You can't generalize from the particular to the whole because large differences in quantity add up to qualitative differences, and machine processing makes laborious correlations and connections easy to tease out.

There's similar problems with automated number plate recognition, public CCTV, non-cash transactions, etc. They all add up to massive potential privacy violations despite being fairly innocent in isolation.

Give someone your phone number, and they can't do much more than phone you. Give them a phone book, and they can phone someone given a name and address. Give them a phone book's worth of data in CSV, and they can deanonimize phone call records. Give them a list of phone numbers that have e.g. called a suicide helpline, and now they know the names and addresses of people who are likely to kill themselves. Without machine processing (i.e. with a book rather than CSV), this would be difficult; without people sharing the relatively innocuous detail of their phone number, it wouldn't be possible (leaving social engineering aside).

So if we want to live with computing, I think we need to learn to live with capabilities of computing and the nature of the casual structure of the physical universe.

Forever, if someone recognized you, chances are you recognized them. People were either within some extended social circle or they were not, and this social circle was face-to-face. Now, we have something of an arms race going on with respect to anonymity, or the lack thereof. Maybe someone will scan me and identify me. What's my recourse? Either I go about in disguise, or I scan everyone around me in order to equalize things.

How could all this not feel strange or wrong? Based on the norms of 10,000 years of human society, it's either a-social or downright anti-social.

I think for most of human history, humans knew the majority of the other humans within travelling distance and people were wary of strangers because there was no reciprocal trust relationship.

Given enough information, everyone could approach cold reader's peak performance at a glance with additional biography. Sort of creepy - mostly because you can use such information to manipulate people.

But like any knowledge it can be used to break ice, strike interesting conversations and broaden one's circle of acquaintances. Or it could be used to build new tribalism.

The most problematic part is being able to cut loose and erase the past. This used to be much easier in the past - you just moved far enough and most everybody didn't know what you did.

Why are you surprised that this data can then be used by a third, or even a fourth party?

It isn't what they think they do, but it very much is what they do.

Now tell me how uploading things to such a database is not a willed action.

I agree with you that there is the possibility of someone else taking such images of you and everyone around you, through surveillance cameras or whatever, but for something of the scale shown in this article you'd still need quite an effort to create such a database without the help from the people themselves, especially if you want to link it to other personal information.

Because people don't own their own clouds, or have privatized social networks, they are forced to upload things into databases that others control. Who controls the privacy defaults typically have the most control over where the data flows thereafter. And it's all out of the user's hands; they weren't given a choice, not a real one, because the incentives for the system lead you to accept the lack of control, or spend your life neurotically trying to keep a lid on everything, or live as a technological recluse. There's no other way to live today.

People are freely giving away the images for the database linking it all to further personal data. If they did not do this, creating such a database would still be a massive surveillance effort, albeit probably still possible if someone really wanted to do it and had the sufficient resources.

I say it's still possible to stay anonymous if you want to.

When I spot such a camera I stand to the side so they have to ask me to move in front of the camera. Which is when I politely refuse to participate. They don't like that very much. Last time, the person made a "well you might not be able to refuse next time" remark. He may be correct, or not, we'll see.

These are cases where the images should never be uploaded to a public database or shared with any other parties. However, given the increasing use of SaaS and cloud providers, exposure to some third-parties is highly likely. Any consumer information hitting the cloud is at high risk of abuse.

In addition to those scenarios you have cameras behind ATMs, cameras embedded within grocery store self-checkout lines, etc and so forth. It has already become difficult to control your image and, in some cases, prevent that image from being combined with other personally identifiable information.

Even gym memberships require this in some places. Soon one would need to provide facial 3D scan just to buy groceries.

And in most places it still wouldn't be socially acceptable even if it may be legal.

And I'm trying to figure out why this apparently feels so wrong and creepy to so many commenters here. I don't feel any of that. As far as I'm concerned, it feels... totally normal. Maybe I'm wired wrong or something, but I really don't see anything weird or creepy about learning from publicly available datasets (AKA observing your surroundings?). Nor do I see anything wrong in leveraging computational infrastructure to learn more from those datasets.

The way I see it - a hypothetical "creep" who takes a photo of someone and matches it with their public social media profile is fine. Where I draw the line is them attempting to put that into action through stalking, harassment, etc. because it hurts the other party. Trying to break into data sources that are not meant for public is of course a violation of personal privacy, which is wrong. Also, I consider a person with obsessive interest in another to have a problem that probably requires medical attention.

Are people so afraid today that the fact that another person notices them makes them uneasy?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_...

Additionally he quite likely doesn't have permission to post the profile pictures due to copyright.

Also, the neural net may return a certain percent of false positives and there may be no particular way for this guy to tell. The impact is small here and would be larger in other circumstances.

I have a significant number of friends who look at me like I'm speaking in Klingon when I tell them I'd rather not be tagged in their Facebook photos.

Occasionally a family member wants to post something but there's seldom a problem.

Most of my friends don't post anyone's photo on Facebook even though they use it a lot.

It is not voluntary.

Some people will not have a public profile picture but they too could be subjected to it.