With various social sites now worth billions of dollars, it’s quite conceivable that social media will become the new “tobacco” with regards to lobbying, political contributions and strong-arming. Is it me or does it seem that most of the legislation designed to protect privacy tends to get pushed under stacks of Libyan turkey jerky appropriations requests.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that these online businesses who haven’t much of an income stream must get their billion dollar valuations from somewhere, and that somewhere is being able to develop incredible databases filled with valuable information, based on almost everything you do, say, buy or download online. Today’s online businesses are much like Santa Claus where they dole out so many gifts for free, but just like St. Nick, it seems that they know when you’ve been sleeping. They when you’re awake. They know when you’ve been bad or good.
I’ve attended several conferences and trade shows the past couple of years that have featured a number of concerns working with programs that do photographic recognition. For example, I have a nifty app on my Droid that lets me take a picture of something and then it will fish around on the internet to find similar photos or corresponding information, perhaps to help identify an object, find out where it could be purchased, etc.
I’ve also seen some interesting work being done that takes this technology and kicks it up a notch for facial recognition. We’ve been seeing this in spy movies for a few years now, but it looks like it’s going to be real world and real time pretty soon. Imagine being able to take a picture of somebody and then cast it to the 4 corners of the world wide web, whereby in a mere matter of seconds you are able to identify who the person is and have a plethora of their personal information at your fingertips.
What an excellent tool for stalkers and pedophiles. Oh it has other applications, such as you taking a picture of the stranger you woke up next to in order to discover their name. It’s so much more civil than routing around in a purse or wallet for a driver’s license.
The funny thing is that facial recognition is already happening online en masse. Over 500 million people are participating in one particular program and it seems that few even know about it. It’s being brought to you by your friends at Facebook, who encourage you to read their terms of service every 7 hours and to check your privacy settings at least twice a day.Facebook has already used this technology to tag several hundred million photographs.Upload a photo and Facebook will alert you when they think the photo contains pictures of your friends, then you are able to tag the photos with their names.
Rights advocates are likening this program to the Orwellian “Big Brother” state. Although given the way rights have eroded in the past few years, Orwell’s world may be more like a utopia than where it seems we could be headed. The program may already be violating one or more of the EU’s privacy laws, which tend to be a tad stronger than in the U.S. In the U.S., we’re not sure what to do with things like this.
But take heart, if you are on Facebook and care about such matters, you can opt out. So, if you don’t want to take part in this voyeuristic conundrum, you can open up Facebook, go to your privacy settings, click on Customize Settings. Then where it says “Things Others Share”, click on Edit Settings and disable “Suggest Photos of Me to Friends”
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