Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 September 2008 13:50
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Trouble is, there's nothing to stop a friend or colleague from identifying you in a photo, and from then on you're known to Polar Rose. And once you're in the database, you're in it for keeps. Even if users delete their accounts, "information that [they] have posted to photos will remain in the Polar Rose database."
So far, Polar Rose has incorporated more than 38 million photos and nearly a quarter of a million people.
But Google's incorporation of 'name tags' into Picasa Web Albums (using technology acquired when the company absorbed Neven Vision) moves this concept into a vastly larger arena.
I couldn't quickly determine the number of photos that have been uploaded to Picasa, but the pool is said to be growing by 7 million a day, so presumably we're talking about hundreds of millions, maybe a billion-pls images by now.
Fortunately, Picasa's default setting is to keep name tags private, and if you do decide to share them only the nickname (typically the person's first name, or titles such as Mum or Granny) you've associated with the face.
But I'm still left with an uncomfortable feeling about the privacy implications. Even if normal users only see their own tags, you're left wondering whether there's any provision for extending recognition between albums.
Such a capability would be a simple way of establishing guilt by association, especially when combined with metadata such as the date, time and location at which a photo was taken. Maybe that's just paranoia, but most cameras apply a time and date stamp, and Google encourages its users to geotag their photos by using Google Earth even if their cameras don't include GPS capability.
What's in it for Google? Please
read on.
