Originally published January 24 2006
New facial recognition service may jeopardize privacy
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Announcing the debut of a technology that can recognize and match facial images, Riya has potentially undermined many privacy guards by making it easier for people to find photos online.
It's a timely development, because new facial-recognition technology is moving us toward surveillance that is unnoticeable, distributed, persistent, searchable and cheap.
Circuit Court columnist Jennifer Granick Circuit Court A great example of the state of the art comes from a new company called Riya, which recently launched a beta facial-recognition service for the masses.
With billions of bits of information out there, finding what you want is impossible without good search tools, and there hasn't been a really good way to search multimedia files like photos, video and sound.
A common current practice, used by photo sites like Flickr, is to encourage users to tag photos, and then allow text searches of those tags.
Subscribers upload photos, and then tell the Riya software who the person is.
By repeatedly running the recognition algorithm against multiple photos of the same person, Riya software eventually learns to identify other images of the same face.
Once trained, the software will automatically generate meta tags, and users can search their own photos and the photos of other subscribers.
The service currently only searches photos uploaded to its servers.
The technology could, however, be deployed across the internet, allowing people to search the web, Flickr, Tribe and Friendster photo sets, regardless of whether the owner or the person photographed wants to be identified.
Mothers could search MySpace.com and find pictures of their children at a party when they were supposed to be studying at a friend's house.
Insurers could search and find a photo of a customer bungee-jumping, and raise the daredevil's premiums.
I predict that the tool will be invaluable to former (and future) boyfriends and girlfriends checking up on lovers.
In the analog days, when you left your house, there was always a possibility that you might run into someone who would remember what you were doing, and tell anyone who cared enough to ask.
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