This is a very cool use of facial recognition. It could also be expanded to the complete history of photographs. So lets say trying to identify all people on all historical photographs. Wouldn't it be funny to see some of the same people pop up in different pictures around the world in events that were previously thought unrelated?<p>For privacy issues you'd want to limit this to periods in time that are far back enough for most people to have passed though. So I could imagine the Second World War to be a (somewhat arbitrary) limit for now.<p>This limit would eventually need to be expanded, because I wouldn't want my photographs to be examined like this in 70 years time.
I always though that this was gonna happen in the future. That someone 100 years from now will check zettabytes of videos, pictures, posts and is going to create complete profiles of everyone that has lived in our time.<p>Each time that you are in the background of a picture of an stranger. In the broad panoramic videos from sport stadiums. From fingerprinting you writing in all social media. From government documentation. From text of other people talking about you... all your digital traces to know who were you.<p>Now is happening with past pictures, even that there is no so much to mine compared with the present.
Well here's the actual link to the website <a href="https://www.civilwarphotosleuth.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.civilwarphotosleuth.com/</a>
What I'm curious about is what image recognition system they used to map the faces in the picture?
The pictures that jumped to mind for this as a potential social issue aren't the Civil War ones - they're the Jim Crow era lynch mob pictures.<p>I'd say there's a huge difference between knowing that your (or someone else's) ancestors were terribly racist and knowing that they were involved in murders.