My face, from my Sri Lankan passport.
Facebook is rolling out facial recognition to suggest taggin people in photos. I’m kinda OK with this, in the sense that all our base are already belong to them. What I’m more interested is using my face to log in to Facebook. If FB and Google want my life, they need to start protecting it with something more than a password.
One major complaint about Facebook (and Google)’s forays into facial recognition is that it makes identity theft easier (WSJ). For me the core problem is more that identity theft is so easy in the first place.
One word can get you into a person’s online life and one number (a social security on NIC type number) can get you into their reality. Our money is secured by a few passwords, again a few lines of text. There’s got to be something better, something more like the way we actually recognize stuff, and more different from the way machines do. That would be evaluating multiple factors at once.
When I meet someone I recognized their face, voice, and stuff they say. Smell a bit. To trick someone face to face is really really difficult, Mission Impossible plastic masks aside. Why can’t FB and Google evolve a password system along the same lines?
For example, right now I just need a password to get in to Facebook. What if, instead, FB scanned my face through my webcam, took my password and recorded that I was logging in through a usual computer. That would be a lot more robust. My personal ideal is where there’s some sort of smell-o-vision attached to the computer and it sniffs me out without having to enter text at all.
That would spare me having to log in all the time, a process which confuses me more than it would a determined hacker or computer algorithm. Instead, I could just be myself and FB/Google could do more than recognize me in photos. They could recognize me.
Great Suggestion Indi but I don’t think it will come in the very future. Facebook still gets it wrong when recognizing faces during tagging so their technology needs to be improved to get it absolutely correct which is a must when login. Who knows, it might come in the future. but for now, passwords are the right way to go.
When I turn on my XBox 360 (which, sadly isn’t that often), the Kinect device attached to it recognises me by my face and logs me in to XBox Live under my profile. I don’t have a similar-looking friend handy to test its accuracy, but it seems to work well by my experience to date.
The tech’s already here, it’s already being used.
One slight worry about this Fb development is that in the future, you could probably take a picture of a stranger on your phone and find out a huge amount about them – as simple as that. Society isn’t ready for the repercussions as of yet.
@ChamindraH, I think faces could be part of any identity algorithm, not the whole thing. Passwords are really quite bad, and most people pick quite dumb ones, or repeat them.
@Carasek, true, from the latter WSJ article:
FastAccess by http://www.sensiblevision.com/ logs you into a PC and can do what you suggest with websites and more… and i have been using it for nearly two years now. quite impressive!
In fact we even considered rolling it out in a call-centre which would have enabled a VoIP telephone system to route calls to a preffered agent regardless of where they were sitting… just didn’t have a sound business case for it.. ;-)
I used to sign into my laptop using a face recog software. Was an ok experience. Switched back to passwords. This was two years ago :)