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Imagine you’re out in town one day. You feel free and anonymous, so when the opportunity arises and you have an illicit cigarette, pop into a sex shop or have coffee with an ex, you assume no-one will know. But with technology that already exists today, this basic right to keep your actions secret could be gone. Here’s how it will happen:
While you’re doing that thing you’d rather keep secret, a bunch of kids nearby snap photos of each other on their iPhones. You’re in the background of one of their shots. When they upload it, Facebook scans the faces in the photo and automatically identifies you, based on photos you’re already tagged in. The photo is then published to your wall; it is broadcasted to your entire social network. Your “secret” is now plain to see. Your Mum sees you smoking, your girlfriend sees you outside the sex shop, your husband sees you dining with your ex.
If this sounds far-fetched, think again. The pieces are already in place. Import a photo into iPhoto and it will make a good guess about who’s in the photo. Facebook already broadcasts any photo in which you’re tagged to your News Feed. Facebook recently added automatic face detection, making it easier to tag you.
Face detection is just the first step towards face recognition, and it’s likely that Facebook will add that soon – they already have a vast corpus of facially-tagged images of their users. At first, they’ll only tag you in photos from your friends (which you’re likely to know about). The only thing that then prevents random strangers’ photos from reaching your wall is Mark Zuckerberg’s unpredictable whim.
We’ve given Facebook permission to broadcast photos to all of our friends, without asking us, at any time. We have no control over the process. Are you ready to gamble your personal privacy on the chance that no-one will photograph you, and that Facebook will put your best interests first?
Perhaps privacy was just a temporary aberration. The global village is getting smaller every day. In a world of Wikileaks and Google vans, maybe there are no secrets anymore.
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Related reading: The science-fiction novel The Light of Other Days, by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke, provides an excellent exploration of a future without privacy.
Image credit: iFovia on Flickr (Creative Commons)
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I was thinking about this, this morning after reading your post. At first I found myself thinking that it was a scary concept, but then I found myself reconsidering.
Firstly I think that it won’t really come to this, as all it takes is the addition of a small ‘you’ve been tagged’ message that you must accept. I’m sure that option won’t be in the initial concept, but by people like you having the conversation before it happens, I’m sure that option will be there, along with the ‘opt out of face recognition tags’ option.
Secondly I decided that I quite liked this feature. So much so that I would like it added to Flickr etc. One thing I know for fact is that there are photos floating around out there in the web of me, that I know nothing about. I’m sure there are a number on Flickr; whether they have been taken by some street photographer who has accidently caught me in his framed photo of something else, or maybe even targeted me because I look interesting to him while I eat my lunch in the park. They could even have been taken by one of the mass of photographers that are covering events that I attend: solstice at Stonehenge, competing in Hellrunner ( I know for fact that I was snapped a few times during Toughguy on Sunday). I don’t mind the photos being taken, but I would like to see them after the event, and usually the photographers want to show off their images – which mean sites like Flickr.
So it would be great that I could register my image with Flickr, or even some central site, and get a notification whenever someone uploads a picture that I’m in. At least I then have a way to consider the image, maybe object to it, maybe even check that someone isn’t making commercial gain from that image of me that I didn’t sign the model release form for…
As for privacy… well the moment you walk into a sex shop, have that illicit cigarette, or have coffee with an ex, you HAVE to consider that someone might see you without a camera, someone who could tell the one person you don’t want to know. And if you consider it a major problem that that special someone might find out; should you be doing it? After all, how many times do you hear about people travelling half way round the world only to find them self stood next to someone who lives two doors down… the world has been a small place for a long time now.
Hi Chris, I’m glad the post made you think – that was what I hoped to achieve.
I hadn’t thought about this being a desirable feature but you’re right there will be circumstances where it could be useful. You can imagine scenarios such as being in a tourist spot without your camera, you might end up being caught in other people’s photos and being able to use their photos for your album instead.
As to your last paragraph – I am not so sure. I think we should be able to expect that our every action isn’t monitored. This reminds me a little of the “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” argument which is used to support the various curtailments on liberty in the name of fighting terrorism. (Google “nothing to hide” for lots of interesting reads about this).
The reason that argument doesn’t hold up, and maybe this one too, is that privacy is not just about keeping secrets. It’s also about keeping your day-to-day behaviour and actions from being publicised or collected by corporations or governments. Something that you do today (e.g. photographing a child, or reading a book about criminal techniques…) might be completely innocent, but it could be taken out of context, or used against you by a future employer, or may later become illegal. We should fight for our right to privacy, not just to protect our secrets but to prevent the potential for abuses of power against us. Laws and attitudes change (consider the “I didn’t inhale” defence about marijuana smoking by politicians) so you can never be sure that some “acceptable” action today won’t come back to haunt you in future should it make it into the public eye.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Alistair Croll and Alex Bowyer, Human 2.0. Human 2.0 said: New post: One step away from lost privacy? http://bit.ly/hIYNIa […]
Face detection within your social network is a much different problem than face detection within a set of 500 million. Now that isnt to say with the help of location it can get easier, but I think we’re pretty far off from being auto-tagged in a complete stranger’s photos.
Using the social graph, it’s likely we could be auto-tagged in a photo that an acquaintance uploaded, especially if some friends are in the photo with you, but personally, I don’t find that particularly frightening. It’s not all that different than someone trolling through the photos and tagging you anyway…
Good point Theo, the magnitude of the complexity of the task is significantly different. However, considering Moore’s law and the never-ending advancement of technology, how long will it be until what seems computationally difficult now will be able to be done very quickly? Admittedly the post is extrapolating a lot – deliberately so – but my main point is that there is no real barrier to prevent this from happening. It’s only a matter of time and ethics.