Finding Faces

There was an interesting article in the Guardian recently about the current state of face recognition technology. Imagine being able to ask a Google-like service to search through the images on the internet for a face that matches yours, or somewhat more worryingly, a face that matches someone who you are trying to track down. The privacy implications strike me as being of concern. If you want to try this out for yourself, then a Swedish company – Polar Rose – is offering a beta to plug into your browser. I note that Google has also bought a company specialising in image recognition last year, so something similar may be being worked on there.