Michael Zimmer.org

It was confirmed last week that Google is acquiring Like.com, a visual search engine that focuses on helping people shop for clothing and accessories online. While most stories are spinning this as Google’s attempt to improve its product search engine and make inroads into the e-commerce marketplace, I see this acquisition differently.
It is important to realize that before Like.com was helping people find shoes and watches online, its technology was the core of Riya, a photo sharing and search site that allowed users to upload, tag and search images based …

Amateur facial recognition technology is coming to Facebook.
Face.com is launching a facial recognition application called Photo Finder to allow Facebook users to search their photos — and photos of their friends — to learn, recognize, and tag familiar faces. There are numerous stories on this launch (each seemingly building from the same press material, each magically offering 100 invites to the private alpha of the app), and the details can’t be confirmed, but essentially the app will scan all your photos and those in your social graph and automatically tag …

I’ve been ridiculously busy lately, and need to quickly catch up on some recent items of note:

Scientific American has a nice special issue dedicated to “the future of privacy.” Nothing new here for most privacy scholars, but it is a nice treatment of the issues that is approachable to those who don’t spend every breathing moment thinking about privacy and surveillance theory. (Also very good for undergraduate courses!)
Colorado Law School professor Paul Ohm has released an important new article on “The Rise and Fall of Invasive ISP Surveillance,” where he …

The ability for everyday users of search engines to query particular faces is creeping closer. Google OS reports that Google has (kind of quietly) added a feature to their Image Search service to restrict the results to people’s faces. For example, a basic search for “Zimmer” in Image Search provides varied results, ranging from the exotic car, pictures of rooms (sprechen zie Deutsch?), and some photos of people. But searching with the special characters “&imgtype=face” appended to the query results in nothing but faces (mine included).
It seems Google is starting …

[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz]
This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts on how the rise of so-called Web 2.0 technologies bear on privacy and surveillance studies. After presenting a few examples of unintended consequences of Web 2.0 that bear on privacy and surveillance, I will introduce the term “netaveillance,” which might provide a useful concept around which a more robust theory of …

Another facial recognition search engine product has launched – Polar Rose. This New Scientist Tech article notes some of the privacy concerns:
Polar Rose and future developments that make facial recognition available to the masses risk encroaching on people’s privacy, warns Yaman Akdeniz, director of the UK non-profit group Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties.
“Although this sounds like a great idea, I would not like to be searchable in this way, or so easily tracked without my consent,” says Akdeniz. The database compiled by Polar Rose is similar to the kind of biometric database …

Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal has an extensive look at how Google might leverage their acquisition of Neven Vision to help identify and inter-connect users’ various web products (blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc) that might not otherwise be shared under a common login. The conclusion:
…if social networking is the future of online communication and Google is going to use Social Network profile information to personalize their search engines, but does not have a way of identifying the owner of the profile on some social networks due to no …

In a quick follow-up to this speculation about Google using Gmail photos to build a facial recognition database, Google just announced they acquired Neven Vision, a company that develops technology to detect and recognize objects and persons in images. While Google is currently spinning this as a new way to help organize your photos (the software could automatically group all images on a hard drive with one’s ex-girlfriend’s face in it), it could also be integrated into their image search engine (to automatically find all images on the web with …

The Google Operating System blog reports that when uploading pictures for your contacts, Gmail will ask you to crop the picture, to separate the face of the person. The result? Google has a database of multiple images for a lot of people, along with their names, e-mail addresses, street addresses, phone numbers, and whatever else contact information you include.
Combined with Riya, where users have upoaded over 7 million personal photos to Riya’s servers and tagged and labeled the subject’s faces to be searchable via Riya’s facial recognition technology, we are …

A few months ago I blogged about Riya, a photo sharing and search site that lets you tag and search images based on facial recognition technology. Users have uploaded over 7 million personal photos to Riya’s servers and tagged and labeled the subject’s faces to be searchable via Riya’s facial recognition technology.
Now Riya is moving ahead by applying the same facial recognition technology (and the facial profiles already learned from those 7 million uploads) to all images found on the web. While they couch the benefits in terms of being …

My earlier musings on Web 2.0′s focus on the collection of (personal) metadata and the potential for the commercial aggregation of images of my likeness come into renewed focus with the launch of Riya (needs IE6 for PC; Firefox for Mac). Riya is a photo sharing and search site that lets you tag and search images based on facial and text recognition technology. Here’s how it works: you upload your photo library to Riya and “tag” the faces in your photos by putting a box around them and labelling it …

Today’s Colloquium on Information Technology & Society at NYU Law School featured talk by Jonathan Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on recent developments in facial recognition technologies and algorithms. Some of the results suggested that having more than one image of a subject in the database to compare to improved the accuracy and reliability of the system (which makes sense).
My concern with such a finding is that if the makers and users of facial recognition systems see a value in having multiple pictures of me …