Manthan

There was a lot of hype about Riya being acquired by Google etc. Well facial recognition stuff is cool, but I couldn’t really understand where I could put it to use, beyond the initial curiosity factor. I imagined there is not much sense in looking up / search for celebrities using this software and for the people(family) you know, one would like to keep details private. That was until, I was playing six degrees of separation online. One of the questions has three faces which I couldn’t recognize. So I picked up my heritage and uploaded the photo, and viola it showed up the name of the celebrity I was searching. It sounded so very cool to begin with. Now imagine this, say Google or Yahoo comes up with a similar face recognition engine and create a database for that purpose. Say Yahoo picks up all the snaps from Flickr and uses the tagging built around it to give names to those faces. So next time you want to stalk that waitress you fancied at a restaurant or a co-passenger on a flight , all you gotta do is to grab her mugshot using a cellphone. Look up that picture on riya or myheritage or flickr and you have a name to the face. Do a bit of googling further in Blogs, forums, social networking sites and you know the persons interests , email ID , chat ID etc. End of any kind of privacy as we know it. This one is not just the government, but anybody determined to gather your private information.

Update : PCWorld’s Harry McCracken comments about Riya from Demo conference in Phoenix.

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