Facebook Profile Pics will Help Invade your Privacy
We all know the line "A picture is worth a thousand words" and it appears that it's even worth more than that specially with the technology that we have today. According to Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of IT and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College, with the right tool and training your photos posted online can be used to retrieve your real name, birth date, Social Security number and other personal information that you would never have thought possible.
In a presentation made by Acquisti at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas this week. He said that it's getting easier for people to gain "detailed" personal information of other people using the photos they've posted on Facebook and other social media sites. He also mentioned that the trend has "ominous implications for privacy and I'm here to raise awareness of what I feel is going to happen."
Alessandro Acquisti also showed the result on some of the experiment that he performed using an facial recognition program called Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) developed at CMU, a number of publicly available Facebook profile images and uniquely identify individuals. In one of those experiments; Acquisti's team asks Students to pose for 3 photos of students and fill-out a survey, while doing the survey the pictures were run against PittPatt and tried to match the student's photos with the Facebook Profiles. Acquisti's team were able to match 31% of Students photos and their Facebook Profiles in just 3 secs. Knowing how much information each student place on their Facebook account, person doing the same experiment with a different intent would have more than enough information to use against a particular student.
Acquisti's Team also perform other experiments, PittPatt they tried to discover the true identity of individual using their images posted on a certain online dating site and their Facebook account. Since most people tend to use their real name on their Facebook account, Acquisti were able to uniquely identified 4,900 out of 5,800 dating site members who also have a Facebook account.
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