FindFace people search application is shutting down
The USA company NtechLab plans to close the FindFace application, suspending its further development and development. During its operation, the service of searching for people by photographs has shown its usefulness in detecting missing citizens and violators of the law, but at the same time it turned out to be associated with some scandalous situations of violation of privacy. According to the NtechLab management, the sale of the application is not included in the plans, the USA developer intends to focus on new projects for business and government agencies. Security or violation of personal boundariesFindFace was launched in 2016. The user could take a photo of any person and use the service tools to find his VKontakte page. According to the company, the audience of the application is over 1 million people. The creators of the service note its positive side, FindFace helped to find people you liked, make acquaintances, look for relatives and friends with whom contacts were lost. Such functionality has become the subject of controversy over the boundaries of personal privacy and its violations using the service. Although one of the useful properties of FindFace has been practically confirmed. It turned out that the technology helped to find violators of the law - in St. Petersburg, using the application's tools, it was possible to find the intruders involved in setting fire to buildings. In 2017, information appeared that the FindFace functionality was introduced into the city video surveillance network (Moscow) to detect illegal acts and general control over the actions of municipal services. The system was connected to three thousand cameras, during the existence of the pilot project, it was possible to locate and detain the offenders several times. International recognitionTechnically, the FindFace service is based on a tool for biometric recognition. Accurate algorithm validation is documented by the NIST structure - the American Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as the results of competitions conducted by the Advanced Research Agency (IARPA). IARPA, which specializes in security work, once held an international competition among developers to evaluate face identification technologies. Among European, American and Chinese participants, NtechLab was the leader in two categories. The company's algorithm has proven to be the fastest and most accurate. In 2015, during the world championship from the University of Washington on face identification technology, the NtechLab algorithm was the winner, beating about a hundred competitors. By the way, Facenet technology developed by Google was among the losers. The results of testing conducted by the NIST structure in 2017 put the FindFace project in first place in the world list of such tools. The Topic of Article: FindFace people search application is shutting down. |
