SOCIAL MEDIA + YOU

You’ve gone through the necessary precautions on Facebook in regards to your privacy. You’ve worked hard to make sure your password is “very strong” & even set all your photo albums to “friends only”. But are you actually safe?

I discovered an interesting article this morning. A study shows that Facebook’s facial recognition technologies can be used to identify individuals in real life. You can read the full article here, but I’ll summarize it for you.

Earlier this year Facebook launched Facial Recognition. Through a complex algorithm they have successfully linked your photo to your profile, making it easier to tag you in photos. This is cool if your friends want to tag you quickly in photos, but not so cool if they can be used to find you at your college campus or workplace.

Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman demonstrated this at the Black Hat Security Conference. They took public information from certain individual’s Facebook pages and used facial recognition software to identify these individuals as they peered into a web cam. They were able to correctly identify 31% of the students in the web cams.

The facial recognition software is not rocket science and it is probable that anyone can get their hands on the technology and use it for harm. We might not be far off from predators using our public information to find us via an online webcam. I’m interested to see what the future of facial recognition turns into.

As the article states, it’s easy to change your name, it’s not so easy to change your face.  Are you confident in your online security?