Wednesday 12 September 2012

Facial Recognition Software - Breaking Privacy Rules?

By Ed Green


Facial recognition software is absolutely nothing new and it has already been round for a while now, whilst we are seeing the uses of it escalating in our daily lives. From a webcam or mobile phone to CCTV's capturing your every single move, the future seems certain that the use of facial recognition is not only here to stay but will be utilized progressively more.

Face recognition is actually a innovative software program that captures the biometrics of one's face and also keeps it within a database, quite similar to getting a finger print taken.

Face recognition is borderline between right and wrong. On one hand it is sophisticated software which has great benefits such as security but on the contrary it also crosses a lot of privacy restrictions that to think about are frightening.

With all the social media sites already acquiring a lot of information related to all of us, just think with the fact that any sort of photo that gets published online can be traced back to you. The concept of privacy will no longer exist and this has serious implications.

For example, an individual takes a photograph of you without you noticing from their smart phone camera. They use a web application to scan your face and run this image online to search for matches. In no time at all they know your name, address and information.

They then can easily look through your social websites and sooner or later could easily obtain your own identification.

Facial recognition software is the here and now, not just the future.

Have you heard of faceprint? That is precisely what this software does. It's much like a finger print but alternatively assesses the face biometrics. After you have a faceprint then matches of you can be found everywhere online in the various databases.

It is not Total Recall, Minority Report or the future, it's taking place these days.

Obviously, there are much less frightening uses of face recognition. If anyone has ever bought an Apple Macbook you will observe a software known as iPhoto. Well do you know what? As soon as you've published a few pictures it's going to have you tag who is who from the photos.

Facebook uses facial recognition when you post pics and employ the tag option, these photos are now held online.

So if you're a Facebook user, no doubt there are pics of you not merely as part of your account but in many different directories. This presents you with many personal privacy issues mentioned previously above.

Face recognition is definitely here to stay, however the court is out whether or not this being employed by the large media companies is a great thing or not.

Use of the technology for security appears reasonable but over and above this it draws in huge privacy issues for the masses.




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