The Atlantic reported on the Google’s “‘Big Tent’ Conference on internet privacy”where Eric Schmidt made a speech about new innovations in Facial Recognition. The Atlantic reports “the ‘surprising accuracy’ of new facial recognition technology “very concerning,” Schmidt said it was ‘unlikely’ that Google would develop a database with the ability to recognize people’s faces. ‘Some company is going to cross that line,’ he added”. Then the Atlantic went on to report that even though the chairman of Google is denouncing the use of facial recognition, Google has filed for two patent in the past year having to do with it’s “facial recognition search system”
Rumor is Facebook is also working on a similar program no patents are yet filed, but there are serious movement into the technology of facial recognition. There might be a reconsideration on the behalf of Google’s part but as Schmidt said some company is going “to cross the line” whether it be Facebook or any other tech corp it has the potential to create a lot of invasion on the people’s privacy.
No longer will you have to be tagged on Facebook by your friends to see what photos you’ve been in, Facebook will be able to do that for you and your friends. Your future employer able to find all those pictures you tried to hide, facial recognition leads to this and it’s being developed.
Facebook certainly has gotten better at this. Before you had to tag the faces, then facebook could recognize what IS a face. Now it even knows friends for you and will add their tag automatically. It’s become a concise database of not just your personal information, but what you look like. A facebook computer or tablet that unlocks or logs in by facial recognition is not unthinkable. Passwords can be a continual problem as they’re hard to keep track of and it’s not safe to just use the same password for every log in. Perhaps some sort of biometrics or facial recognition software combined with the idea of an internet “ID” can become the new login system for certain applications.
It’s unnerving to think a computer “knows” what you look like. But as far as I know, facebook privacy settings can prevent people from seeing pictures of you if you don’t want them to. It’s something that individuals need to stay on top of.