The Fear Of Social Media: Linking Offline and Online Identities

The Fear Of Social Media: Linking Offline and Online Identities:

The World Of Social Media

As we all know, this world is coming together as one, in many more ways than we will ever realize. It just not manifests itself in terms of international trade and the effects of whom has what debt (as we are seeing the obvious effects the Greek debt is having on our financial institutions [the gigantic swings, even as we see it today]), but it also comes in the way we communicate. No, I am not talking about Smartphones, or calling my relatives in India via Skype. It all comes now down to the use of social media, and how quickly and easily we can share our daily lives with another in just a matter of seconds.

Yea, this is all great and has its benefits, especially given that it is all free and such. But it also comes with a severe price: Our own security. While efforts have been made by the owners of social media tools and site to offer enhanced security, we still hear of breaches almost every day, from Identity Theft to Facebook accounts being hacked into, in an effort to launch Trojan Horse attacks and worms/viruses. Well, now there apparently seems to be a convergence now between Biometrics and the use of the various social media tools.

To be honest, I have not see a lot of use of Biometrics with social media per se, but I came across a whitepaper of sorts which pits Facial Recognition against social media, the dangers it can pose. It is written by Dr. Joseph Attick of the International Biometrics Industry Association (or IBIA for short), and in this white paper, he describes at some detail of what he sees how Biometrics will play out in the realm of social media. As mentioned, he discusses specifically about Facial Recognition. He touches on three areas primarily, and the following are some excerpts from the white paper:

The introduction:

“Simply stated, an unprecedented convergence of several technological developments – a perfect storm – is creating an environment where new kinds of face recognition applications that threaten privacy on a very large scale could emerge over the next decade. Furthermore we see that the control of these applications can no longer be solely in the hands of the industry that created the technology, but will require the active cooperation of social media providers and the IT industry to ensure the continued protection of our reasonable expectations of privacy, without crippling legitimate use of this powerful technology.” (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/articles/i/9335/).

Here are his three areas where he sees the negative aspects of social media and Facial Recognition:

#1:

“The net result is that the assemblage of identification databases today is a much simpler process and the potential size of these databases is much larger than what could have been imagined in the days before we had Google and the cloud—the days when face recognition databases were painstakingly built by adding individuals one at a time. By far, this is the first and the most critical factor that has changed from a decade ago.” (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/articles/i/9335/).

#2:

“Face recognition algorithms, as independently measured by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), have improved by at least two orders of magnitude over the last decade and have gained many orders of magnitude in speed. This means that today’s state-of-the-art algorithms are at least 100 times more accurate and could be a million times faster than they were ten years ago and are now within the realm where they can function by utilizing every-day photographs. With continuing technological improvements, the clouds of a perfect storm begin to darken.” (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/articles/i/9335/).

#3:

“When face recognition was invented, digital cameras were uncommon; inputting images into computers was not seamless, often requiring multiple manual steps. Today billions of high quality digital cameras are in the hands of consumers. They are found in iPhones, Blackberries, and other mobile devices, and in the ubiquitous snap-and-shoot digital cameras.” (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/articles/i/9335/).

So as you can see, this is rather complex subject, one which will take time to really review and give some points on. I intend to fully do this, and I will offer my viewpoints in much more detail in a future posting. After all, this is a topic which is of prime importance, especially to the Biometrics Industry. After all both subjects (the second being the use of social media) both are hot button topics with regards to privacy rights. But, the author is right in one aspect:

Technology, not just Biometrics is evolving at a very rapid clip, and with that, standards and oversight are being forgotten about. This is something which could go very wrong if it is not observed and corrected. As he points out, given the evolution of the cloud, social media, and Biometrics, this poses the great storm for the “the linking of online and offline identities.” (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/articles/i/9335/). My deeper thoughts on this, especially this last sentence, coming very soon.