FindFace May Bring an End to Social Anonymity

FindFace, introduced two months back has taken Russia by storm, as it lets users take pictures of people in a mob and find out their identities, with 70% authenticity. The app functions by analyzing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network famous in Russia with over 200 million accounts.

FindFace May Bring an End to Social Anonymity

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In the near future, makers envision a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by intriguing a picture of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could select your face out of crowds and trace you through social networks.

Within a matter of no time, Findface has gathered 500,000 users and processed almost 3m searches, according to its patrons, 26-year-old Artem Kukharenko, and 29-year-old Alexander Kabakov.

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Not like other face recognition technology, their algorithm lets quick searches 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 Kabakov, during an interview at the company’s modest central Moscow office.

The app will offer you the most possible match to the face that is uploaded, as well as 10 people it thinks look the same. The app has already been used by a St Petersburg photographer to snap and find people on the city’s metro, as well as by online watch to reveal the social media profiles of people.

The app’s makers informs that the technology can operate with any photographic database, although at present it cannot use Facebook, because even the public photographs are stored in a way that is difficult to access than Vkontakte.

The startup is in the concluding stages of signing a deal with Moscow city government to work with the city’s network of 150,000 CCTV cameras. If a crime is committed, the identification photo of anyone in the compass can be fed into the system and matched with pictures of wanted lists.

Kabakov believes that in this modern era we are encompassed by various gadgets and we have ample information about people’s movements, their interests and so on, hence we cannot cease technological development rather we must go with the pace of time and assure that it stays open and transparent.

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