Posted on March 23, 2006 at 10:30 AM in thoughts
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
Whenever a new kind of web-based sharing or socializing comes out, I find I have to balance the urge to embrace the new technologies with my interest in finding an appropriate level of myself to share with the world. For Google's social networking service Orkut, I struck that balance by constructing a profile and identity online that was incomplete on facts and identifiers about me, but wholly true to the parts of me I like to share with others. I'm not talking about using a deceptively fake picture or lying about my height or weight or anything like that, I'm talking about using the profile responses to indirectly build an honest picture of myself. For example, this is the photo I used for myself on Orkut:
See what I mean? I'm not passing myself off as two swizzle stick monkeys asking a wooden cop to do a trust fall. But hopefully by choosing this photo for my profile I'm communicating something about myself as useful as a portrait, or possibly more so. I don't see that as deceptive, I see that as part of how I share with other people about myself in meaningful ways. And on Orkut, I made lots of contacts based on their interest in that photo. I had a great time on Orkut, being myself but in a playful way that didn't deceive anyone and invited everyone to play along. I found my own way to share what's important about me but remain as safely anonymous as I wanted to me, and I stayed in decent control of my information.
It's kind of like return on preferences. Things I thought would be of benefit to the social network to know about me, I shared, or found a way to share that I was ok with. Other things that felt superfluous or irrelevant to the experience, I ignored. And I grew that set of information and modified it as I got to know the site and its culture better. I think it was a good compromise, and it worked well for me.
I was just reading about the public beta of Riya, a new photo storing and sharing and searching site that has some really neat and potentially creepy face recognition ability. Right now I'm trying to figure out how much engagement I want with this thing.
There are some great write-ups of the service, and it sounds like with a little patience and TLC, you can get it to recognize the faces in the photos you upload. The benefit seems to be that it can make photo storage quicker and easier, and help you discover photos of friends and relatives, and then expand your circle as well.
So is the payoff worth all of the information sharing and pooling? I'm really not sure. It's definitely innovative, and that alone makes me want to play with it. But it's definitely a little creepy too, with the potential to be a lot creepy. If you share information about who the people in your photos are, and it gets pooled with a big user base, then all of the sudden people can find a photo and know who you are, what you look like, and what your friends and relatives look like. So what's bad about that? I'm still thinking this through, but here are some of the dangers I can think of:
- It would become easier for people to spot you in public or a crowd if they wanted to. It's a reduction in anonymity by choice.
- Once you make the decision once, you can't really take it back, as data on web servers can stick around for a while even if you delete it.
- There's probably already a record of you and your photo on a state-issued id or driver's license, but this would add to the paperwork on who you are. That may or may not be a problem, depending on what your situation is.
- You might be asked to give up the anonymity of your friends without their permission.
- Could this be a source for a new type of unwanted targeted advertising? Hard to say whether matching a name with a face would be valuable in the future.
- If it can learn to do this with photos, I wonder how long it'll be before it does this with video. This isn't a potential danger in itself but it didn't fit anywhere else so I threw it in here.
And on the benefits side, it:
- Speeds up your storage of photos online, maybe by a lot if you take lots of portraits and snapshots of your friends.
- Helps you connect with photos of friends and relatives.
- Helps you expand your circle of friends and surf the names of strangers who might remain nameless on a site like Flickr.com, but could give you their name if they wanted to.
I don't mean to be a killjoy, but I'm not completely sold yet. Maybe I'm missing some of the benefits. And maybe I can come up with a way to interact with the site without giving up much anonymity for me and my friends and family yet.
Here's an idea -- how about doing what George Bush does and giving everyone a descriptive nickname instead of a name?
Comments
Just a clarification, the Riya service doesn't even look for people in photos if the owner of the photos can't train us. Meaning if you have a photo of me at a stadium it can't recognize me unless you train it. Now if I have used Riya and created a training set of what I look like Riya still can't recognize me in your photos ... why: a) We don't allow it to do global recognition b) it doesn't work if it is looking for more than 400 unique people in your photos. Happy to chat more. - Munjal Shah - Riya
Posted by Munjal Shah | March 24, 2006 7:54 AM
Wow, thanks for stopping by and for the clarification. I'm fascinated by Riya and still trying to figure out what to make of it, as you can tell from my write-up.
If a law enforcement agency approached you, would you allow them to use global recognition?
And is there a way for someone to ask not to be recognized and tagged by name, even if their friends have trained it to do so?
I have a few more questions and would also love to be able to test some things about it out so that I could talk about it with more specificity. I'd like to conduct a couple of fun experiments if you'd be up for it. Can you set me up with a test account, and do you have time for a brief interview via telephone or e-mail?
Posted by Dave Coustan(earthling) | March 24, 2006 10:38 AM
Hey Dave,
I don't think Munjal has cocomment. ;)
I pinged him for you...in the meantime, did you see that Riya is open for the public?
To answer your questions:
1. We would not allow a law enforcement agency to use global recognition as long as we weren't breaking the law. Privacy is important to us.
2. We are working on a way for people to keep their 'digital signatures' private. It may take a while to implement. For now, you can request your friends keep your photos private (the same issue goes for most photo sites).
I hope this helps for now.
Tara
Posted by Tara 'Miss Rogue' Hunt | March 28, 2006 7:39 PM
Thanks, Tara! I really appreciate your responsiveness.
Maybe once I mess around with Riya a little more, and if Munjal has time, we could do a quick phone or e-mail interview.
And thanks for introducing me to horsepigcow.com. I'm a little late to the party but I am now a fan.
Posted by Dave Coustan(earthling) | March 31, 2006 11:57 AM