This morning I seen a report on the local news about when Rangers fans went mental around the streets of Manchester last year, GMP have released footage and images of people that they are looking for in connection to the violence that took place. The GMP Uefa Cup Identification site is aimed for people to basically name drop the people if they recognise them. This led me to thinking, i bet at least 95% of these guys are online and using Facebook, Bebo, or MySpace. What I also thought of is seeing the recent MacWorld Keynote with the iPhoto ‘09 and its new facial recognition software.
Facial Recognition
Most facial recognition works in the same way, using nodal points on a persons face and then matching that up to another image to find exact matches or similar people. Each human face has around 80 nodal points like distance between eyes, width of nose, depth of eye sockets etc
More information on Facial Recognition here.
My Questions
Why don’t social networks help in fighting crime by utilizing Facial Recognition Technology and its VAST number of images, surely the technology is not that hard to implement?
What would the privacy implications be?
Would this either Lower Crime Rates or Lower the Number of People that use such sites?
I personally would love to see this technology available to the police and do think that people would thing twice knowing that they can be tracked through their favorite social networking sites. Whether or not this actually happens is another thing.
Shane
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Tags: Crime, Facial, Social Networking
Social networks are great tools for raising awareness of just about anything, but i think the major problem is the fact that you have to take just about anything learnt through social netwokring with a handful of salt, what with marketers like ourselves trying to subtley coax users one way or another, and pranksters and con men sending out hoaxes such as the classics on Snopes.com, just like they do through email (and if you don’t believe that, I have a deceased Arab uncle that would like you to hold onto some cash for him).
Most people don’t bother to check their sources with stuff like this, so there’s still plenty of room for abuse. Perhaps an official SnitchBookSpace could be the answer?