Remember that when you post something, it can be found later. While current technology might not be sufficient for someone to identify you by using face recognition software, it's very likely that software coming out in the future would have no problem identifying you (or someone else) based on, for example, a blurry photograph. The same goes for speaker identification software and other technology that can be used to identify people. As time goes on, the technology improves, so never assume that because something isn't possible today, it won't be possible in the future.
Once a tweet has been retweeted or a post on Facebook has been liked or shared, you can't delete it - neither technically nor legally. Once a web page has been crawled and indexed by search engines, there is a record of it. If you post something that shouldn't be made public, you don't have much time to delete before it's really not possible. Posting information therefore means giving up control over it.
The fact that you post boring things, like pictures of what you ate for breakfast, doesn't make you invisible online. Although it may sometimes seem like nobody is paying attention, advertisers are always paying attention, and data you post is collected by social networks and other businesses in order to tailor ads to your tastes and (hopefully) increase profits as a result. Maybe you don't mind that social networks are paying attention to your breakfast, but it's good to be aware that even seemingly insignificant posts online *are* tracked by somebody, often as part of a marketing strategy to increase profits.
Just because you aren't posting information about yourself doesn't mean that other people aren't. Lots of people post pictures from vacations, weddings, and other events that you may have attended. There could also be information about you online having to do with your job, for instance on a company web site. Even the government might be sharing information about you without your knowledge. Gerald Friedland recently commented on concerns about publicly available statistics from surveys, the census, and other government sources. Read more about it and watch the video.
Therefore, while not posting on social networks might result in less of your personal information being online, it doesn't mean there isn't information, some of which you might prefer to keep private, available on publicly accessible web sites.
DAAD scholar Erik Rodner, along with colleagues Alexander Freytag, Paul Bodesheim, and Joachim Denzler of the University of Jena, won the best paper honorable mention award at the Asian Conference on Computer Vision, held November 5-9 in Daejeon, South Korea. Their work tries to go one step further in lifelong visual learning with minimal supervision, an important topic in computer vision and robotics. Detecting new object categories in images and videos requires measuring classification uncertainty. The paper proposes methods of computing and approximating uncertainties in a Bayesian setting, which are in general intractable with large-scale data. Erik and his colleagues were able to show that the computation time can be reduced from several hours to milliseconds. Furthermore, it turns out that the approximations do not hurt the classification performance when used for active learning or one-class classification, where only the induced ranking of test examples is of interest.
Even if you are careful not to post private information, you might not realize how much metadata becomes available whenever you post something online.
Metadata is information that is contained in files such as photos and status updates on social networks, but is not visible when looking at the content, so many people are not aware that it exists.
Mechanical Turk, Amazon's popular crowdsourcing platform, is used by many people and organizations who need repetitive tasks completed. For rapid completion of unskilled (easy) tasks online, crowdsourcing can be an easy and affordable solution. But what if you need people to complete a skilled task? Researchers at ICSI decided to find out.
Here are a few highlights from November 2012 at ICSI:
Our new Swordfish project aims to build speech recognition systems for different languages under severe time and data constraints. Read more about it in our press release.
On the blog, we started a series of posts about common online privacy misunderstandings. So far, there are three posts: part one, part two, part three. This series will continue in December.
We profiled Nelson Morgan (in two parts: read part one, read part two) on the blog. If you are interested in speech research over the past few decades, you'll want to read these.
This is the third in a series of blog posts debunking some common misunderstandings about online privacy. The images used in these posts have been adapted from a tutorial given by Gerald Friedland at ACM Multimedia in Nara, Japan in October.
Most sites are viewable by the public, not just the people you are intending to communicate with. Even non-public sites may be sharing some information with, for example, their advertisers. Never assume that information you provide on a Web page is private.