A few months ago, 21-year-old Egor Tsvetko took photos of strangers on the St. Petersburg subway.
Then he used an app to identify their faces.
In a photo series titled "YOUR FACE IS BIG DATA," Tsvetko showed his pictures from the subway ride alongside matching faces from photos on VK, the Russian version of Facebook. He used a free app called FindFace to track down the matches.
The people he photographed found out about the project like everyone else: by seeing it in the media.
"As a person, I certainly felt some shame," the Russian photographer told Tech Insider via email when asked why he exposed the identities of people he'd never met. "But in this project, I try on the role of internet stalker."
Tsvetko's is far from the only example of FindFace making headlines in Russia.
One software developer used the app to find the names of two women he had taken a photo of six years ago. He called the experience "Shazam for people."
Members of Dvach, the Russian equivalent to 4chan, used FindFace to publicly expose, or "dox," the real identities of female Russian porn stars.
The creators of FindFace say their app has been downloaded over 600,000 times since February. People have performed over three million searches on the 100 million VK profiles with publicly-listed profile pictures. They claim a 70% success rate at finding matches.
While FindFace remains confined to Russia for now, the facial recognition powering the app may be the best in the world, and might spread as a result.
NTechLab, the small Moscow startup behind the technology in FindFace, beat competition from Beijing University and even Google's FaceNet algorithm at the University of Washington's 2015 "MegaFace" competition. (A Google spokesman declined to comment or discuss the company's facial recognition technology.)
FindFace's developers claim its algorithm can run on a small fraction of the servers required by competitors like Google. "We can work off commodity hardware and we don't need a big data center to use our technology," they say. NTechLab
In an interview with Tech Insider, NTechLab co-founders Alexander Kabakov and Artem Kukharenko said they've received over 300 queries about using their algorithm from businesses and government agencies in multiple countries, including the U.S. and China. They declined to name who specifically had reached out, or discuss any potential future partners.
"We want to cover all cameras across the world with facial recognition," said Kabakov, a philosophy major from Moscow State University who acts as NTechLab's marketing chief. "We see that we are leaders in this sphere."
Kabakov said his startup, which created the core facial recognition algorithm, will release an online platform this summer for any company that wants to use the same tech powering FindFace. He envisions NTechLab becoming the universal standard for facial recognition in the same way that Google dominates web search.
It's an interesting contrast from the approach of the big tech companies working on facial recognition. Google can let you search for faces and even specific breeds of dogs, but only in the Google Photos app. Facebook's Moments app scans photos on your phone, identifies faces, and asks you to share them with those people on Facebook. Apple's new Photos app in iOS 10 will be able to recognize faces, but it only works on Apple devices.
NTechLab, on the other hand, wants to work everywhere.
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