“Your Face is Big Data”, the danger of facial recognition

Russian photographer Egor Tsvetkov created the project entitled “Your Face is Big Data” where he demonstrates how easy it is to identify strangers through face recognition applications.

Tsvetkov began by photographing about 100 people in the subway without their knowledge. He then used those same photographs in the FindFace application to find people on the main Russian social network VKontkte.

The photographer could easily identify 70% of the people.

The strangers caught in the offline world were revealed in the online crowd.

This project shows how technology increasingly begins to affect our privacy and how vulnerable we are by sharing almost everything on social networks.

In this experience, besides being able to find profiles and see the main photo that identifies the person, depending on what the person put in “public” mode you can access personal information such as location, relationships, work, etc.

The title of the project uses the term “big data” which refers to the storage of a large set of data collected by companies and social networks, and the use of sophisticated algorithms to perform information analysis, cross-referencing the collected data. The use of the term “big data” in the title of this project is due to the crossing of a photograph taken by a stranger and with information posted on the internet with no apparent link.

“My project is a clear illustration of the future that awaits us if we continue to disclose as much about ourselves on the internet as we do now.” — Egor Tsvetkov

With this project, Tsvetkov demonstrates that one photograph is enough to know who is in front of us and eventually to know where that person resides or what places they go to.

There is no anonymity even in a crowd of strangers. Privacy is starting to become more and more of an illusion.

Walking around with a bare face can easily become an invitation to online stalking. So when you leave home, be careful!