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Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Facial recognition study raises new fears over ID theft

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By Daniel Bates

Last updated at 8:13 AM on 2nd August 2011

One in three people can be identified on Facebook using just their photograph, a study has found.

Researchers took a picture of 93 volunteers and used this to track them down on the social networking site using publicly available software - usually within three seconds.

Armed with the profile they were then able to predict the first five digits of their social security number 27 per cent of the time.

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Simple steps: Researchers fed a photo into PittPatt which compared it to Facebook photos

The study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh used the Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, or PittPatt, facial recognition software which has just been bought by Google.

They took pictures of the 93 students and compared them with 261,262 publicly available photos downloaded from Facebook profiles.

In under three seconds their system turned up 10 possible matches. The correct one was in the top three more than 30 per cent of the time.

Professor Alessandro Acquisti, the lead researcher, said that technology had now evolved so that there was a 'democratisation of surveillance'.

The researchers said that Facebook, which has 750 million members worldwide, is becoming the world's default identification service.

In the past the only publicly available pictures have been school photographs or mugshots of criminals which have been tricky to get hold of.

Now ID thieves could potentially find out everything they need to know just by surfing the web and looking at photos.

Tracking device: The researchers said that Facebook is becoming the world's default identification service

Professor Acquisti said the study 'suggests that the identity of about one-third of subjects walking by the campus building may be inferred in a few seconds combining social-network data, cloud computing and an inexpensive web cam.'

With just four attempts he was also able to identify the first five digits of the test subjects' social security numbers, potentially a goldmine for ID thieves.

'The chain of inferences comes from one single piece of anonymous information - somebody's face,' he said.

Paul Ohm, a law professor at University of Colorado Law School, who has read the paper, said the research showed how easy it was to 're-identify' people.

'This paper really establishes that re-identification is much easier than experts think it's going to be,' he told the Wall St Journal.

The advent of facial recognition software has sparked an arms race between Google and Facebook.

Powerful tools: Researchers could predict the first five digits of some of their subjects social security numbers

Powerful tools: The technology predicts the first five digits of some subjects social security numbers

In June Google launched Google+, its social networking website which it plans to integrate with PittPatt.

Facebook has already rolled out its version which lets people identify pictures of friends.

According to the National Institutes of Standards and Technology the proportion of photographs which were wrongly identified by such programmes has declined from 79% in 1993 to just 0.29% last year.

Earlier this year a the D: All Things Digital Conference Google chairman Eric Schmidt told of his concerns about Facebook dominance of social networking.

Facebook is 'the first generally available way of disambiguating identity,' he said.

'Historically, on the Internet such a fundamental service wouldn't be owned by a single company. I think the industry would benefit from an alternative to that.'

A Facebook spokesman told the Wall St Journal that users do not have to upload a photo to their profile if they do not want to.