Facebook’s DeepFace AI Can Recognize You In Nearly Any Photo

By: Jordan Minor | Geek.com -

The more time goes by the more obvious it becomes that Minority Report was as good at predicting the future as the psychics it featured. Not only are we now waving our hands around to control games, but soon we may have to remove our own eyeballs to prevent computers from recognizing our faces. Facebook is boasting that its DeepFace AI system is now powerful enough to spot users in the 400 million photos uploaded to the social network every single day.

Sci-fi paranoia aside, Facebook claims the program, which has been learning for years, is actually for increasing privacy. Instead of tagging users in embarrassing or even incriminating photos without their permission, users will be able to see the photos they are popping up in and have the choice to blur out their faces. The program works for strangers’ pictures as well as ones from friends, but users can only see the identities of people they already know.

Still, whether or not the intentions are good, at the end of the day Facebook will still be able to identify you in any picture and hold on to that very valuable personal data. Even worse, other entities are researching similar technology including the government and private companies such as Google. We can argue over which side is scarier, but most would agree that’s too much power for one group to wield.

The science behind DeepFace is pretty fascinating. To consistently read features in a variety of lighting conditions the way human eyes do, DeepFace uses a technique called Deep Learning. By drawing on knowledge from an existing data set, the computer can then teach itself to recognize patterns in new faces and become smarter. As the algorithm improves, the computer is then able to analyze faces as eyes, mouths, and ears instead of pixels and use that to guess when the same faces show up in vastly different kinds of pictures. But while that data is what makes the tool so powerful, users are understandably concerned about being an unwitting part of the process.

Facebook is no stranger to problems regarding privacy, so to get people to believe that DeepFace will truly benefit users instead of profiting off of them, Zuckerberg and company will have to prove it. People aren’t just going to give up their faces without a fight, at least, not before they can strap an Oculus Rift to them.