Ok lets put the eternal ethical debate aside as to "if" Google should apply its facial recognition technology to all the photos on the internet (arguments aside for now anyway) in order to tag you in every photo you were ever in...even ones you didn't realise you were part of.
Something that would be amazing and turn this technology application to doing good rather than "evil" as Google would have it. This can be done by taking the images of children that have disappeared over the past 50 - 70 years and apply ageing software to generate an image of what they would (could?) look like each year since that point.
Once each of these images has been created Google could put it through its database of every photo on the internet and scan for any photo that has similar characteristics using their facial recognition technology. These missing children photo databases could also be applied to the ever growing CCTV systems that spread across the world however I think the images from the internet would be more valuable and are more likely to provide solid leads.
There are so many pictures taken in the world and uploaded to the internet that at least some of these missing people would have to show up in the background or even be the primary focus of the picture.
Below are some stats from Pingdom to give you an idea of the number of photos already on the internet and coming in the future.
- 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
- 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
- 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
Google has the databases and processing power to do this however as I mentioned at the beginning there will be overwhelming opposition to the general use of facial recognition technology applied to the whole internet; the point of this would be to find people who have gone missing and now with the ever increasing number of devices that support geotagging it will be possible to isolate the photo to a GPS co-ordinate greatly improving the chances of finding them.
I would think that the US's Home Land Security would already have a system like this however I am sure it isn't being used in this fashion. So the real questions is will Google use their technology for Good rather than Evil?
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