As I touched on my first blog, privacy is a huge concern for consumers, especially on social networks, who have an enormous amount of information on any average user.
We talked before about data-mining, and how the information posted on social networks could be extremely valuable for consumers to target users and learn more about a demographic.
A brilliant article in Newsweek underlined the goal of companies like Google and Facebook:
"These companies will never stop trying to chip away at our information. Their entire business model is based on the notion of "monetizing" our privacy. To succeed they must slowly change the notion of privacy itself—the "social norm," as Facebook puts it—so that what we're giving up doesn't seem so valuable."
Today I wanted to talk about a feature on Facebook called "Facial Recognition" and what it means for advertisers and what kind of information it can give us. About a month ago, Facebook announced that it would be implementing this new technology which learns about the facial characteristics of a user and after a while is able to recognize that persons face in most posted pictures.
As stated by Sarah Purewall in PCWorld.com,
"Facial recognition technology will ultimately culminate in the ability to search for people using just a picture. And that will be the end of privacy as we know it--imagine, a world in which someone can simply take a photo of you on the street, in a crowd, or with a telephoto lens, and discover everything about you on the internet."
I don't know about other people, but I am scared about the potential of this technology. To be sure, for advertisers and governmental agencies, this technology will be a god-send. For the average user, however, I think this is borderline dangerous, and can be easily manipulated to invade the privacy of consumers.
It is interesting to note how the internet, which began as the ultimate tool for total anonymity, has evolved into a sphere of our lives where nothing is personal and nothing is private.
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