Eddie Codel from Geek Entertainment Television came to the Internet Identity Workshop and interviewed Phil Windley and I about the workshop for his LUNCH MEET show.
Digital Identity
More identity management next week.
So if you are coming to town for IIW next week you should know that the ITU is going to be having its IdM Focus Group meeting on the 17th and 18th in Mountain View. If you want to attend you need to fill out this form.
Map of Online Communities
I just found this on Boing Boing and thought it was very appropriate to re-broadcast. It is from xkcd: A webcomic of romance sarcasm, math, and language that is quite entertaining comic strip.
I think this map also reflects the nature of identity on the web…we show up in a lot of different places and need identities that work across them – with the freedom to link and de-link them. It also highlights how fundamentally identity is social and for engagement with people in community.
<img style=”border: 2px solid #000000″ src=”http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities_small.png”/>
What is Identity?
Last week at the ITU-T meeting in Geneva there were some folks making the assertion that Identity was all about one’s credentials starting first and foremost with one’s birth certificate. Clearly credentials that are abstract representations of our selves have value in our world and let us do things that we were not able to do when identity was just social. Much like the fact
Hernando DeSoto points out in the Mystery of Capital that abstract representations of ownership of things (like deeds of ownership of houses – that say you own your house) has value because now you can do new things you couldn’t do before when ownership was just social (my neighbors know I own my house because I do – no piece of paper says this).
I think loosing the understanding that Identity is first and foremost a social construction would be disastrous. We had a great conversation last week in Brussels with Doc and JP in the ‘because of effect’ I will work on writing up my notes from that while at CFP today.
I am staying at a friend’s house in Montreal and picked up Oppenhimer: The Tragic Intellect on the coffee table. In the Preface the author says this:
The recent biographies all, in different ways, place Oppenheimer’s life in the context of the transformation of science and American society and politics during the Cold War. My aim in this book has been to provide a biography that draws together individual character structure and social structure, looking at the social processes and collective work through which the individual identity is constituted. It is sociological biography, which looks at the collaborative and interactional shaping of the individual in the web of relationships. In that sense, it aims to break down the division between individual and context, treating both in terms of social processes. This is a difficult task. Sociologist Norbert Elias has written, ” Whenever one looks, one comes across the same antinomics: we have a certain traditional idea of what we mean when we say ‘society.’ But these two ideas, the consciousness we have of ourselves as society on the one hand and as individuals on the other, never entirely coalesce…What we lack, let us be clear about it, are conceptual models and, beyond them, a total vision with the aid of which our ideas of human beings as individuals and as societies can be better harmonized.” This study attempts to use the narrative form of a sociologically conceptualized biography to weave together the threads of the “individual” and the “social.”
I continued reading it last night as I went to sleep and found another paragraph I will post tomorrow.
Identity Web 2.0 Expo Talk
Giving my talk at Web 2.0 was an interesting for a few reasons.
Firstly I tried to really step out and talk about what is next for identity and where the problem issues are looking forward assuming people knew about the past. I How to think about what we do in terms of people and community? How do we things with Identity for people in groups not just about ‘them’ in this user-centric but isolated. To articulate this I wrote what I hope is the heart of a great article that gets at where we are now with the identity layer, where we could go. This is the first two pages of the PDF. (yes doc it is a PDF and I will work on an HTML version).
Secondly, the audience was not who I expected. I thought this was the regular ‘tech crowd’ I meet often. Instead it was people coming from big companies trying to figure out this web 2.0 stuff and people buidling things who travelled a long way to be here. Not really who I typically think of in the O’Reilly scene. So for all of you who wanted ‘the download’ about all the identity ‘bits’ the basics of all that on the third and forth pages of this PDF.
I learned from this experience and I have had two opportunities to really be on stage at O’Reilly events in the past two months and I learned quite a bit from both of them.
Looking forward I am going to be working on some core content to speak with ‘completely’ normal and somewhat technically literate people about identity. I am also going to be practicing these talks more regularly.
I also have thoughts about what is next in terms of the problems that the identity community needs to address and can address moving forward. This is where the opportunity lies if you are an enterpriser, venture person or coder. These opportunities and issues are deeper then code and money stepping into the heart of what it means to be human in the networked world. What we do now on the web in relationship to this REALLY MATTERS.
INVITATION: Internet Identity Workshop & IOS
Here is the invitation to the IIW that I will be sending out via e-mail over the next week. Please pass it along to others who might be interested in attending.
Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) May 14-16, 2007
Computer History Museum, Mountainview CA.
In Europe there is a similar event that I am facilitating as well.
Identity Open Space April 26-27 in Brussels.
The Interenet Identity Workshop is about moving user-centric identity ideas and technologies forward. Come to this event to learn more, participate in the community and shape the future of the web.
What is User-Centric Identity?
User-centric identity starts with the individual, and his or her needs. It is about working relationships and services between individuals and retailers, employers, membership bodies, and organizations of any kind. It is not about a centralized solution, or anybody’s silo. As such it solves different problems than the familiar ones of providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization, or federation between different organizations.
What is going on in the field?
OpenID is emerging as a protocol for SSO across the web.
- It has major adoptions from sites like AOL, Digg, FaceBook, and
- open source platforms like MediaWiki, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla using it,
- startups are forming around this emerging field like NetMesh, Sxip, and JanRain,
- and reputation services are emerging like Opinity and Jyte.
Legal and Social issues about norms and uses of identity continue to surface.
- How can I share my information and know it will not be misused?
- How can we innovate better End User License Agreements?
- How do young people, men, women and diverse groups understand and represent identity differently online?
- How do online and offline identity relate?
- How does ‘official identity‘ and ‘web constructed identities’ relate?
- What is the role of anonymity and pseudonimity and how are they explicitly supported in this ecology?
What about Mobile Devices and Identity?
Vendor Relationship Management as an potential market segment is emerging
Microsoft Cardspace has been released on to Vista and XP desktops and Symantec has a user-centric Identity management product for the desktop.
There are several Open Source efforts to weave tools together – like Higgins, OSIS, Bandit.
Liberty protcols continue to be deoployed in enterprise and on the web.
Who is going to be there?
User-centric identity is an extremely active and growing conversation involving many converging development efforts — by open source communities, by vendors large and small, and by customers of all sizes. Internet Identity Workshops are where Mozilla, Symantec Microsoft, IBM, Novell, Liberty Alliance, WS*, Verisign, Red Hat, SixApart, Kintera, Sxip, Cordance, NetMesh, JanRain and many other projects and companies meet to work toward common goals and real solutions. They are joined by customers of all sizes as well.
You won’t find a higher ratio anywhere of real productivity to idle chat and marketing BS that are typical to many conferences. They are informal and purpose-driven. In every IIW so far, a high degree of progress has been made, within and between separate development efforts.
The workshops are organized by a working group within Identity Commons, and are run on Open Space practices and principles*. There are no formal presentations, no keynotes, no panels. Instead, topics are vetted and chosen by participants when the workshop convenes, and open meetings are organized and scheduled for the day that follows.
Still wondering if it will be good or not? Read what folks said about the May 2006 conference.
Cost:
We are committed to keeping this conference open and accessible. If you want to come we want you there. If cost is an issue please contact us and we can discuss how to make it work.
* Students – $50
* Independents – $175
* Corporate – $300
The fees are used to cover the cost of the venue, organization, snacks and lunch both days. We encourage you to pre-register since we will limit attendance at the event to 200 people. The IIW workshop in December was strongly attended and we expect strong interest in this one as well.
If you would like to sponsor the event please contact us.
If you would like to speak at the event sign up to come…anyone can.
_______________________________
Related to all of this is the Identity Management Focus Group of the International Telecommunications Union – here is the wiki and their mailing lists. The April meeting is the 23-25th in Geneva and May 16-18 is concurrent with IIW for one day and then continues for 2 more. They meeting following that is in July in Japan.
Looking at Identity
Andre has a great post that frames the identity zeitgeist.
Ancient History
- PKI
- Firewalls
- My stack vs. your stack
- Mooooaaannn
Mould
- Strong Authentication
- Federation & SSO
- blah, blah, blah
Old
- User-centric
- Attribute Sharing
- OpenID phishing
- yak, yak, yak
Bold
- Delegation
- Smart clients
- Protocol convergence
- Identity meets payments
- Just do it!
He has been in the business for 6 years. I thought my 3 years was a long time. The irony of it Mould and Old subjects is that it is still way early for all of those things beyond our circle – I had a conversation with a VC this past week and he said ‘I know there is something going on here – but it is still way to early.’ I hope that with the USA Today article that changes.
AOL launches cool OpenID enabled App: Ficlet
Yesturday walking through the exhibit hall at SXSW the AOL Principle Product Managerd Micheal Cummins came up to me and said he had to show me this new OpenID enabled app – Ficlets.
It is a really cool idea – you get to start a story by writing a ficlet and other people get to continue it. The first thing that came to my mind was the fact that you could end up with collaboratively created Choose your own Adventure style stories.
The other thing that this makes clear is that someone inside AOL has read the Innovators Dilemma/solution and is supporting a creative culture within the company. With this I look forward to seeing what other cool apps/features emerged and how they can play in cultivating an thriving OpenID ecology.
Providing Answers about Identity.
I am not sure that I am the right person to ‘provide answers‘ to the questions James McGovern suggested that the Identity Gang folks should address. I think that the traffic on the list about nomenclature does not reflect the actual amount of activity on solutions going on in the community. There are several projects working away…not talking much on the list because they are solutions oriented people and have little patience for waxing on about the definition of ‘user-centric’. I will do what I can to help in the emergence of solutions and answers. I commit to continue to facilitate spaces where folks working towards real solutions can gather and work them out.
RSA/SFO Identity Commons Dinner Dec 7th Please RSVP
Identity Commons/Gang Dinner Dec 7th
We are confirmed at Sauce for 7pm. We have a large table in their back room. Please come if you are in the Bay Area either for RSA or not.
RSVP on the wiki ASAP.
It is official…Identity Society Meeting London Feb 19.
This is going to be a great follow on to BarCamp London happening on the weekend. (you have to scroll down to see the wiki content)
Monday, February 19th, 2007
Venue: BT Tower Restaurant, 34th Floor, 60 Cleveland Street, London W1
You are cordially invited to the Inaugural Identity Society Open Space event.
This event is for anyone who is interested in identity and its relevance to society. If you wish to attend please proceed to the Registration page. Please also feel free to spread the word to others! The wiki for the event can be found at IdentitySociety.org
- 8:30 am registration with 9.00 start (with two breaks and a one-hour lunch)
- Welcome and Open Space orientation
- Key speakers describe the genesis of the Identity Society and identity Open Space collaboration experience to date
- A discussion of topics for the break out sessions (which has already started in the identity society mailing list)
- Concluding sessions will include one on “Organising the Identity Society”
- The end of the open space is for announcements—and a sharing of the Open Space experience.
- Closing at the BT Tower Venue 4.00pm
- Everyone is invited for evening drinks (and possibly some food)
Initial discussion proposes that the “Identity Society” is not necessarily primarily a talking shop for the ins and outs of “identity technologies”, but might take a broader remit—of identity’s relevance to society as a whole—how we express our unique identity as individuals and collectives freely, but how we also want the benefits of cooperation and collaboration. This is of course in a context within which technology would have a vital place..
However, what Identity Society becomes is very much still up for grabs, and is down to all of us to decide. Which is hopefully what the Feb 19th meeting will help us begin to do.
We look forward to your contribution, in person or through the wiki.
Identity Event Dates
Last week we had three great events. Liberty 2.0, VRM and Mobile Identity.
The Spring program of Identity events has settled out.
February 7th will be a Identity Commons/Gang Dinner during the Week of RSA and the Open Mobile Alliance.
February 19th the folks in the UK are having and Identity Society gathering in London. It will be done with Open Space.
April 16-17 we will be doing and Identity Open Space in collaboration with Liberty Alliance before their meeting in Brussels.
May 14-16 will be Internet Identity Workshop in Mountainview will be the main meeting place for Identity Commons working groups.
Identity MAGNET
I am heading over to the ITU-T Focus Group on Identity Management next month.
Lee Dryburgh is going to be there. I am looking forward to meeting him finally. We have been corresponding in IM for a while now. His talk follows mine at eTel.
He pointed to the MAGNET Project recently. I went there to check out what they are up to…
MAGNET – My personal Adaptive Global Network
MAGNET Beyond is a worldwide R&D project within Mobile and Wireless Systems and Platforms Beyond 3G. MAGNET Beyond will introduce new technologies, systems, and applications that are at the same time user-centric and secure. MAGNET Beyond will develop user-centric business model concepts for secure Personal Networks in multi-network, multi-device, and multi-user environments
MAGNET Beyond has 30 partners from 15 countries, among these Industrial Partners, Universities, and Research Centres.
Then I went deeper and found IST Projects listed with a cornucopia of creative acronyms and inspiring words. However what is less clear is what has happened to any of them in terms of actual technology and deployment that works for people.
Ambient Network
In the telecommunications world of future, there will be many different networks. To provide users with the services they want irrespective of their location, these networks have to cooperate. In a highly mobile environment, this network cooperation will have to be established ‘on the fly’. The Ambient Networks project is about making this fast network cooperation a reality.
Cruise NoE IST Project (CReating Ubiquitous Intelligent Sensing Environments)
The Network of Excellence (NoE) CRUISE intends to be a focal point in the planning and coordination of research on communication and application aspects of wireless sensor networking in Europe.
DAIDALOS – Designing Advanced network Interfaces for the Delivery and
Administration of Location independent, Optimised personal Services.
(((Doesn’t this sound like VRM)))
DAIDALOS is an EU Framework Programme 6 Integrated Project, currently in its second phase. Mobility has become a central aspect of the lives of European citizens in business, education, and leisure. The rapid technological and societal changes and the bewildering emergence of numerous new services has created a complex environment for network operators and a confusing situation for end users. The enhancement of existing technologies and development of new Beyond 3G systems will increase this complexity even more.
The End-to-End Reconfigurability (E2R) project aims at realising the full benefits of the diversity within the radio eco-space, composed of wide range of systems such as cellular, fixed, wireless local area and broadcast. The key objective of the E2R project is to devise, develop, trial and showcase architectural design of reconfigurable devices and supporting system functions to offer an extensive set of operational choices to the users, application and service providers, operators, and regulators in the context of heterogeneous systems. Innovative research, development and proof of concept are to be pursued from an end-to-end perspective, stretching from user device through all system levels.
e-SENSE VISION – e-SENSE enables capturing of Ambient Intelligence for Beyond 3G Mobile Communication Systems through Wireless Sensor Networks.
Ambient Intelligence is a key component for future beyond 3G mobile and wireless communication systems. However, the enabling technology that provides systems with information to allow for Ambient Intelligence has been neglected and currently consists of many independent modes of input, mainly relying on active user interactions or specialised sensor systems gathering information.
is a three year (2002-2005) European research project (IST-2001-34734), on self-organizing and collaborative energy-efficient sensor networks. It address the convergence of distributed information processing, wireless communications, and mobile computing.
The vision of ubiquitous computing requires the development of devices and technologies, which can be pervasive without being intrusive. The basic components of such a smart environment will be small nodes with sensing and wireless communications capabilities, able to organize flexibly into a network for data collection and delivery.
HIDENETS (HIghly DEpendable ip-based NETworks and Services) is a specific targeted research project funded by the European Union under the Information Society Sixth Framework Programme. The project was started in January 2006 and have a duration of 3 years.
The aim of HIDENETS is to develop and analyze end-to-end resilience solutions for distributed applications and mobility-aware services in ubiquitous communication scenarios. Technical solutions will be developed for applications with critical dependability requirements in the context of selected use-cases of ad-hoc car-to-car communication with infrastructure service support.
MIMOSA – “Microsystems platform for MObile Services and Applications”
Make Ambient Intelligence a reality by developing a mobile-phone centric open
technology platform
RUNES – Reconfigurable Ubiquitous Networked Embedded Systems
Embedded systems are now ubiquitous. They can be found in a diverse range of appliances, from mobile phones to smoke alarms, from refrigerators to trucks. Enabling these systems to communicate opens up new areas of applications: smart buildings, industrial automation, healthcare, power distribution and host of others. Some of the applications will result in a more efficient, accurate or cost effective solution than previous ones. Others will be new, previously unimagined or impossible. We are in the middle of a major technological revolution that will affect many aspects of our lives, and Europe is well placed to be at the forefront of exploiting this technology.
Moving to this exciting new technique in system development necessitates a common language for all systems. Without this, we risk repeatedly ‘re-inventing the wheel’ at a high cost in money and effort, and we compromise the inter-operability of sensors between applications.
Simplicity – Secure, Internet-able, Mobile Platforms LeadIng CItizens Toward simplicitY.
The development of new ICT devices and network-based services has generated a bewildering array of configuration procedures, access technologies and protocols. For non-technical users, excessive complexity is an obstacle to take-up of these new technologies.
The Simplicity project has developed and evaluated tools, techniques and architectures to remove this complexity, enabling users to customize devices and services with minimal effort.
WINNER – Wireless World Initiative New Radio
is a consortium of 41 partners co-ordinated by Siemens working towards enhancing the performance of mobile communication systems. The improvements of radio transmission to be explored by WINNER are crucial for enabling new mobile services and applications anytime and anywhere.
Our challenge is to make mobile communication systems more adaptable to user needs.
There were these other links out to other projects:
Wireless World Research Forum
WWI – World Wireless Initiative
MOCCA – Mobile Cooperation and Coordination Action
Information Society Technologies
ECMA “Standards at Internet Speed”
ESTI – “Home of ICT Standardization”
World Economic Forum and World Social Forum
I have friends who blog at both events this week. It should be interesting to watch them both unfold.
Halley Suite of (Halley’s Comment) is at the World Economic Forum and Karri Winn who I work with at Planetwork and writter on World Changing SF is at the World Social Forum.
I just checked out the Davos ‘forum Blog’ and it turns out Jim Fruchterman of Benetech is also going to be Blogging. I also have met Gillian from Witness at SVN related events.
Identity Gang Dinner at RSA
I am heading to RSA this year to cover the show for DIDW. Last year was my first dip into all out ‘security land.’ I was glad to hang out with Bob and Pam who helped me understand things there. It occurred to me that it might be fun to have an Identity Gang Dinner one night of the show. This will be both for folks on the list and those at RSA who might be interested in getting to know what we are up to.
URL's are cool.
Apparently some people think that I don’t like URL’s. I truly think they are great. I have since the first I heard about them. I am very excited that this model for doing SSO now exists. I think the model is very empowering truly (except for the domain name part) decentralized. I think it will be great for millions of web literate folks. Weather they have their own domain or if they just have a blog and use that URL. The way wiki travel is doing it to support interop between the different wiki travel sites is cool too.
I want to see this model flourish.
It is true that I am also not a technical person and I don’t think that they will work for ALL people (they will work for many millions of people). This is a Yes AND situation. The AND is I don’t think it will work for ‘everyone’ and particularly the user communities that I got inspired to try and build social networks for the Spiritual Activists. There are lots of web-literate folks on this list who can weave their way through domain naming and setting up stuff on their servers. I feel that part of my role is to speak up for those who are less technically savy and what could work for them in a ubiquitous identity layer. I would like to see the diversity of identifiers and ways of doing SSO flourish under OpenID. I really want a ubiquitous user-centric identity layer that can serve a diversity of people.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday. She is in her 50’s and we talked about the different things going on in our professional lives. I shared a little bit about what was happening in OpenID. I told her about this new way of doing SSO with URLs and that in the universe of possibilities there was also i-names. She said to me that she thought the URL thing would never work for her mother. That is who I care about…her mother. So went I say I like i-names and I think they will work as a way to for spiritual women over 45 to use these systems I really am just talking about those folks in a different part of the web. Who normally don’t have non-tehcnical allies on their side as these things are formed thinking about what might work for them in a ubiquitous identity layer.
Please don’t take what I say as against anything else that lives under the OpenID2 umbrella. I really love the fact everyone has found a way to cooperate despite their different angles. It gives me great optimism for the future of the web.
Corporations plan to contribute Open Source OpenID
This was a great to see from James McGovern:
In terms of my own planned 2007 contributions to open source, I will be commiting to contributing to the authorization specification as part of the OpenID community. The funny thing is that I will be going against my better judgement in that enterprises tend to desire to contribute to things that are measurable like implemented software as we really can’t do anything with ideas alone. Ideas need to be turned into software. What I fear the most is folks from Sun such as Pat Patterson, Sara Gates,Simon Phipps, Robin Wilton, Don Bowen and folks from Microsoft such as Kim Cameron and Jason Matusow openly supporting initiatives such as OpenID but not taking deliberate steps within their respective employers to actually implement the OpenID specification and any resulting authorization enhancements. I too am somewhat constrained in that the perception of anything that isn’t implemented will be perceived as an academic exercise that was a waste of time that will put the ability to contribute to open source projects in the future at risk…
XFN, Liberty 2.0 and OpenID UX
Eran Sandler has two great posts about identity and OpenID. One links to my post on “the network of Me.” He asks if we can do ‘creative things’ with XFN and identities. I personally don’t want my identifier in anyone else’s XFN file. I want to be asked by the person if I want my relationship with them expressed in a new context. All our relationships do not exist in all contexts….there is however often a lot of overlap between people with whom we share multiple contexts – making these relationships traverse contexts in a privacy protecting and non-annoying way is the challenge. I hope that people interested in how identities, social graphs and social portability will go to the Free Liberty 2.0 meeting on January 22 to learn more about their proposed open standard for this.
He also blogs eloquently about the still emerging challenge of UI and OpenID adoption.
I keep on seeing two distinct ways that are common in such sites/services (at least in the sites that I’ve visited).
The first, is to separate the OpenID handling to a different page. In that page the process of sign-in/up is actually the same. If this is your first time of signing in with your OpenID it will actually transform itself to a sign-up process and may ask you a couple of questions and may interact with your OpenID provider.
The second, OpenID is integrated only in the Sign-In screen. If you sign in with an OpenID for the first time you will actually get a sign-up process and you may be asked a few questions and have an interaction with your OpenID provider.
The best place, of course, is to have OpenID in both the Sign-In and Up screens, if a user that do have an OpenID reaches any one of these screen the scenario of signing in for the first time (or not for the first time) will work no matter when he is.
What do you think? How would use design these processes that will still fit to your site/service and still support in a clear and obvious way OpenID?
There is an emerging community that is focused on User Experience. I hope that Eran and others who care about this join up. We need all the UX brains we can get on this not easy to solve puzzle.
Profile Linker – is the time right for open standards…?
Tech Crunch has a review of Profile Linker.
They have one partnership sealed already, with Photobucket, and hope to do more. But for sites where they are unable to get a partnership they’ll have to gather information using the user’s credentials. There’s a risk that networks will simply cut them off.
They have portable profiles:
Portable Profiles allow you to take your content with you anywhere on the web. Mobilize your bio, share your photos.
Best of all, you only need to make updates in ONE place and all your portable profiles will be automatically updated all over the web.
one way they do this is...Don’t feel like entering ALL your profile content again?Well we can do all the work for you. Just tell us your Facebook login or MySpace URL and we’ll get your photo and more . .
All this proves the time is really right for open standards to do this.
Tracking content online
Attributor Corp is launching a product that combs the entire web for ‘unauthorized uses.’ From the WSJ:
They claim to have cracked the thorny computer-science problem of scouring the entire Web by using undisclosed technology to efficiently process and comb through chunks of content. The company says it will have over 10 billion Web pages in its index before the end of this month.
Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from individuals to big media companies, using a technique known as “digital fingerprinting,” which determines unique and identifying characteristics of content. It uses these digital fingerprints to search its index of the Web for the content. The company claims to be able to spot a customer’s content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video. It will provide customers with alerts and a dashboard of identified uses of their content on the Web and the context in which it is used.
(if the link to the WSJ goes ‘unfree’ follow the ‘read more’ at the bottom of this post to read the full text)
[Read more…] about Tracking content online
Polar Rose soon to search photos for faces on the web
This story comes from Slashdot. A startup Polar Rose is about to launch a face search tool.
Polar Rose relies on a combination of our unique face recognition algorithms and the collective intelligence of our users….we don’t and can’t rely exclusively on face recognition, but also harness the collective intelligence of our users who help train our software and tag names on people we haven’t seen before.
We will open up for a royalty-free use of our API’s, which will allow for partners to integrate the Polar Rose functionality into existing sites or create stand-alone applications of Polar Rose, for example:
* A news site that wants to let users help tag photos, and link stories together based on who appears in photos.
* A photo-sharing site that wants to let users automatically tag new uploads, and search and sort archives based on the people in a photo.
* A social networking or dating site that wants to wants to help users find more pictures of a person, elsewhere on the net or just in the photos of the person’s friends.
The only significant requirements we put for the use of the APIs, is that the Polar Rose signature rose is used, and data that users generate is passed back to us on a non-exclusive basis. The reason being that every piece of data helps train our engine.
Some have privacy concerns. I certainly do – when Riya was pitching similar face recongintion for a flickr like tool I was creeped out. They are now doing a visual search engine so you can put in a purse or boot that you like and it searches for purses and boots like that.
Privacy concerns from New Scientist:
Polar Rose and future developments that make facial recognition available to the masses risk encroaching on people’s privacy, warns Yaman Akdeniz, director of the UK non-profit group Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties.
“Although this sounds like a great idea, I would not like to be searchable in this way, or so easily tracked without my consent,” says Akdeniz. The database compiled by Polar Rose is similar to the kind of biometric database some governments wish to use, he points out.
“I wonder whether they have a right to build such a database,” says Akdeniz, he suggests people think twice before embracing such potentially intrusive tools, and consider which photos of themselves they allow online.
Others agree. Simon Davies, director of the campaign group Privacy International and a specialist in technology and privacy at the London School of Economics, UK, says face-searching technology is valuable but must be used responsibly.
He fears Polar Rose could help identity thieves or stalkers, or even be used by the police to monitor protesters. “They could use the service to find where people have been, what their activities are, or who they associate with,” he says.
Search engines should allow users to prevent their photos being searched, says Davies. “There should be a way to put code in a webpage that signals you want to opt out,” he told New Scientist.