Picasa Rolls Out 3.0 — Now With Facial Recognition 243
eldavojohn writes "If you use Picasa (Google's photo sharing site), they have upgraded to 3.0 and are purportedly offering facial recognition. That's right, why tag photos of your friends when the software will group similar faces together for you? There's a new list of features including repairing old photographs by touching them up and even writing on your images. As expected, not everyone is 'ok' with Google automatically recognizing you in pictures."
Families (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering that members of a family typically bear a very strong resemblance to one another (with identical twins being the extreme case), I would think this would be one of the tougher trials for a facial recognition algorithm.
If you don't like Google doing it you won't like.. (Score:3, Interesting)
the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has been spending millions and possibly billions [boston.com] on face recognizing cameras for cities around the nation.
It wouldn't be too difficult for the DHS to take the information from google and incorporate it in their own databases.
I'm confused... (Score:2, Interesting)
How is this not a violation of basic data protection laws in numerous jurisdictions (like, say, pretty much all of Europe)?
This is the curse of social networking sites generally: you don't have to be the person providing personal information about yourself, because chances are your well-meaning friends will do it for you.
Please bring out Mac support (Score:4, Interesting)
God I hope this works... (Score:2, Interesting)
My wife is:
1) a shutterbug
2) a packrat
3) totally disorganized
the ability to type in "find R3.0" and have it come up with all the pics of my son would make my life a lot easier.
Re:Google Earth integration. (Score:1, Interesting)
Remember that time,,,,? Did anyone take pics? If there was any pics, did someone post them on the internet? Maybe your boss will let you know,,,,maybe the police will,,,maybe your parent(s) will,,,maybe your wife ( or her lawyer ) will,,,
How does that old ethics line go: "it is not whether or not we can, but whether or not we should"? Double application here?
So true (yes, this is a 'me too' post) (Score:4, Interesting)
I was watching a Dr. Phil show by chance about a week back that dealt with some girls posting questionable pictures of themselves (not naked, just.. plastered) on their Facebook/whatever, and discussing how that might impact their (future) lives - with one employer type guy saying that he will check you out on the internet and if he were to find stuff like that, not consider you for a job.
So Dr. Phil and some 'expert' went on to say that posting pictures like that is not good, blablabla; the same stuff parents would tell their children, I guess.
But what Anonymous Brave Guy mentioned was not even touched upon in the program; yes, it's stupid if you publish those pictures yourself, but what are you gonna do if somebody -else- posts those pictures?
Yes, you can ask them to take them down... maybe they will, maybe they won't.. in the latter case you might ask Facebook.. who may take them down, or not.. in the latter case you might have to sue, etc. But even if your friend does take them down... a friend of theirs may have already copied it to -their- facebook page. In no time, it can be in a hundred random places on the internet... and that employer-type guy is going to find it and not hire you. So what are you going to do against that? Check if anybody's taking pictures while you're plastered? Good luck doing that when every cellphone has a camera these days. Only get plastered while in a private setting? Most of these pictures -are- from private parties.
I guess the answer is "don't get plastered". Sadly, that means "Don't do anything whatsoever that, while innocuous, may be interpreted in such a way by other people as to form a negative opinion of you either personally or professionally". A boring life that'll be.
Back to the topic at hand; protecting your own privacy is all good and well, but in the end, if others are allowed to talk about you in the forum of a billion people that is the internet, you're bound to be screwed one way or another.
Re:Families (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It recognizes *faces* (Score:3, Interesting)
"Guess we need to drop all of the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories from the Oscars. Let the men and woman both fight it our for the single Best Actor award...:
What would be wrong with that? Shorten the damned ceremony up a bit.
Re:I'm confused... (Score:4, Interesting)
Strawman, much?
Most of the civilised world has basic privacy protections. If the US doesn't, then in the age of the Internet, the US needs to be penalised by everyone else until it does. This is no different to the way the US itself leans on other nations to protect its own interests. Related things are already happening, with increasing numbers of European businesses explicitly forbidding service providers from storing data in or routing data via the US because of legal and regulatory concerns.
Either this sort of harmonisation with basic rights protected by worldwide law happens, or sooner or later the Internet probably becomes fragmented into more localised parts with more consistent legal environments. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, IMHO: just like any other international agreements, if you want to play with the others, you have to play nice.
they read my post to /. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think they read my post...
I made a comment to this article about "Computer Scientists Scour Your Holiday Photos"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/18/1323224 [slashdot.org]
and here's my post:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=587635&cid=23843099 [slashdot.org]
Re:Google Earth integration. (Score:3, Interesting)