Facebook’s Photo Archive Can Identify People in Real Life [STUDY]

 by Stan Schroeder

Facebook has had its share of problems over face recognition — a feature that connects a photo of a person’s face with their Facebook profile, making it easier to tag people in photos — but researchers from Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University recently proved that Facebook’s vast photo archive can be used to identify people on the street, too.

The authors of the study titled “Faces of Facebook: Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality” — Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman — demonstrated it at the Black Hat technical security conference, which was July 30 to August 4 in Las Vegas. They used publicly available data — photos from Facebook profiles of students — and then used face recognition technology to recognize these students as they look into a web camera.

The results? Using a database of 25,000 photos taken from Facebook profiles, the authors’ face recognition software correctly identified 31 percent of the students after fewer than three (on average) quick comparisons. In another test, the authors took photos from 277,978 Facebook profiles and compared them to nearly 6,000 profiles from an unnamed dating Web site, managing to identify approximately 10 percent of the site’s members.

The study raises important questions about our privacy. Online, you can make steps to hide your real identity such as changing your name, but as the authors of the study note, “It is much harder … to change someone’s face.” Based on the results of the study, it’s not hard to imagine someone creating a simple software/hardware combination which could identify people simply as they walk through a street or peer into a store’s window.

“Our focus, however, was on examining whether the convergence of publicly available Web 2.0 data, cheap cloud computing, data mining, and off-the-shelf face recognition is bringing us closer to a world where anyone may run face recognition on anyone else, online and offline — and then infer additional, sensitive data about the target subject, starting merely from one anonymous piece of information about her: the face,” the study concludes.

Create Albums From Instagram, Twitter & Facebook Photos With Pictarine

 by Jennifer Van Grove

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Pictarine

Quick Pitch: Pictarine is a website that lets you enjoy and share all your photos in one place.

Genius Idea: Mix and match photos from different services to create shareable albums.

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Today’s digital photo sharer snaps and posts shots to myriad social sites and photo applications. Those photos often end up haphazardly scattered across web and mobile sites and devices.

Paris-based startup Pictarine gives modern photo sharers a way to clean up the photo chaos and bring together all of their shots littered across web and mobile for viewing, sharing or one-click download.

CEO and co-founder Guillaume Martin says Pictarine was envisioned after a weekend getaway with his partner. “Both of us took photos, but we couldn’t share them in an easy way,” he says. “So, the first idea was to share Flickr photos with other friends, like Facebook friends.”

An early version of Pictarine first offered users a simple way to collect and share all their photos fromFacebook, Flickr, Picasa and the desktop. Today, Pictarine now includes Instagram and Twitter — TwitPic, Yfrog, Lockerz and Twitter Photos included — integration. These new features where released Tuesday to further round out its online photo repository.

After first-time users authenticate each of their photo site accounts, Pictarine collects their photos, and auto-sorts them into albums by service, while also maintaining third-party site album structure. The service even grants users viewing access to their Facebook friends’ photos, Instagram friends’ photos and Flickr friends’ photos, making Pictarine a window to nearly all of the photos the users’ friends are posting to the web.

Pictarine’s most fetching feature is its highly malleable virtual photo album. With Zests, as they’re called, you can construct albums from your Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and desktop photos, as well as mix in photos from friends’ albums. You can then choose to share Zests with Facebook friends, Google contact groups and email contacts either publicly or privately.

Founded two years ago, Pictarine has been quietly available to the public since May of this year and has more than 3,000 users. The bootstrapped startup hopes to raise funding to support development of mobile applications.

Facebook Rolling Out Brand New Photos Interface

by Jolie O'Dell

Tonight, we’re seeing Facebook‘s all-new design for displaying photos rolling out to quite a few users. It features larger images, a lightbox-type UI and other features that put Facebook in even more competition with Flickr on the casual and social photography front.
We got wind of these new Facebook Photos features some months ago around the end of September. So much time has passed, however, that we wondered whether the flashy new UI wasn’t just a test.
However, Facebook did confirm that a new photo viewer was on its way, and tonight, we’re seeing this new interface from several accounts.

One major benefit, from Facebook’s perspective, is that users will be able to browse through many photos in the lightbox layer without disrupting the underlying page and “losing their place.” Other features include hi-res photos, photo-download links and bulk tagging options.
In fact, as we noted last fall, many of these feature upgrades strongly mirror recent changes to Flickr’s own UI during the summer of 2010.
Along with Tag Suggestions, a.k.a. nascent facial recognition technology, Facebook’s photo offering, which has long been a distinguishing factor of the social network, is remaining strong and competitive.
Check your Facebook account to see if you have the new interface; if you don’t have it tonight, expect it to come over the next couple weeks.
In the comments, let us know what you think of the new Facebook Photos. Are these improvements more welcome to you than other changes Facebook has made in the past?