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 on facial recognition technology. Users simply uploaded their photo library to Riya, tag faces in a handful of the photos, and then Riya’s facial recognition technology took over and attempt to automatically tag different faces it “recognizes” so that you don’t have to. Riya’s vision was to expand this facial recognition beyond an individual’s library, and eventually reach every digital photo scattered across the Web.

Over 4 years ago, I wrote about the privacy implications of Riya’s facial recognition technology here and here. I warned then:

Sure, it would be great if I could easily search for pictures of me on the web, but do I want others to be able to do that as well? Could this provide a useful tool for stalkers looking for a particular person? Abusive partners trying to track down their victim? (Note that Riya also uploads and indexes all the metadata related to your photos, including the date and time is was taken, when it was uploaded, etc. Users can also tag and search photos based on location). …there are externalities once all of the images of our daily lives (and their related metadata) are uploaded to the Internet, indexed, searchable, and accessible to all.

Google almost bought Riya back in 2006, but acquired Neven Vision instead, and soon integrated basic facial recognition into its image search results, and, later, into Picasa and Orkut.

With the purchase of Like.com, Google obtains the original Riya technology. Coupled with other recent social networking related acquisitions, Google appears poised to make a run at Facebook, with Riya providing the means to automate photo tagging at a scale Riya could only have dreamed of. What remains to be seen is how carefully Google will consider the privacy implications of unleashing powerful face recognition technology on throngs of users.

Following up on this discussion, the Institute of Information Law at the University of Amsterdam are holding an Expert Workshop on”Audiovisual Search: Regulatory Challenges for Audiovisual Abundance” on April 12, 2008:

In an environment with unlimited amounts of information available on open platforms such as the internet, the availability or accessibility of audiovisual content is becoming less of an issue than in the past . The real question is how to find the information about audiovisual content and the content itself. Electronic programming guides are one way to find information. But in an internet environment, search engines are becoming the most important gateway used to find content.

The workshop will discuss both programming guides and search engines. What are their limitations, what kind of new developments can be expected. In particular, the regulatory environment will be assessed: at present, both electronic programming guides and search engines fall largely outside the scope of (tele-)communications and media regulation. In the open online environment of the Internet everyone can easily publish audiovisual content. The developing technology of audiovisual search will increasingly define how we will navigate the emerging audiovisual landscape. The proposed multi-stranded approach of this expert workshop offers a unique opportunity to gain further insights into relevant questions and to provide additional input for law- and policy-makers, as well as industry players and civil society interest groups.

I have been asked by IViR to lead a discussion on the ethical dimensions of audiovisual search, especially as they relate to privacy and user profiling. (See, for example, my posts on Riya, Polar Rose, and Google’s plans to monitor ambient sounds). It should be an exciting event.

UPDATE: My presentation from the Workshop can be downloaded here (1.9 MB PDF).

UPDATE 2: An article version of my talk has been published in a special issue of the European Audiovisual Observatory’s journal, Iris: “Searching for Audiovisual Content“

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 creeping closer and closer to a user-created, user-supported, and user-identified database of images of the population. The increased aggregation and tagging of my image has value externalities that have yet to be fully theorized. As I’ve warned before:

Sure, it would be great if I could easily search for pictures of me on the web, but do I want others to be able to do that as well? Could this provide a useful tool for stalkers looking for a particular person? Abusive partners trying to track down their victim? (Note that Riya also uploads and indexes all the metadata related to your photos, including the date and time is was taken, when it was uploaded, etc. Users can also tag and search photos based on location). …there are externalities once all of the images of our daily lives (and their related metadata) are uploaded to the Internet, indexed, searchable, and accessible to all.

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 able to search for particular fabric patterns of rugs online (yawn), such a service is much more likely to be used to find more pictures of a person’s face you saw on MySpace or Flickr, or of an ex-girlfriend you’re trying to track down. As I warned before:

Sure, it would be great if I could easily search for pictures of me on the web, but do I want others to be able to do that as well? Could this provide a useful tool for stalkers looking for a particular person? Abusive partners trying to track down their victim? (Note that Riya also uploads and indexes all the metadata related to your photos, including the date and time is was taken, when it was uploaded, etc. Users can also tag and search photos based on location). …there are externalities once all of the images of our daily lives (and their related metadata) are uploaded to the Internet, indexed, searchable, and accessible to all.

[via Search Engine Watch]

From Riya’s vision statement:

Riya is more than photo search. Our goal is to help you find every photo of yourself on the web. We want to help you recover every moment, every place you’ve been and all of the people you’ve met along the way. We want to give you the tools to discover your future, every place you want to go and meet new friends. We will be successful when we can find every digital photo in the world.

In essence, Riya aims to create a vast database of facial recognition profiles. Sure, it would be great if I could easily search for pictures of me on the web, but do I want others to be able to do that as well? Could this provide a useful tool for stalkers looking for a particular person? Abusive partners trying to track down their victim? (Note that Riya also uploads and indexes all the metadata related to your photos, including the date and time is was taken, when it was uploaded, etc. Users can also tag and search photos based on location).

I don’t want to be alarmist, but there are externalities once all of the images of our daily lives (and their related metadata) are uploaded to the Internet, indexed, searchable, and accessible to all. I haven’t had time to fully consider this new trend, but it deserves serious attention.