The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported on the rapid development of facial recognition technology. While the increased availability of these robust features is something to celebrate, the privacy implications loom especially large. Combined with online photo storage services and a lack of meaningful limits on government or corporate access to data, facial recognition technology raises serious privacy concerns.

Last month, Google incorporated facial recognition technology in its online photo sharing service, Picasa. The new feature spares us the tedium of hand-tagging personal photos one by one. By analyzing the facial features of the people in your photos, Picasa identifies all the people in your photos for you. No one can deny the positive social benefits of these kinds of services— dozens of digital images filling our pictures folders are begging to be organized and shared. However, policymakers need to address the power of facial recognition technology in the hands of government or corporate snoopers.

What’s to stop a zealous prosecutor from searching the state’s digital database of driver’s license photos for people under 21 whose online Flickr photos show them engaged in underage drinking? What’s to stop an employer from doing the same with a photo taken by a video camera in the lobby of the building where you went for your job interview?

Legally, not much. To its credit, Google has built some important privacy features into Picasa; for example, users can only tag photos in their own account. However, there already are millions of photos available on the public web, through services like Flickr and social networking sites that are public or quasi-public. So far, the law has no rules on who can use those photos and for what purpose. Even if photos are in password protected accounts, government investigators may be a simple subpoena away from forcing the service provider to disclose the photos. In the absence of clear laws, companies offering photo storage services may comply with such subpoenas – or even a mere request from a government official claiming an urgent need.

The courts and legislators need to catch up, starting with a rule that digital photos stored online in a private account should have the same protection as photos stored at home in your closet. Taking advantage of new storage services shouldn’t come at the price of privacy.

The legal implications of personal photos published on publicly-available sites may be harder to deal with. Unfortunately for now we need to think twice about what we post publicly. You can no longer take comfort in the belief that only your friends will recognize you.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 7:02 pm and is filed under CDT, Consumer Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.