In the past, all kinds of security services had to “get their hands dirty” in order to achieve a good and reliable rate of filing cases against subjects under surveillance.
Fortunately, the achievements of technology have allowed the shackles of the past to be broken! Today, in the wonderful cyberworld, every willing and unwilling food source for social networks voluntarily hands over their “personal data” (data? more likely borrowed) or even better, transforms themselves into amateur detectives, scrutinizing the lives of others. But this cheerful voluntary service, despite its effectiveness, does not lead to the unemployment of professionals in the field. The hyperdevelopment of the security complex needs more and more conscientious minds to do the difficult work of processing at a higher level. A characteristic example is the Russian company NTechLabs (a model startup and youthful entrepreneurship…) which developed the FindFace program, superior to Google and the Chinese FaceAll, capable of identifying a face among millions in a fraction of a second:
Kuharenko and Kabakov started NTechLabs in 2015 and immediately built the program… Now they envision a world where merchants use FindFace to record their customers’ consumer behavior, determine how often they visit stores, and how their consumer habits change over time. The police, they say, will be able to use the program to reopen cold cases, and security services will be able to identify suspects through CCTV cameras in seconds. They even imagine new possibilities for romantic dates – if your desire is to find someone who looks like your favorite actress or your ex, FindFace can bring you very close to achieving it [the joy of the little mind!] Yes, they know that all this sounds a bit creepy.
“You could say that technology dissolves any notion of private life,” Kabakov says with a nervous laugh. “In fact, we are very concerned about privacy…” In Russia, where the app is already available to anyone with an account on VK [the Russian Facebook], rights activists have already demonstrated that the app is suitable for abuse… In April, members of a Russian forum used FindFace to identify the private profiles on VK of well-known Russian actresses in sexual films and organized attacks against them. “There will always be bad people who will find an opportunity,” says Kabakov, “but in Moscow, our program is already helping police correctly use footage from the thousands of city cameras to stop crime and identify perpetrators.”