经济学人下载:面部识别,你还想匿名吗?

Anonymous no more
你还想匿名吗？

You can’t hide—from anybody
都在看着你呢！

Jul 30th 2011 | SAN FRANCISCO | from the print edition

IF YOUR face and name are anywhere on the web, you may be recognised whenever you walk the streets—not just by cops but by any geek with a computer. That seems to be the conclusion from some new research on the limits of privacy.

如果网上有你的头像和名字，说不定哪一天，你正在大街行走，一眼就会被人认出，这里说的不是警察，而是电脑高手。这大概就是关于隐私范围的新研究得出的结论。

For suspected miscreants, and people chasing them, face-recognition technology is old hat. Brazil, preparing for the soccer World Cup in 2014, is already trying out pairs of glasses with mini-cameras attached; policemen wearing them could snap images of faces, easy to compare with databases of criminals. More authoritarian states love such methods: photos are taken at checkpoints, and images checked against recent participants in protests.

对于那些罪大恶极的嫌犯以及一心想要将他们绳之以法的警察，面部识别技术早已不是什么新鲜物。2014年足球世界杯主办国巴西已在试制装有迷你摄像机的眼镜，警察戴上这种眼镜可以快速拍摄众多的面部肖像，便于同数据库中的罪犯进行比对。很多专制国家对这种技术也比较青睐，他们可以在一些关卡进行摄像，还可以用以比照最近参加抗议者的肖像。

But could such technology soon be used by anyone at all, to identify random passers-by and unearth personal details about them? A study which is to be unveiled on August 4th at Black Hat, a security conference in Las Vegas, suggests that day is close. Its authors, Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman, all at America’s Carnegie Mellon University, ran several experiments that show how three converging technologies are undermining privacy. One is face-recognition software itself, which has improved a lot. The researchers also used “cloud computing” services, which provide lots of cheap processing power. And they went to social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, where most users post real names and photos of themselves.

可是，这种技术是否不久就可应用于寻常人家，用以识别任意的过路人并挖掘出个人详细情况？ 8月4日将在拉斯维加斯举行黑帽安全会议，会议将公开一项研究，根据这份研究，这一天已为期不远。该项研究报告的作者阿里桑德罗．阿奎斯蒂、拉尔夫．格罗斯以及弗雷德．斯杜兹曼都来自于美国卡内基梅隆大学，他们的几个试验向人们演示了这种三合一的技术是如何侵犯别人隐私的。其中一个是面部识别软件本身，这项技术已经有了很大的改进。研究者还使用了“云计算”服务，因为它具有很强的处理能力，且价格低廉。他们常上Facebook和LinkedIn等社交网站，那里大多数的用户使用自己真实的名字和照片。