"A picture of your face is all it takes for Alessandro Acquisti at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to access a wealth of personal information. He and colleagues used PittPatt facial recognition software - which was developed at CMU and recently bought by Google - to match people with their Facebook profiles and gather names, birth dates and other demographics for one in three test subjects.
The researchers then used this data to correctly predict the first five digits of the subjects' social security number, using a technique they developed in 2009. In principle it should be possible to identify the full number, but the sample size of 93 was too small to do this accurately.
This kind of identification relies on people sharing their information on social networks in the first place, but of course many happily do this. What they may not realise is that information from different networks or or even their friends can be linked, building up a surprisingly rich picture of their identify. "It's like a domino effect," says Acquisti, who will will present the research at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this week. "It has become truly difficult for us to tightly seal our personal information"......................READ MORE
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