems will need to take that into account if they want to create really secure solutions.
For example, MasterCard and Google ask users to blink — a simple action that stops fraudsters from fooling the system with the help of a 3D-printed face or even just a photo. Unfortunately, Google’s solution failed — people managed to bypass the security measure with the help of a simple animated picture. MasterCard’s system is under development, so nobody knows yet if it can be fooled the same way.
6. Don’t share your face with any Tom, Dick, or Harry
You may have heard of Anaface, a website that analyzes your photo and rates your level of attractiveness. It uses symmetry as the main criterion — quite a questionable standard, don’t you think? For example, Angelina Jolie rated only 8.4 out of 10 on Anaface. But the site’s accuracy is not its only problem.
First, Anaface’s owners admitted they launched the project to encourage people to seek plastic surgery. Well, at least they’re giving it to us straight.
Second, the website’s terms and conditions are hard to read and really shady. They are given in a very small window so a user needs to scroll a lot to read the more than 7,000 words of small print. That’s why many will probably miss that every user of the site provides it with a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license” to use all photos uploaded to Anaface. In plain English: The service can sell the photos people upload without any obligation to pay the real owners of the images.
At the same time users, pledge to upload only their own photos: “You may not post, upload, display or otherwise make available Content that contains video, audio photographs, or images of another person without his or her permission (or in the