Vkontakte and FindFace

[Hatari]

Firstly



Vkontakte
VK (originally VKontakte) is the largest European online social networking service. It is available in several languages, but is especially popular among Russian-speaking users. Like other social networks, VK allows users to message each other publicly or privately, to create groups, public pages and events, share and tag images, audio and video, and to play browser-based games.

As of November 2014, VK had at least 280 million accounts. VK is ranked 22 (as of November 1, 2014) in Alexa's global Top 500 sites and is the second most visited website in Russia, after Yandex. According to eBizMBA Rank, it is the 8th most popular social networking site in the world. VK had an average of 75 million daily users for December 2012.

VK grants easy access to pornographic images, video and other such materials which are shared in certain communities.

[Hatari]

Now, FindFace

The developers behind “FindFace,” which uses facial recognition software to match random photographs to people’s social media pages on Vkontakte, say the service is designed to facilitate making new friends.

Released in February this year, FindFace started gaining popularity in March, after a software engineer named Andrei Mima wrote about using the service to track down two women he photographed six years earlier on a street in St. Petersburg. (They’d asked him to take a picture of them, but he never got their contact information, so he wasn’t able to share it with them, at the time.)

From the start, FindFace has raised privacy concerns. (Even in his glowing recommendation, Mima addressed fears that the service further erodes people’s freedoms in the age of the Internet.)

In early April, a young artist named Egor Tsvetkov highlighted how invasive the technology can be, photographing random passengers on the St. Petersburg subway and matching the pictures to the individuals’ Vkontakte pages, using FindFace.

“In theory,” Tsvetkov told RuNet Echo, this service could be used by a serial killer or a collector trying to hunt down a debtor.”

[Hatari]

The Russian Art of Meta-Stalking
7 April 2016

The next time you ride the subway in St. Petersburg, watch out for 21-year-old photographer Egor Tsvetkov. He recently unveiled a new project called “YOUR FACE IS BIG DATA,” which he created by semi-secretly photographing passengers seated across from him on the city’s metro, without asking their permission.

Using these pictures, Tsvetkov turned to an online service called FindFace, which allows you to upload random photographs of a person’s face. Using facial recognition technology, FindFace then searches the image database of Vkontakte, Russia’s most popular social network. If it finds a match, it does its best to identify the person in the picture. Any photo posted and tagged on Vkontakte can be found this way, provided that the user has opted to make his or her postings public. (Most users do.)

FindFace was launched this February by the Moscow-based company N-Tech.lab, which says the service was designed to facilitate online dating, allowing users to photograph anyone on the street, locate their social media profile, and learn more about them, before trying to get acquainted directly.

Tsvetkov says FindFace was able to find social media accounts for 70 percent of the young people he photographed, though it worked only half as often with pictures of older individuals.

...
Below examples of an image juxtaposition created by Tsvetkov. Source

Of course, what's truly unsettling about all this is that a guy with a smartphone and free website could ID 70 percent of the strangers he photographed

[Hatari]

And the nasty side of it all

Facial Recognition Service Becomes a Weapon Against Russian Porn Actresses

22 April 2016



Tsvetkov seems to have inspired a particularly nasty effort to identify and harass Russian women who appear in pornography.

On April 9, three days after the media reported on Tsvetkov’s art project, users of the Russian imageboard “Dvach” (2chan) launched a campaign to deanonymize actresses who appear in pornography.

After identifying these women with FindFace, Dvach users shared archived copies of their Vkontakte pages, and spammed the women’s families and friends with messages informing them about the discovery. The effort also targeted women registered on the website “Intimcity,” which markets prostitution services.


Photos used in Dvach's doxing campaign. Image: Tjournal.ru.

[Hatari]

Next?

The Thai version, potentially matching up pics of Mrs Respectable to, in some cases, what some might say was a less respectable past

All those bar photos will be around for a long time

.......
And I'm interested because .... work in HR, background checks are used, incl social media. 1995-96 I lectured part-time on NZ's Privacy Act, Human Rights Act .... early days of Internet, pre-social media taking off, 20 years later and the 'rules' change so rapidly, just as technology does.

Again

what's truly unsettling about all this is that a guy with a smartphone and free website could ID 70 percent of the strangers he photographed

[Quarky]

I am glad I started wearing a balaclava whenever I leave the house... you can't be too safe these days...

How long before there are no such things as secrets? Can imagine many adulterous people out there being caught out...

[Hatari]

Your career may be ruined if your double life as a Russian porn actress goes public

Keep wearing the balaclava, and trust no one

[kaptainrob]

I am glad I started wearing a balaclava whenever I leave the house... you can't be too safe these days...

How long before there are no such things as secrets? Can imagine any adulterous people out there being caught out...

DP's new look ....

[Sydney]

^^^ 5555555555555555 ... funniest thing i have seen all weekend

[Quarky]

DP's new look ....

Bugger... not even safe in a mask.. 55

[PGC]

Bugger... not even safe in a mask.. 55

It's the ears that give it away.........Every time