A recet article at the Modern Survival blog brings up the issue of privacy in an increasingly-connected world, technology that recognizes faces in real-time:
The latest is the ‘NameTag’ smartphone or Google Glass app, which enables a person to simply snap a picture of someone (purportedly who you want to connect with) and see their entire public online presence in one place… Everything about you…
Your most unique feature – your face, enables the real-time facial recognition technology to link your face to a single, unified online presence that includes your contact information, social media profiles, interests, and anything else which the app may discover about you based on your electronic footprints of online activities.
When someone passes you on the street (or anywhere), they don’t know who you are – unless they ask or already know. With this new technology they will apparently be able to discover all sorts of things about any stranger by simply pointing their smartphone at them (or apparently when wearing Google Glass or other such technology). So much for asking…
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/communications/vanishing-privacy-with-real-time-facial-recoginition
The idea that technology which can on one hand make the world a smaller place gives reason to be optimistic about the future, but privacy concerns might tarnish those advancements. New technologies need to continue to hold privacy at the front of efforts to digitize the analog world.
