How Our Face Has Become MetaData

A few (scary) experiments show that today, we are not anonymous anymore in a crowd. Our face can easily be recognized thanks to the technology, in particular the technology used by social networks that pushes us to identify the face of friends.

Recognized in the subway!

A Russian photography student has carried out an experiment to show how easy it is to identify complete strangers.Twenty-one-year-old Egor Tsvetkov took photos of people in public places and then tracked them down on the Russian social media site VKontakte using a facial recognition app. The experiment ‘Your Face Is Big Data’ was published online (link in Russian). It is quite impressive how the results turned out to be!

We can expect this technology to be quite available, so we’re probably not anonymous any more when we are walking around or taking the tube. Something to take into account in our daily life… and our privacy settings on our favorite social networks!