Nowhere to hide: Video location tech has arrived

Here’s a scene you didn’t see in Oscar-nominated film “Zero Dark Thirty”: Osama bin Laden is ranting and waving his AK-47 automatic rifle as he denounces the great Satan in a video broadcast on Al Jazeera. The video is recorded by U.S. intelligence and analyzed by a new technology that can pinpoint the location where a video was shot with an accuracy of 10 meters, and the orders go out to the drones. You know what comes next.

That didn’t happen, of course. But a new technology currently cooking in a lab in Berkeley, Calif., could make that fantasy a reality. And we may regret it. Researchers at the Unversity of California’s International Computer Science Institute are building a location-centric database by analyzing videos downloaded from the Web. By comparing a video whose provenance is unknown to the database of known videos, it can then make an informed guess about where the video was shot. And thus where anyone in that shot was when.

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The technology I saw during a visit to ICSI last week is exceedingly cool, and it has the potential for all sorts of nonlethal uses. But it raises disturbing questions about privacy on the Web and what you might call the tagging of America. Facial recognition long out of the lab, warrantless cellphone snooping that can pinpoint your location at every turn, and the use of cookies that track your every move on the Web have all left us as exposed as one of the “Naked Guys” who walk around San Francisco’s Castro District sans pants.

How video-location detection works You’ve probably used speech recognition software that requires training. The software learns by making guesses about what you’re saying, then comparing it to the corrections you make in the text. Pretty soon it knows that a Bostonian saying “Cuber” means Cuba and not cucumber. The video location software learns in a similar manner.

Jaeyoung Choi, the lead researcher on the project, downloaded thousands of videos from Flickr that contain embedded geographical information. That data may include location tags (aka geotags), visual cues such as textures and colors, time stamps, and sounds such as birdsong. The attributes of a test video are then compared against these profiles, and its location is estimated. As more videos with embedded geographical information are downloaded, the researchers will use them to train the software to recognize more and more locations.

Currently, only 3 to 5 percent of the videos uploaded to the Internet contain geographic information revealing the location where they were shot, which means that a database containing more than selected test videos will take some time to build. Even so, the nascent system is remarkably accurate. By comparing the information in the database to some 5,000 “wild, unfiltered” videos, Choi was able to pinpoint the location where 14 percent of the videos were shot to within 10 meters, or about 33 feet.

More startling is the system’s ability to pinpoint a location by analyzing sounds in a video. It can, for example, “listen” to a train whistle and know it came from a train passing through Tokyo. No, that’s not hypothetical. It’s already been done, and the software has been trained on the sounds of 32 cities around the world, says Gerald Friedland, who heads ICSI’s multimedia efforts.

The same technology could be applied to photographs, which means the huge trove of precise geographical data generated by Google Street View and almost every digital camera could be used to train a system much more extensive than the one currently being built in Berkeley.

The core fight: Privacy vs. dollars ICSI’s video research was initially funded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (one of the 17 U.S. spy agencies), Friedland says. That’s hardly a coincidence. The military uses of the technology, like the hypothetical tracking of bin Laden, are obvious. But aside from the debate over the morality of drone warfare, the ability to extract tracking or identifying data from a video or still photo is worrisome. It’s no stretch to imagine a cop in Iran — or the United States — looking at pictures or videos of a protest and using facial identification, for example, to figure out who was holding the banner or leading the march.

Less extreme, but still scary is the tagging of photos by Facebook users, often without the permission of the owner of that face. Although facial recognition is a difficult technology — it still doesn’t work very well — Facebook is interested in making it more precise. Facebook and has long partnered with Face.com, a supplier of that technology. In buying the Israeli company last June, Facebook made clear its intention to double down on facial recognition as a tool to build traffic and revenue — not toss users into Guantanamo. (Google purchased a similar company in 2011.)

The more data on users that Facebook supplies to advertisers and third-party app developers, the more money it makes. The company has already collected billions (I’m not exaggerating) of photos. Given its terrible record of abusing our privacy, what are the odds that Facebook will say no to a lucrative deal that mines its store of geotagged pictures?

Even if Facebook were scrupulous about user privacy, that data store would be a very tempting target for hackers. Given how fragile security at even major financial institutions appears to be these days, that’s very worrisome.

Then there’s the FBI plan, first publicized in 2011 by Nextgov.com: The FBI is planning a nationwide facial-recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bureau officials told Nextgov.

I don’t spend my time looking out the window for the black helicopters, and I don’t want to squelch research into new technologies even if they have the potential to be misused. But the tagging of America is frightening. It’s time we had a very adult conversation about it.

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This article, “Nowhere to hide: Video location tech has arrived,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.