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"The story of your life."
With that phrase, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the company's new Timeline profile in the fall of 2011. The social network's original profile page, he explained, was the first place where most people "felt safe expressing their real self" on the internet, but it was only the "first five minutes of your conversation." A major redesign in 2008 extended that to "the next 15 minutes." Timeline, though, was the "next few hours." Your true self, in full.
To illustrate the point, Zuckerberg went on to show a promotional video that put This Is Your Life to shame by recapping one man's life from his own birth to the birth of his child (and then some) in just over a minute. Facebook has always wanted to be your online identity -- your internet, in many ways -- but it was now also bringing something else to the fore that once had a tendency to fade into the background; your memories.
If you value your privacy, then you’re probably wary about surveillance or security systems that use facial recognition programs or snap pictures of passersby. They’re widely used these days, and you might’ve already resorted to wearing sunglasses to protect your privacy. However, sunglasses alone won’t be enough to prevent detection on facial recognition systems.
For that, you’d probably need something like these privacy visors that were developed by Japan’s National Institute of Informatics.
“Light from these near-infrared LEDs can’t be seen by the human eye, but when it passes through a camera’s imaging device, it appears bright. The LEDs are installed in these locations because, a feature of face detection is, the eyes and part of the nose appear dark, while another part of the nose appears bright. So, by placing light sources mostly near dark parts of the face, we’ve succeeded in canceling face detection characteristics, making face detection fail.”
The privacy visors works on cameras that are affected by infrared light. For cameras that aren’t affected by infrared, they suggest a visor that doesn’t use electricity but instead comes covered in reflective material, as this “makes light from outside look white.” The resulting “pattern breaks up the features used in face detection.”
VIA [ DigInfo ]