Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
A new study looks at privacy in a world where
computers can increasingly recognize faces in a
crowd or online. Alessandro Acquisti at Carnegie
Mellon University's Heinz College in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, led the study. Professor Acquisti says
social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn represent
some of the world's largest databases of identities.
He sees increasing threats to privacy in facial
recognition software and cloud computing -- the
ability to store huge amounts of information in data
centers. "The convergence of all these technologies
-- face recognition, social networks, cloud
computing -- and all these advances in ... data
mining are creating this world where you can blend
together online and offline data. You can start from
an anonymous face and end up with sensitive
inferences about that person." Recognition systems
measure things like the size and position of a nose,
the distance between the eyes and the shape of
cheekbones. The software compares lots of images to
try to identify the person. Facial recognition
programs are used in police and security operations.
But the software is increasingly popular in other
uses, including social media sites.For the study,
the Carnegie Mellon team used software from
Pittsburg Pattern Recognition, or PittPat. Google
bought that company last month. The software can
recognize faces in photos and videos. The
researchers did three experiments. First, they
collected profile photos from a dating website. Its
users try to protect their privacy by not listing
their real name. But comparing their photos to
pictures on Facebook identified one out of ten
people.In the second experiment, the Carnegie Mellon
researchers asked permission to take pictures of
students on campus. They compared these to photos on
Facebook. This time they correctly identified
one-third of the students. In the third experiment,
they tried to see how much they could learn about
people just from a photo. They found not only names
but birthdates, personal interests and even
locations, when people listed them. And Professor
Acquisti says "face recognizers" keep improving. In
June, Facebook launched a facial recognition system
to help users "tag" or list the names of people in
photos. Germany became the first country to declare
this software a violation of privacy. For VOA
Special English, I'm Alex Villarreal.
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personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
