with Stephen Meyler

#FacialRecognition

#IbrahimHalawa

ONE STEP CLOSER TO DYSTOPIA?

A study at Stanford University in the US used software to guess if profile pics from a dating site were gay or straight. It guessed correctly in up to eight out of ten cases. The researchers guessed that by looking at enough faces, the software was able to pick up near invisible evidence of different testosterone levels experienced by gay or straight people in the womb. When the story broke in early September, the immediate reaction from gay rights’ organisations and others was concern and alarm. Minority Report-style futures were envisaged, with gay people discovered by CCTV or profile photos and punished for their “pre-crime”.

The study used pics of 14,000-plus white Americans culled from a dating website and selected to be the right size and clarity to work. There was an even mix of gay, straight, male and female, and the software created a ‘faceprint’ set of numbers for each that it then used on new sets of faceprints to make its predictions.

Shown one pic of a gay man and one of a straight man, it guessed right 81% of the time. When shown five photos of each man, the hit rate went up to 91%. It was a worse guesser with pics of women – 71% with one photo and 83% with five. Shown the same pics, plain old people guessed right only a little better than random chance.

The researchers suggested that those levels of hormones in the womb, which are known to influence the eventual shape of a foetus’ face, the cues the software noticed – might also determine sexuality. Gay men have narrower jaws and longer noses than straight men while lesbians have larger jaws, apparently. While the researchers immediately defended their work from accusations of it being “junk science”, saying that their aim was to show what could be done with information (public profile pics) and software already in the world, they did request that journalists not reveal the name of the dating site. They were afraid of copycats repeating the experiment for non-scientific purposes.

The US watchdog GLAAD did point out that by choosing only white faces from the dating website, perhaps the study had actually measured beauty standards in just one section of the US population.

Professor Benedict Jones of the Face Recognition Lab at the University of Glasgow told the BBC that the subtle features shaped by hormones in the womb might in fact be down to gay and straight people picking profile pics differently.

Although there’s no doubt authoritarians would love a handy bit of software to root out their local degenerates, maybe the alarmed reaction to this story has a lot to do with our more general fear about how much information about us is gone out of our control. Knowing that a record of every profile pic you’ve posted, every news article you’ve read, every opinion given a thumb’s up, exists ‘somewhere else’ is something we all accept in return for using the digital world. Google, Facebook and the rest have been mining this data for years to sell us stuff, so it’s no surprise that it might be put to another purpose. Given how little success government has in keeping tabs on what happens to all that data we so willingly share, it seems likely that the future will have ever more intrusive profiling and fewer places to hide our individual selves.

Maybe the alarmed reaction to this story has a lot to do with our more general fear about how much information about us is gone out of our control?

HOW VALUABLE IS AN IRISH PASSPORT?

The acquittal of Ibrahim Halawa after four years in jail waiting for a sentence to be handed down was one of the first good news stories various members of the government presented for the new Dáil session. Views during his long wait while the gears of the Egyptian judicial system slowly turned provoked extreme reactions here. Because Enda Kenny or his successor Leo hadn’t immediately jumped on a plane, cape heroically flapping, to demand the Egyptians release our citizen was proof that official Ireland is irredeemably racist. Racists thought, well, he must have been up to something, going to an anti-government protest when he was supposed to be on holidays in Cairo with his sisters, so why should Irish officials make any effort to save him?

The truth is likely to be much more boring – it’s normal for people to spend years locked up in Egyptian jails awaiting trial, as the judicial system there is vulnerable to chaos. Halawa was lucky to have Irish officials and media keep his name in the public consciousness, sure, but was the Egyptian government going to make any huge efforts on his behalf when asked by Western diplomats? Does the world work that way any more? Did it ever?