Photographer Uses Face Recognition Software To Find Public Photos Of Strangers He Shot On The Subway

"Your Face is Big Data," is a smart but also slightly scary project by Russian photographer Egor Tsvetkov. In order to show how easy it is for complete strangers to gather information about you, Egor spent six weeks taking around 100 pictures of subway commuters in St Petersburg before using a facial recognition app called FindFace to track down their internet profiles.

He used open source software to scan the 55 million plus users of VKontakte, Russia's biggest social network, and despite some of his photographs bearing little resemblance to their online pictures, Egor was (rather alarmingly) able to find around 70% of the people he snapped. “My project is a clear illustration of the future that awaits us if we continue to disclose as much about ourselves on the internet as we do now,” he said. In an age where people are using social media more than ever, perhaps it's time we started to think about how much information we really want to share with the world.