This scary new app can give you a persons name & address from a photo of their face

[ReedeFox]

Imagine if there was an app out there that would allow a total stranger to upload a photo of you and find out your full name and address. It’d be creepy right?! Well it turns out that app actually exists, thanks to a new startup called Clearview AI. 


 
The app is currently only being used by law enforcement agencies in the US, including the FBI, and works by comparing a photo to a database of more than 3 billion pictures that Clearview says it’s got off Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other sites. So if you have a Facebook or Instagram account, your face is probably already in their database. It then serves up matches along with links to the sites where the photos originally uploaded. It’s then pretty easy to find a name and address from there.

 

The frightening thing is that if the app is already being used by law enforcement, it’s only a matter of time before this technology finds itself in the hands of criminals or just utter freaks. Some rich stalker will have a field day with a app like this. Here’s what CNet had to say about the software: 
 

The size of the Clearview database dwarfs others in use by law enforcement. The FBI’s own database, which taps passport and driver’s license photos, is one of the largest, with over 641 million images of US citizens.

Law enforcement officers say they’ve used the app to solve crimes from shoplifting to sexual exploitation to murder. But privacy advocates warn that the app could return false matches to police and that it could also be used by stalkers and others. They’ve also warned that facial recognition technologies in general could be used to conduct mass surveillance

 

Yikes. That does sound like some scary shit. Most girls on Instagram have enough stalkers to contend with already let alone having to deal with the prospect of their ‘biggest fans’ turning up at their front door. Anyone fancy making a meme: Only 90s kids will remember privacy!

[FantasticMR]

Look like we'll all be wearing the scramble suits from A Scanner Darkly much sooner than expected. 

For those who've not read/seen the movie.
 

 The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers... Basically, his design consisted of a multifaceted quartz lens hooked up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure - the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, then switched to the next...In any case, the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him - or her - was meaningless.From A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick.
Published by Not Known in 1977

[ReedeFox]

Looks like Philip K Dick was onto something way ahead of his time. Looks like we're all going to need scramble suits. Insta models are probably quaking in their boots right now!