InformationWeek noted that the inventors listed on the patent application include "David Petrou, Andrew Rabinovich, and Adam Hartwig" who also worked on Google Goggles. It seems as though Google is close to reaching its goal of incorporating facial recognition into visual searches, but Google is certainly not the only company with big plans to utilize facial recognition searches.
The Interpreter suggested other applications like Viewdlw, with mobile facial recognition on the fly, might help "government stalkers." Viewdle allows users to tag and save "faceprints" of people, and "then share the faceprint of them with other Viewdle users so they can recognize that person too!" The photosharing privacy settings are integrated with Facebook privacy settings.
Some people may have no privacy issues with visual searches that use facial recognition,GHD Purple but there are plenty of people concerned about protecting privacy. For instance, when you leave your house and go out and about, do you wear a name tag out in public or at the mall as a constant visual aide for anyone and everyone to identify you? That seems a bit over the top to me, but isn't that similar to tagging a photo with a person's name and then that image becoming face search fodder? Wearing a name tag at all times in public is a personal choice, but there isn't much choice if someone else chooses to tag you in an image.
Dictators and governments are already identifying people based upon real names and photos posted in social media. CNN published an interview with examples of when the Internet might help a dictator such as Facebook requiring people to use their real name as opposed to pseudonyms. GHD Clearance Another example was after the Iranian protests were over in 2009, the government went through Flickr and collected photos of protesters, published those pictures on government websites and then circled unknown faces in red ink.
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