Russian Photographer Uses Facial Recognition To Find People He Snaps On Subway

Social Media Had Taken Your Privacy!

A smart but also slightly scary project by Russian photographer Egor Tsvetkov. In order to show how easy it is for complete strangers to gather information about you, Egor spent six weeks taking around 100 pictures of subway commuters in St Petersburg before using a facial recognition app called FindFace to track down their internet profiles.

In 70 percent of cases, he was quite easily able to identify the people he had photographed. Often, there was a striking difference between a person’s real look and the image they projected on their social network profile: a shy and grim young man might appear to be the life and soul of the party and a lover of extreme sports on his VKontakte page.




He used open source software to scan the 55 million plus users of VKontakte, Russia's biggest social network, and despite some of his photographs bearing little resemblance to their online pictures, Egor was (rather alarmingly) able to find around 70% of the people he snapped. “My project is a clear illustration of the future that awaits us if we continue to disclose as much about ourselves on the internet as we do now,” he said. 

In an age where people are using social media more than ever, perhaps it's time we started to think about how much information we really want to share with the world.

The Your Face Is Big Data project is aimed to show to people that our right to privacy is endangered by the development of digital technologies, according to Tsvetkov.