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
Last fall I had the pleasure of participating in a “Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search engine” hosted by the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands. My talk at that event outlined…
Read More Audiovisual Search: Regulatory Challenges for Audiovisual Abundance
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…
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…
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