Can criminals use Facebook to guess your SSN?

Facebook received some pretty heavy negative backlash after the social networking site rolled out its facial recognition photo tagging system worldwide in June.

Now a new report suggests it may be possible to gather personal information using facial recognition software and profiles from social media sites like Facebook. Is it time to turn the feature off?

Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab claims that by using readily available facial recognition software (technology recently acquired by Google), cloud computing, and public information from social sites, it is indeed possible to identify people and create public profiles.

To prove his point, Acquisti and his team took snapshots of volunteers and used facial recognition to match them with their public Facebook profiles. In less than three seconds, the system found 10 possible matches, with the correct Facebook profile page among the top results more than 30% of the time.

Acquisti says the study “suggests that the identity of about one-third of subjects walking by the campus building may be inferred in a few seconds combining social-network data, cloud computing and an inexpensive webcam.”

What’s even more scary is the statistic that around 27% of the time he was able to use information from Facebook to identify the first five digits of a person’s social security number within four attempts.

Acquisti highlighted this problem back in 2009 when he released a similar study citing that criminals can easily predict social security numbers based on publically available data.

Although the focus wasn’t on Facebook and facial recognition in 2009, the concern has certainly shifted towards these new technologies.

Acquisti explained, “A person’s face is the veritable link between his or her offline and online identities. When we share tagged photos of ourselves online, it becomes possible for others to link our face to our names in situations where we would normally expect anonymity.”

As technology continues to bridge the gap between the digital and real world, Acquisiti warns the seamless merging of online and offline data made possible by face recognition and social media “raises the issue” of what privacy will mean in an augmented reality world.

“Ultimately, all of this access is going to force us to reconsider our notions of privacy. It may also affect how we interact with each other.

“Through natural evolution, human beings have evolved mechanisms to assign and manage trust in face-to-face interactions. Will we rely on our instincts or on our devices, when mobile phones can predict personal and sensitive information about a person?”

(Via WSJ)

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Internet expert on Google+: “Facebook is toast.”

It’s no secret. I like Google+ a lot. Lot of people love Google’s new social network. But, I think it noteworthy when someone like Steve Kille, a former Senior Research Fellow at University College London and one of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)’s authors writes, “Google+ is very impressive. I reckon Facebook is toast.”

Kille, CEO of Isode, a high-performance messaging and directory server software company, has been helping design the Internet’s communication infrastructure from its very early days. He knows what he’s talking about.

In his blog for Ferris Research, a leading e-mail and Internet communications research firm, Kille explained that he saw Google+ eventually killing off Facebook for numerous reasons.

These reasons included: Google Plus‘ “integration with other Google services [which] will be a key strategic advantage, that Facebook will not be able to match.”

He makes a good point. Google already has, for example, a sophisticated e-mail system, Gmail, and a Voice and Video over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Google Chat. Facebook, on the other hand, is discovering that integrating Skype for VoIP into Facebook is easier said than done. Just today, August 1st, a major Skype/Facebook security hole has been reported.

Kille also praised “The Circles approach to privacy control” because it “puts control of
sharing with the sender in a clean and easy to manage way. Widely aired privacy concerns with Facebook will help fuel the already spectacular growth of the invitation only G+ service.”

That’s another telling point. Many people have been voicing concern about Google+ user security.. Certainly you should be wary of your security on any social network, but keep in mind that Facebook’s security and privacy settings are an ever-changing maze. Heck, here at ZDNet’s we’ve been publishing new editions of the multi-part The Definitive Facebook Lockdown Guide in no small part because even we, people who make their living from riding technology’s cutting edge, have trouble keeping track of what’s what with Facebook’s settings.

He also thinks, as do I, that Google+’s “asymmetric model (like Twitter) will usually work better. It removes the need for ‘hand shaking’ on setup, and subsequent issues of de-friending.” With Google+, you don’t have all the friend/de-friending drama or the eternal Facebook question, “Where do I know this guy from?” You can follow someone new who follows you or not with no pressure.

Kille also thinks that “Photo integration is increasingly important and already better than Facebook. Convergence with Picasa [Google's Web-based photo album] is likely to help G+ to extend its lead.”

When I first started using Google+, I didn’t see this one myself. Since then, though, I’ve found myself being followed by more and more photographers who are using Google+ and Picasa to share their work. I suspect that it’s because photographers are growing concerned about the long-term fate of Yahoo’s Flickr and so they’re looking to move to other services such as 500px or the combination of Google+ and Picasa.

Put it all together, and Kille concludes that while “Facebook has a lot of users and enormous network effect strengths. All the same, I don’t think this will save it from going the way of MySpace.” I can’t disagree.

Related Stories:

Five Things to love about Google+

Three signs Google+ is here to stay (And two that it’s doomed)

Google revises Google+ real name management policy

What was Google thinking!?

Google+: An infographic to ease your privacy-concerned mind

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