Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a digital privacy and data ethics scholar at Marquette University
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…
Read More Google Acquires Like.com, and its Facial Recognition Technology
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.…
Read More Photo Finder: Automated Facial Recognition on Facebook
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…
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…
[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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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