Face Search Engine Raises Privacy Concerns

holy_calamity writes "Startup Polar Rose is in the news today after announcing it will soon launch a service that uses facial recognition software, along with collaborative input, to identify and find people in photos online. But such technology has serious implications for privacy, according to two UK civil liberties groups. Will people be so keen to put their lives on Flickr once anyone from ID thieves to governments can find out their name, and who they associate with?"

Re:pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a facial. Turn off safe search and do a google image search of it sometime. Just make sure your mom/wife/girlfriend/pastor isn't looking over your shoulder at the time.

Unless they're into that kind of thing.

Re:The end of protest?

[pluther]

Photographing people at public events for intimidation purposes has been around for a long time before this technology was even conceived.

The FBI used to do it back in the 60's, when cameras used film. I'm unaware of any of the images actually ever being used, but the threat was obvious: we know who you are. Even if, of course, they didn't.

Didn't stop the protestors then, either. Just pissed a bunch of people off, and had a lot of people jumping in front of the cameras and shouting their names and addresses at them: Now you really know who I am, and that I'm not afraid of you.

already done

[Anonymous Coward]

www.alltefaces.com already does this, and is currently online

Diamond

[awolbach]

An open source version of a content-based image search engine is already available in the Carnegie Mellon-Intel joint research project called Diamond. (http://diamond.cs.cmu.edu/) It has a facial recognition application called SnapFind which can already perform arbitrary face matching and other filtering (given the image data), and it is available for free. Disclaimer: I work on Diamond, which has many other applications than this, and thought it was appropriate to post.