There's going to be a day, and I mean a specific day, when Facebook, Google or someone launches a product that lets you search for all instances of your face on the Internet.

You'll type your name in, confirm some images of your face and then be returned with pages and pages of photos of you in them.

You'll see photos you recognize, photos you don't (ie ones that you were never formally tagged in) and photos with you in the background that you had no idea existed.

It's going to be a day of mixed emotions. Photos are memories, and they'll be happy memories of events and places you had totally forgotten about. They'll also be embarrassment as you are presented with situations you forgot existed or thought no one would ever know about - perhaps as tame as you being drunk at a college party or as serious as evidence you were at some event or place you shouldn't have been at or with some person you shouldn't have been with.

You'll then repeat the above for your friends, family, partners and co-workers. We all will.

The technology is already there, it's just not being implemented in this way yet. But this experiment just shows how close this is to happening. And the ethical, moral and legal issues it's going to raise.

It's going to be a very interesting day.

Yes, and a good portion of these people will be searching with SafeSearch turned off.

We as a society are either going to get a lot more puritan or a lot more tolerant.

Or somewhere in between.

I remember a company, polarrose.com, who offered a face search engine. After a while they where asking you for your Facebook credentials (would you please give me your FB ID and passwd, sir?), crawl your account for tagged faces to extend their database. Googling shows they got bought from Apple a while ago [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20017018-37.html] and the guy [http://www.maths.lth.se/~solem] moved to SF. There is also http://whozat.com , which searches social networks for names; I am pretty sure that at given moment they where doing face recognition.

I always thought of photos, videos, content etc. as ghosts-- bits of memories saved into disjointed systems.

These ghosts live out their lives too! Some are aggregated, some gets repurposed as scams for spam sites, some plucky ones get drafted as trending memes, and the rest just... exist.

We don't see all these ghosts everywhere but as you pointed out it's a matter of time before one day we all become ghost busters.

But the thing is I don't think we'll be any more non-plussed about it. Because the day when we can self-identify ourselves online that novelty wouldn't feel all that different from any other futuristic day we live in. What with jetpacks, heads up goggles, glass displays, electric cars and more.

Assuming we're on an exponential innovation scale towards singularity we will inevitably grow bored, internalize the change, accept it for what it is and move on to the next shinier toy.

The future is pretty nifty.

It would probably have to be Facebook, because they have most of the photos.

But picture this:

"Hello [name]! All non facebook-photos of you ever are all here: [link]! Sign up for our brand new social network today to 'organize' them."

If this site doesn't grow faster than Pinterest, I don't know what will.

I guess we can look forward to applying our anonymizing face-paint, or strapping infrared LEDs to our heads before going out in public.

I thought you were kidding, but the LED idea is already a real product.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.obe...

The face paint idea is also real: http://cvdazzle.com/

only for certain values of "real"

The really interesting day from a privacy perspective is the one when you can search and the algorithm will be advanced enough to do even partial face matches or even non-face matching identification.

There are quite a lot of people who upload photos of themselves to places like /r/gonewild (or send such pseudo-anon photos of themselves through unsecure MMS or email networks) that they think are non-recognizable because they only show the bottom 20% of their face or whatever.

IMO it won't be that long until you can plug in a photo of someone and get matches with fairly high degrees of confidence that don't even show the entire face (maybe none of the face at all, if the photos are high enough resolution and the technology gets advanced enough to do real 3D mapping it could be based solely off of small moles or other skin markings on eg. the neck).

This is actually an even easier problem than what the blog wrote about.

On facebook at least, any photo of you is extremely likely to have been uploaded by a friend or mutual friend of yours. This vastly limits the number of possibilities to the point of this problem being tractable.

A lot of the more interesting ones will be by people who you don't know.

Perhaps.. but given the huge number of possibilities, you won't ever be found.

Really? You don't believe facial recognition technology could ever get good enough?

Not at typical quality (resolution) on facebook. When you start considering hundreds of millions of people, you just look too much like others.

Honestly, I think it'd be awesome if Facebook showed me pictures uploaded by people I don't know that may have me in them. There are valid reasons why Facebook doesn't do this right now (random people able to see your photos even on false positive recognition), but I'd easily opt in to such a feature.

With webcams in all laptops, and iMacs - Cinema Displays too? - there's no need to upload a file. Push a button and allow the webcam to snap a photo, and there you go.

It really bothers me than I can't opt out of getting a laptop with a webcam.

>>It really bothers me than I can't opt out of getting a laptop with a webcam.

If you feel this way just paint the camera lens with a permanent black marker.

I put tape on it, and I plan on getting a vinyl sticker for my MacBook, but unless I decide to specifically design one, it's going to look ridiculous.

It already exists: http://www.theipatch.com/

Have to be honest, though, I don't fully understand the concern. Is it that malware will secretly snap photos of you?

That and my own stupidity.

You can opt out. You just need to shop for a "business" laptop from HP or Dell.

Add Lenovo ThinkPad to the list. I always order mine with no camera.

I currently opt out of having a webcam using a piece of electrical tape.

Google+ is halfway there already: http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=nam...

Let's hope reddit allows a custom robots.txt for subreddits by then... or else there is going to be some unexpected results showing up from /r/gonewild

There's going to be a day when I can point my phone at you, and know your name.

Ha, they have something like that already http://face.com/blog/klik-is-alive-and-we-have-the-party-pic...

That is completely awesome! Very cool.

this would be a great idea for the dating website, although it wont solve chicken-egg problem.

most women i ever went out from match had pictures with their boyfriends on their profile that looked pretty similar to me! it would be an interesting approach: you upload a picture of yourself and reverse-match.com searches through database of pictures (that women with their boyfriend upload but dont have to be visible anywhere on the site) and as a result you getting list of women that had pictures with guys that look similar to you.

apparently Im still learning HN. any idea why I got downvoted here?

Seems pedantic, but a lot of people use punctuation as a signal. Couldn't hurt to capitalize properly.

I upvoted you before reading that you were downvoted. Your idea's just slightly off-topic, but it's a brilliant idea.

Once in a while someone will accidentally downvote when trying to scroll on a touchscreen device (e.g. iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.).

I have thought about this too and while not to break from the Match.com discussion.

This is a big dilemma where I work, but not for match.com. Women are finding themselves being placed online with pictures of themselves in different positions from their camera phones. Mostly from Ex BFs or people that just wanted to be upsetting to that person. We are actually dealing with facial recognition to try and find those women through various websites and make sure they know their pictures have been placed online. There is a small amount of money that can be made through lawyers to have the perp who placed them online sued.

One day, you will be able to search facebook with all your "dirty" images and find those 18,19,20,21 year olds that well didn't want their pictures made public....

I do this in reverse quite frequently. I'm on OKCupid and when I want to find out more about someone I'm interested in, I use Google Images reverse image search (http://www.google.com/imghp) - click on the little camera and dump the img url. I would say about 30% of the time it leads me to their same photo on some other site, after which I have their full name and can do more background checking.

I assume you're aware of TinEye (http://www.tineye.com/), which sometimes gives different results. Google is generally better, but can't hurt to double-check.

Artem should add

  pre code {
    white-space: pre-wrap;
  }

to his CSS, so the code doesn't cause a horizontal scrollbar to appear.

Comments like this are why I love HN. It's absolutely no surprise to me that your account is as old as it is.

Have you discovered the super cool part of jfarmer's suggestion?

You can select and copy the wrapped text (code), and the lines, when pasted, are not wrapped. In other words, the line breaks in the original text/code remain intact.

With a bit of userContent.css manipulation in firefox, you can force this on all places (<pre>, <code>, ...) where it's useful.

> What we need to do is to run HTTP requests asynchronously. There is a number of way to achieve that (no, using threads is not a way)

- why is threads not a possible solution? Is this something to do with Ruby?

Yes ruby threads will block on all IO

Interesting, so then the few people who still use match.com (after you filter out scams and such) don't even have to pay for it because they can contact the other person though Facebook once they match the photos.

No because Face.com will only search from a master list of photos you provide. If you go the route of using your Facebook account, it will only identify faces from the pool of your friends.

Technically, they could go further but they don't.

So specifically, this hack is telling you which of your friends are on Match. If you don't already know someone you find on Match, this isn't going to help you (unless Face.com change the way their tool works)

You described something slightly different. The article is about finding a particular person on Facebook on a dating site and you are looking to go in the opposite direction. This means that you would need to scrape Facebook profiles instead. While some people don't make their photos public, this generally shouldn't be any harder.

However, contacting someone directly on Facebook might feel creepy to the recipient in that when they posted on a dating site they expected to be anonymous.

Keep in mind that it could be a violation of both sites' ToS to do this.

what works rather well is google reverse image search. While it doesn't seem to do face recognition, if the image is a resized version of one on facebook, as they often are, it'll straight to the user's facebook profile.

Can anyone recommend a face-recognition algorithm that I could run locally? I'd like to tag a lot of my photos, but I'm afraid I'll hit rate limits.

This can help to figure out http://stackoverflow.com/questions/953714/face-recognition-l...

Thanks!

We did this last year in our research. We used Pitt Patt software instead of face.com. Here is the link: http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/face-recognition-study-FA...

Excellent piece of work. Useful, quick and subversive. I look forward to your next off-the-cuff project!

Great job! I am wondering how does this process take for Match.com case?