Profile Pictures on Social Networks 'Are a Privacy Risk'

COMPUTER WORLD - It's becoming easier for strangers to identify people and infer detailed information about them from their publicly available images on sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of IT and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College, used a facial recognition tool called Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) developed at CMU to see whether he could find matches between the dating site images and the Facebook profile pictures. ~5,800 dating site members also had Facebook profiles. Of these, more ~4,900 were uniquely identified. The numbers are significant because a previous CMU survey showed that 90% of Facebook members use their real name on their profiles.

by Jaikumar Vijayan
See full article at Macworld

Comments

[Mark Brooks]

It won't be long before these kinds of services will be available as a form of background check for idaters.