Face search engine will let anyone find every picture of you on the Internets...

New Scientist: "A search engine that uses sophisticated facial recognition to allow users to identify and find people in online images will launch next month. But civil liberties groups say the biometric-style tool could compromise the privacy of anyone who has their picture online."


Yikes. And people have called us paranoid for years because we chose not to be in photographs or put our mugs on the Internets... Nice search tool for stalkers, ID thieves and governments.. Not to mention blackmailers. Or employers who want to pre-screen candidates for 'youthful indiscretions'..

Come to think of it, this is a huge risk to undercover officers, CIA or other covert operatives... Take a picture of someone who's past or loyalty or identity may be suspect, post it to the web, then run a cross index for every photo of this person -- turning up any family photos (and in the process, identifying family members), further leveraging any surrounding ID or metadata to suss out the real identity of the individual in question... This could go very dark very quickly.

It's like a huge internet-wide social network that you can't opt out of.

The idea's out there now (and was originally developed for governments), but it should still die a fiery death on principal.