Here’s an interesting post on Slashdot about a Face Search engine.

I’ve had this thought before. We’re about to become a nation of cameras, where public privacy is a thing of the past, as the ability to become lost in a crowd itself become slowly lost in the crowd of surveillance devices. But what if we all had access to these devices? What if the public in general is (as it should rightfully be) given the data? This assures the population that Big Brother simply can’t use the surveillance for anything it likes, and allows interesting technology to be built, such as Face Search. Want to know where your children are? Search them.

Don’t want to be searched? Who want to bet someone comes out with an obfuscation method to fool CC cameras? Something wearable, something small, something that would blur their face out. Like encryption for your image.

(As a side note, this is generally what happens: a massive hole opens up in our right to privacy, and someone comes along and fills it with a clever tool.)

In any case, something like this is going to happen eventually. The usefulness of ten million networked cameras is going to eventually overcome the cost of networking them. As storage becomes more plentiful and less expensive, I think we’ll find ourselves storing petabytes upon petabytes of camera data somewhere or other. And Google or Yahoo or Ask is going come along and index that material.

I’m not much for prognostication, but this one seems pretty straightforward. One day you will be able to find someone’s whereabouts with your browser. Maybe you’ll even be able to trace their path not only at the present moment, but in time. Essentially, 4D People Search.

So, what do you think. Good outweighs bad? Would you like to see something like this happen?

Tags: geekery