As I was scrolling through the different A.I projects on the website I stumbled upon one called Your Face is Big Data by Egor Tsvetkov. In short, a Russian photography student took it upon himself to photograph random strangers in public and go home and see if he can tract them down on a Russian social media site called VKontakte accompanied by a facial recognition application. The idea of people taking a photo of me and automatically finding out who I am seems unbelievably scary.
He learned so much about about a person whom he has never even spoken to. Imagine just being on public transportation and somebody clicks a few buttons and knows exactly where you work, where you live just by snapping a photo of you. And you being unaware that they are even doing that in the first place.
This is all due to social media as well. He couldn’t have found this information without social media and the information we put online. The information that we think is safe but as we see here, isn’t.
The lesson that could be learned from this experiment is that we should always keep our accounts on private or not even have a social media account in the first place because it can be unsafe and unhealthy.
I think this experiment was really interesting but frightening to think about someone doing that to me.
Media Lab AI 