WIRED: A US Agency Rejected Face Recognition—and Landed in Big Trouble. “Officials working on Login.gov, used to access dozens of government sites, worried about algorithmic bias. Their decision breached federal security rules.”
WIRED: A Face Recognition Site Crawled the Web for Dead People’s Photos. “The company, which has trawled social media for images but now says it scrapes only publicly available sources, has been criticized for collecting images of children and accused of facilitating stalking and abuse. (Gobronidze, who took over PimEyes in January 2022, says that this criticism predates his tenure at PimEyes, and that the company’s policies have since changed.)”
Motherboard: How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice. “Banks in the U.S. and Europe tout voice ID as a secure way to log into your account. I proved it’s possible to trick such systems with free or cheap AI-generated voices.”
VentureBeat: New research suggests that privacy in the metaverse might be impossible. “The research analyzed more than 2.5 million VR data recordings (fully anonymized) from more than 50,000 players of the popular Beat Saber app and found that individual users could be uniquely identified with more than 94% accuracy using only 100 seconds of motion data. Even more surprising was that half of all users could be uniquely identified with only 2 seconds of motion data.”
TechCrunch: Tile takes extreme steps to limit stalkers and thieves from using its Bluetooth trackers. “Apple took a big PR hit as news spread that its item tracker the AirTag was being used for stalking and car thefts, which led the company to retool its software with a closer eye on user safety. AirTag’s competitor Tile is now introducing its own plan to make its device safer, with the launch of a new feature called ‘anti-theft mode,’ which prevents the tracker from being detected by anyone but its owner. But it’s taking things a bit further…”
Dutch News: Expats, foreign students – your photos are in a massive police database. “Passport photos which foreigners from outside the EU have to supply to the immigration service are automatically included in a massive police database without their knowledge, RTL Nieuws reported at the weekend. Hundreds of thousands of photographs of expats, students and family members from non-EU countries have been stored in the facial recognition data base, despite questions about its legality, RTL said.”
Lifehacker: You Can Add Face ID Lock to iPhone Apps That Don’t Support It. “Face ID is great for locking and unlocking your iPhone, but it’s even better for authenticating apps that contain sensitive data. While many apps now support Face ID log in, there are still plenty that don’t—but there’s a hack that can lock any app behind Face ID, thanks to an interesting quirk of iOS.”
WIRED: China Is the World’s Biggest Face Recognition Dealer. “EARLY LAST YEAR, the government of Bangladesh began weighing an offer from an unnamed Chinese company to build a smart city on the Bay of Bengal with infrastructure enhanced by artificial intelligence. Construction of the high-tech metropolis has yet to begin, but if it proceeds it may include face recognition software that can use public cameras to identify missing persons or track criminals in a crowd—capabilities already standard in many Chinese cities.”
NPR: A rocky past haunts the mysterious company behind the Lensa AI photo app. “A Belarussian millionaire living in Cyprus. A dinner with the CEO of Snap. A six-figure patent troll case. They are all part of the history of Prisma Labs, a largely obscure artificial intelligence startup that spent years under the radar until November, when the company introduced ‘Magic Avatars.’ The feature in Prisma’s Lensa app has allowed millions to turn mundane selfies into dazzling AI-generated animated portraits of fairy princesses and astronauts. And it has brought in tens of millions of dollars.”
Western University News: AI tech exaggerates biases in facial age perception more than humans. “Researchers from Western University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) tested a large sample of the prominent major AI technologies available today and found not only did they reproduce human biases in the recognition of facial age, but they exaggerated those biases.”
New York Times: For Sale on eBay: A Military Database of Fingerprints and Iris Scans. “The shoebox-shaped device, designed to capture fingerprints and perform iris scans, was listed on eBay for $149.95. A German security researcher, Matthias Marx, successfully offered $68, and when it arrived at his home in Hamburg in August, the rugged, hand-held machine contained more than what was promised in the listing. The device’s memory card held the names, nationalities, photographs, fingerprints and iris scans of 2,632 people.”
NBC New York: Face Recognition Tech Gets Girl Scout Mom Booted from Rockettes Show — Due to Where She Works. “An attorney whose firm is in litigation with MSG Entertainment was barred from attending a Radio City Rockettes’ show with her daughter and other Girl Scouts because the company’s facial recognition technology knew where she worked.”
University of Georgia: New facial recognition technology scans your ear. “The ear is one of the few body parts that remains relatively unchanged over time, making it a useful alternative for technology requiring face or fingerprint recognition, said Thirimachos Bourlai, lead author of the study and an associate professor in the UGA College of Engineering. The ear recognition system Bourlai’s team developed correctly authenticates individuals with up to 99% accuracy, according to the new study (depending on the dataset and model used for testing).”
University of Virginia: Researchers Angling To Make ‘Fish-ial’ Recognition Software a Reality. “Facial recognition can identify people in a crowd. Can the same be done for fish in a river with ‘fish-ial’ recognition software? University of Virginia data scientist Sheng Li is determined to find out. In collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey, which has provided a five-year grant, Li and his two research assistants are training a deep-learning algorithm to recognize nuances in individual fishes’ faces and scale patterns.”
Associated Press: Facial recognition can help conserve seals, scientists say. “A research team at Colgate University has developed SealNet, a database of seal faces created by taking pictures of dozens of harbor seals in Maine’s Casco Bay. The team found the tool’s accuracy in identifying the marine mammals is close to 100%, which is no small accomplishment in an ecosystem home to thousands of seals.”
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