That's a bold statement but the video is interesting as a survey of what Carnegie Mellon University is up to in biometrics applications and platforms.
It's a good video. Click on over there and give it a look. It even discusses the privacy/anonymity issue in terms that have a lot in common with a something we posted last week.
But about the PittPatt Technology using face recognition to discover Social Security Numbers (this links to a text article describing the first app featured in the video linked above)...
I'm not buying it.
What Alessandro Acquisti and his team have succeeded at is using a face as a search term in a search engine focused on Facebook. This is probably why Google bought the technology. It is an interesting and important development in its own right and something discussed here: Biometrics, object recognition and search.
But, using a photo of a face to find a Facebook page has zero, nothing to do with Social Security Numbers. An individual's birthday and place of birth, however, has a lot to do with their Social Security Number. See: Google yanks request for kids' social security numbers:
It is open to children from kindergarten through the last year of high school and requires that a contestant provide a Parent Consent Form along with their submission. The original form asked for the child’s city of birth, date of birth, the last four digits of the child’s social security number, and complete contact info for the parents.Now that's how you get Social Security Numbers! Social engineering and a wide net, not covert efforts focused on individuals.
The only way the PittPatt technology could be useful in stealing an identity by trying to deduce a person's SSN is:
♦ The identity thief has identified a particular individual whose identity she wants to steal.
♦ The identity thief knows no other information about the mark, but she has a photo.
♦ The mark has stored private information (either the SSN itself, or the details that make it somewhat predictable) online in a publicly viewable way together with their photo.
Essentially, the photo just replaces the name as the search term. I've never heard of identity thieves doing their research by typing random names into a search engine and hoping for the best. This isn't how identity theft works and no rationally profit-maximizing identity thief would ever do something like that. It is far easier to search for Facebook profiles that share birthdate information than to sit around on the sidewalk taking pictures of people in the hope that (a) they have a Facebook account, and (b) it contains instructions on how to steal their identity.
Granted, as this type of search becomes more common, and it will, it won't just be Facebook that gets searched. But at most, the PittPatt project allows users to do a search for people without knowing their name.
The real problem is the importance, predictability and unchangeability of Social Security Numbers, not facial recognition.
