Another technology is cloud computing. Cloud computing allows cheaply and efficiently running many, many face comparisons in just a few seconds, otherwise that would not be possible with normal computers.

5.Ubiquitous computing

The idea of ubiquitous computing is that I can just take my smartphone and connect it to the Internet, and although my smartphone does not have the processing power to do 500 million face comparisons in seconds, something up there in the cloud can, and I just need to connect to it to run face recognition in real time in the street.

They could come from LinkedIn; they could come from organizations and governmental databases and so forth

So this is what we are talking about: combining all these technologies, and in particular face recognition and publicly available online social network data, for the purpose of large-scale, automated, peer-based individual re-identification both online and offline; and individual informational inference, the inference of additional information about these individuals, potentially sensitive data.

In Latanya Sweeney’s example, the identified database was the voter registration list for Massachusetts voters. The un-identified database was a sensitive database of medical discharged data – obviously un-identified because hospitals wanted to share that information but they didn’t want to share it with the names of the people suffering from the different diseases. Lees verder →