A widely used app in Russia called FindFace, which compares photos to profile pictures on social networks, is leading to privacy fears.The app allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability.Linking to social network Vkontakte, the app searches more than 200 million accounts automatically.The website's founders, 26-year-old Artem Kukharenko, and 29-year-old Alexander Kabakov, have told The Guardian that the solution focuses on face recognition in large data-sets:”Three million searches in a database of nearly 1bn photographs: that's hundreds of trillions of comparisons, and all on four normal servers. With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer,” said KabakovWhile FindFace currently markets itself as a dating service, but its founders hope to eventually make money from licensing its algorithm to law enforcement and retail companies.When users spot someone they are interested in, you can simply take a photo and upload it to the app to find the person's Vkontakte profile, app co-founder Alexander Kabakov told the Guardian.
Select Page















