The news that facial recognition software is to be made freely available to web developers has raised concerns about the pervasive nature of the internet and the threat it poses to people's privacy.
The latest scare story concerns Face.com, a company that has developed a method of identifying people in videos and photographs that it claims is 90 per cent accurate. It works by measuring the arrangement of features such as eyes, nose and mouth.
Although the company is not new, it only made its Photo Finder software feely available recently - and it already claims that 5,000 developers are using it.
The concern is that users will be able to gather information about people armed with only a single photograph of them. Indeed, they do not even need to know the identity of the person in the photograph before they start searching the web for the subject's details.
Gil Hirsch, Face.com's chief executive officer, explained: "You can basically search for people in any photo. You could search for family members on Flickr, in newspapers, or in videos on YouTube."
Of course, the main concern is that people will not search for family members at all. Employers could use it to check up on the extramural activities of their staff, for example. And while the practice of 'Googling' people has become relatively common, the facial recognition aspect takes it a stage further.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/67597,news-comment,technology,face-recognition-software-raises-internet-privacy-concerns-facebook-facecom
http://face.com/
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