Toon Vanagt's Thought Valve
Posts Tagged ‘Privacy’
Why I like my MIT data portrait and why you should get yours
August 22nd, 2009
Personas Data Portrait Toon Vanagt
Tonight I stumbled upon this MIT personas project, which generates a real time data portrait of your online identity. Apart from being a cool data visualization project, I think it is a great illustration of large dataset processing and an educative warning for on-line privacy. During the processing of one’s character the most information is shown. I was stunned by the animation and personalized content generated by the flash application. It seems I grew up with my pants down 
“Personas uses sophisticated natural language processing and shows you how the Internet sees you.
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.”
If you’ve left traces on the internet and aren’t cursed/blessed with on-line homonyms, you’ll be stunned by how much the internet knows about you. Enter first name & last name here to share feelings about your generated portrait below
Video: How to virtualize your face into a realistic 3D avatar
March 19th, 2009
At my other blog, I just posted a slightly off-track video on how I virtualized myself, with the help of a pioneering Belgian tech company, which rules the emerging H2A-conversion industry (Human-To-Avatar). This resulted from my presence at the excellent Plugg event on innovation and entrepreneurship in Brussels, where Dirk Callaerts, the president of Eyetronics gave me a short explanation of their amazing virtualization technology. I discussed the privacy challenges of this technology and accepted to get myself virtualized in a similar way as Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman. Major movie stars use these scans to get their face applied to stand-ins and stunt men. But also because the insurance companies require them to get virtualized, so that expensive movies can be finished, in the unfortunate event something happens to the leading actors.
For those who do not live on a film set, there are many application for this technology too. Think about the gaming industry or online communities. But also the biometrics industry could use these high resolution scans to improve facial recognition application. Another market for these scans is to produce miniature physical copies of your virtual self. The cosmetics industry already knows vanity is a great revenue driver…
Now that I got my face virtualized, I am able to send stand-ins for those dangerous tech interviews in the heated hypervisor battle fields around the world
Which usefull or fun applications can you imagine for this technology? Would you be willing to pay to get your face virtualized & obatin a realistic3D-avatar on your favorite social network?
Making of ‘Erasing David’: Tintin looking for some privacy in Brussels
January 12th, 2009
I made a small contribution to ‘Erasing David’, a project by filmmaker David Bond. For a month David is testing the boundaries of civil liberties by deliberately destroying his identity. Is it possible to disappear from ‘the system’ anno 2009? To push this experience a little further, he has top private detectives tracking him down. Instead of digging a hole to easily go underground for a month, David seems to keep a normal life style. He contacted me via text messaging (UK mobile number) and paid for our lunch with his credit card (yes, there is such a thing as ‘free lunch’ during the credit crunch We met at the rooftop of the Old England art nouveau building, which now houses the Musical Instruments Museum. If David is really paranoid about privacy, using a mobile phone and credit card seem bad ways to remain digitally unnoticed…However, it would be interesting to learn if those private detectives managed to get hold of these sensitive data.
Making of ‘Erasing David’: Tintin looking for some privacy in Brussels from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.
We discussed facial recognition, finger print technology, on-line search logs & cache, social networks, activity stream events, micro-blogging, geo-tagging, ccTV, PKI key signing and many more privacy related topics. I pointed David to the latest iPhoto feature (part of Apple’s iLife09), which introduces facial recognition into consumer software. It is easy to imagine similar or even more powerful facial recognition features on Flickr, Facebook, Netlog and Google Images. We “name tag” the people we recognize in our album and these ‘application providers’ complete the tagging effort on the rest of ‘their’ online picture collection. Are you sure there are no pictures out on the internet, in which you prefer to remain anonymous?
Being British, David was amazed by my Belgian indifference to carry an electronic identity card. It must not have helped that he just interviewed Paul Rusesabagina (the hotel manager of Hotel Mille Collines, whose extraordinary actions were the basis for Hotel Rwanda) who learned him that during the 1994 genocide at road blocks a Hutu- or Tutsi-label on a Rwandan ID, were not a matter of iLife, but of real life or dead.
David really wanted to know “Is there anything on your Belgian ID card now, that could prejudice you in the future…Even if it is hard to imagine?” I had never given that question much thought, but even without information on ‘race’, religion or sexual preference, I must admit my card does hold my place of birth (Bruges in Flanders) and preferred administrative language (Dutch). “Ethnically” that would easily classify me as being ‘Flemish’, a 10% minority in Brussels, but a majority in Belgium. Nobody in his right mind expects Belgium to ever fall apart in a violent way… But then again, neither did the Rwandan people… Anyway, negative future consequences for my language indicator are the least of my concern. Being multilingual, I could even choose French as administrative language in Brussels…but my very Dutch first name would always give me away at a road block.
How paranoid are you about your ID card? Should we be more concerned about the data it contains in the event Belgium ever drifts apart?
PS: ‘Erasing David’ is a cinema documentary for Channel 4. I realize this post creates a small breadcrumb for those private eyes on the lookout for David. Since he left the building, there is need to go looking for him here anymore…
About Me
Internet entrepreneur. Proud founder of Casius.com, Virtualisers.be, Virtualization.com, Promex.be and 2 sons. Not necessarily in that order. Read more...
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