The Leaky Nature of Online Privacy
The day when we all sport stress monitors is probably not looming. But we may already be unintentionally volunteering that information.
Recent research by Ming-Zher Poh, Daniel J. McDuff, and Rosalind Picard of that same Affective Computing Group has found that pulse information can be gleaned from a basic webcam. It turns out that blood changes the skin's color slightly with each pulse, in a way that can be recovered from a video signal using a technique called independent component analysis. Though the technology has not yet proven itself outside the lab, where controlled lighting conditions can make such analysis easier, it is not hard to imagine that pulse could be recoverable from video recordings of normal teleconferences. Pulse therefore joins the long list of information that we are leaking all the time over the Internet without really knowing it. It's clear at this point that anybody can take a photo of you and post it on the Internet; once it's there, it is nearly impossible to remove all copies. But increasingly, pattern recognition software has made it possible to learn about someone not based on what he has shared about himself but by examining what his friends have made public.