If you think recently-unveiled products like the Facebook Timeline and Amazon's cloud-powered Silk Web browser have raised privacy issues, an innovation that lies just around the corner could blow them both out of the water.
Facial recognition technology has been around for decades, but until recently it's been slow, inefficient and largely limited to proprietary implementations, such as databases used by law enforcement. That could all be about to change, and the results are bound to send shivers down the spines of digital privacy advocates.
PittPatt, software developed at Carnegie Mellon University (and now owned by Google), is just one example of software that can quickly identify individuals in a photograph, matching their likeness with other images of them found online and then scouring the Web for other information about the person.
Facial recognition technology has been around for decades, but until recently it's been slow, inefficient and largely limited to proprietary implementations, such as databases used by law enforcement. That could all be about to change, and the results are bound to send shivers down the spines of digital privacy advocates.
PittPatt, software developed at Carnegie Mellon University (and now owned by Google), is just one example of software that can quickly identify individuals in a photograph, matching their likeness with other images of them found online and then scouring the Web for other information about the person.