Facebook, Facial recognition and YOU. Europe safe for now, America sold out.

Originally posted by avriel
It's not only Facebook using this software. Take a look at Googles Picasa software. It allows you to name the faces in all of your photographs and then after a few dozen times of naming a person it starts making educated guesses and suggesting matches for that person in other photographs. I had a few thousand photographs on an external hard drive and it only took a matter of hours to name every person in them. I recently scanned all of my wifes grandfathers photographs onto the hard drive and this software began accurately naming baby photographs taken in the 1930's and 40's of people that it had only named previously in their adult years.
Now If you have tried Googles image search online you will realise how powerful that search is, you can upload a photo and it will tell you, pretty accurately where that picture appears online. The Picasa software allows you to upload your photos onto googles own photo storage space with the information of the tagged people retained. How much of a jump would it be to implement a facial recognition search into Google image search ? once they have enough images of a named person on their servers it wouldn't be hard to then trawl the net and pick out other images that contain that persons face.
I have an image of a friend taken in the upper tiers of Wembley stadium prior to a Muse Concert, Picasa wanted me to name every single face visible on the photograph (thousands of them). Imagine if I had a huge server with millions of faces tagged and stored on it ? I would then know that those people were in a certain place at a certain time on a certain date and those people would not have even been aware of a photo being taken.

Imagine being questioned by the police and being asked if you was at a certain place at a certain date and time five years ago and you can't remember where you was on that date. They could then turn to you and say "Well you are in the background of this photograph taken by a Japanese tourist in that place and at that time. They uploaded it to "X" site after their vacation and a quick Google search easily identified you"

Scary thought!

I can add it will go even further ... relating you and your friends (via facebook or other social blog) everytime everywhere theres a picture or a reference to you.. it can literally (one day?!) know every step you make ... even before you take the step...(minory report.. thing!?)

btw there's cameras everywhere... even on Tv set's...

Person of Interest series ... start's to make even more sense... just saying

edit: I'm not afraid of this... I've nothing to hide..