‘Come on then, get on with it.’ Charles had skipped an appointment with his personal trainer for this. It was 23 December, a Monday, and everyone else at Gravitas had finished for the holidays the week before. The office was silent except for the hum of the servers. ‘Show me what this app can do.’
Zack was excited. For years, he had been trying to persuade Charles that they needed to move into software, and Charles had always been hesitant, telling him that if he came up with something brilliant he might consider investing in it. Up to this point, everything Zack had showed him had been pooh-poohed, but he was certain Charles wouldn’t be as dismissive of this. He couldn’t be.
‘I need a photo of a person,’ Zack said. ‘I could use your picture, but you’re well known so it won’t have the same impact. Half the people in the office have pictures of loved ones on their desks. Can you choose one at random? Not a child.’
Begrudgingly, with an air that his time was being wasted, Charles went around the office until he found a photo of amiddle-aged woman on the desk of one of the marketing managers. The man’s wife, presumably; an ordinary-looking woman with light brown hair cut in a bob and a gap between her teeth.
‘Perfect.’
Zack opened the app– currently in its developmental phase– and positioned his phone over the photo, waiting for it to scan.
It beeped, and he said, ‘Now watch.’
The wordProcessingappeared above the woman’s photo. Zack knew Charles wouldn’t have time to ask any annoying questions because the app was so fast, and three seconds later, the results appeared.
‘Abigail Young,’ he read. ‘Fifty-two years old. Works in the planning department of Birmingham Council, married to Steve Young– that’s whose desk you took this from– and has two children, Frank and Grace. She went to Bartley Green secondary school, and her main interests are, hmm, let me see. She’s a member of a book group, her favourite band is Take That, and she loves dogs. There’s a lot more here. I have her address, email and phone number. I can also tell you that she attended her work Christmas party at the Distillery near Brindleyplace last Tuesday, and that she and Grace are going to see Lana Del Rey at Anfield next summer.’
He handed the phone to Charles, who put his reading glasses on and scrolled down. As Zack had hoped, he seemed impressed. A little stunned.
‘These are the most recent online photos of her,’ Zack said. ‘Look, there she is at her Christmas party. Her colleague Mandy posted it on Facebook.’
‘I think I need new glasses,’ Charles said. He was acting like Zack had just performed a party trick, not quite getting it yet. ‘I can’t see her.’
Trying not to sound impatient, Zack double-tapped the picture with his finger. ‘There she is.’
She was at the back of a group photo, her head turned away, half in shadow.
‘I can hardly tell that’s her,’ Charles said.
‘I know. But the app can. That’s one of the things that’s most remarkable about it. It doesn’t need a clear photo. It can identify people if they’re in profile, if they’re wearing sunglasses or face masks, whatever. It can pick people out of massive crowd shots. For example, when she goes to that Lana Del Rey concert, if someone posts a photo of the crowd and she’s in it and in focus, even if she’s twenty rows back, it will pick her out.’
Zack could see Charles thinking. But it wasn’t quite sinking in yet. This was not a magic trick.
‘Choose another photo,’ Zack said.
Charles returned Abigail’s picture to Steve’s desk and, this time, came back with a photo of an elderly woman. Someone’s mum. Zack ran it through the app and the results came back in seconds.
‘Bindiya Patil. Born in Maharashtra, India, in 1950. Moved to the UK when she was twenty-three.’ He showed Charles the rest of the results, including photos of Bindiya at a wedding back in the autumn. ‘Want to try another?’
Charles was silent for a moment. He finally seemed to be grasping it.
‘So this is some kind of search engine.’
‘Exactly.’ Zack had that tingle. The sense that he was on the precipice of something amazing. ‘A search engine for faces. You can show it the face of anyone who has ever appeared online and it will find them.’
Charles was still holding Zack’s phone, staring at the pictures of Bindiya and the screed of information below.
‘I assume you’re going to tell me how it works.’
‘Of course. It searches a huge internal database of photos and information. Every picture a person has posted of him or herself, as well as those they’ve been tagged in, or where their name is on the caption. It’s incredibly clever. It can even figure out the relationships between people, create networks based on family connections, professional links, friendship groups. It searches online posts and news stories and any public database, like the Companies House site, or Directory Enquiries.’
‘The whole internet.’
‘Pretty much. I mean, there are certain walls it can’t go behind. We’re not stupid enough to try to get past government security barriers, but we don’t need to. There are a lot of private companies that use face recognition now. Banks, phone companies, any website that uses facial scanning for age verification. You know the porn sites are going to have to do that soon.’ He smiled. ‘It’s astonishing how much information people put online about themselves. All the social media posts, the forum chats, the employee sites– then add all the news stories and review sites and payment platforms. Almost everyone can be found online, either through stuff they’ve posted themselves or things other people have posted about them.’
Charles was beginning to look irritated. ‘You’re talking to me as if the internet is a new invention. Gravitas had one of the first e-commerce sites in the UK. I was a dotcom pioneer when people thought the worldwide web was an international network of spiders.’
How many times had Zack had to pretend to laugh at that joke? He cleared his throat.
