Face.com has launched a new Facebook application called Photo Finder - it's a face recognition application designed to tag pictures of you and your friends fast. It's still in beta mode, so it's not available to the general public yet, but it's treading on scary, big brother territory here.
Once a person uploads the app, it automatically scans not just your own pictures, but the pictures of each and every one of your friends. When the scan is done, it sends you a list of ALL photos you're in, which you can then choose to auto-tag yourself in or not.
According to Mashable, "Face.com seems to have an ambitious goal: to complete the picture social graph. No person left untagged, no photo left by in digital space, and every person in every picture tagged and sorted."
While I think this is convenient and fast, the issue of privacy comes up. Right now it doesn't seem to be too invasive, but think about how it's going to change and progress in a few months time.
Say you download the PhotoFinder app, are out at a bar with some friends and see an attractive person, lets call them Pat, across the room. You take a picture of your friends, with Pat conveniently in the background. You go home, upload the pics to Facebook. If Pat has PhotoFinder too, will that mean they automatically get tagged too? Which means that you could essentially find out who anyone was if they have this app.
This is where the big brother, creep factor comes in. Stalking people would be so easy. Seriously, would you want someone to be able to take a picture of you without your knowledge, upload it to Facebook and then, thanks to facial recognition software, know who you are? As of right now, it seems the app scans only your friends' faces, but still. The potential for this to be abused is high. Maybe I'm just reading way to much into this.
Mashable said it best: "PhotoFinder is a reminder that anything you or your friends put on the Internet is public domain and will probably be found one way or another."
via Mashable
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