PogoWasRight.org

Menu
  • About
  • Privacy
Menu

The Future of Privacy: Facial Recognition, Public Facts, and 300 Million Little Brothers

Posted on June 12, 2010July 3, 2025 by Dissent

David Thompson, co-author of Wild West 2.0 (Amazon) and general counsel of ReputationDefender, blogged on The Volokh Conspiracy:

… facial recognition is quickly becoming available on a wide scale. For just one example, an application called Face.com allows Facebook users to use photo recognition to find their friends in photos (even if they have not been tagged, or if they have removed their tag). Using the tool, it’s often possible to find hundreds of untagged photos of your friends (or yourself) posted by other people.

The Face.com developers just released an API (programming interface) to allow other websites to use the same technology. So far, Face.com has restricted use of the technology to known faces, but nothing technological prevents them from using their database of hundreds of millions of Facebook photos to identify millions of people in public photos.

The results of just one company unleashing photo recognition on the Internet could be huge. There are more than 3 billion photos on the site Flickr.com , and billions more in the unstructured Web, on sites like Facebook, and in automated surveillance systems (every time you walk past a security camera, imagine your name being logged).

Read more on The Volokh Conspiracy.

No related posts.

Category: Online

Post navigation

← NC: Mandatory DNA Samples From Arrestees Would Flip Legal Principles
Privacy Settings on Social Networking Sites May Determine Protection Under Stored Communications Act →

Now more than ever

Search

Contact Me

Email: [email protected]

Mastodon: Infosec.Exchange/@PogoWasRight

Signal: +1 516-776-7756

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Australian law is now clearer about clinicians’ discretion to tell our patients’ relatives about their genetic risk
  • The ICO’s AI and biometrics strategy
  • Trump Border Czar Boasts ICE Can ‘Briefly Detain’ People Based On ‘Physical Appearance’
  • DeleteMyInfo Wins 2025 Digital Privacy Excellence Award from Internet Safety Council
  • TikTok Loses First Appeal Against £12.7M ICO Fine, Faces Second Investigation by DPC
  • German court offers EUR 5000 compensation for data breaches caused by Meta
  • How to Build on Washington’s “My Health, My Data” Act

RSS Recent Posts on DataBreaches.net

  • Back from the Brink: District Court Clears Air Regarding Individualized Damages Assessment in Data Breach Cases
  • Multiple lawsuits filed against Doyon Ltd over April 2024 data breach and late notification
  • Chinese hackers suspected in breach of powerful DC law firm
  • Qilin Emerged as The Most Active Group, Exploiting Unpatched Fortinet Vulnerabilities
  • CISA tags Citrix Bleed 2 as exploited, gives agencies a day to patch
©2025 PogoWasRight.org. All rights reserved.