Face It: Privacy Is Endangered - A new photo-tagging service uses facial-recognition technology to identify the people in your party pix. When similar systems start crawling the web, we'll all be looking for a change of face. Commentary by Jennifer Granick. [Security Blanket]

With the privacy concerns that is already started to become prevalent as it is easier and easier to find everything about a person online, including their birth certificate (vitalchek.com), credit history (equifax.com), and even background checks that’ll tell stuff like addresses, property ownership, legal judgments, etc. (intelius.com), and of course whatever other random facts you could find on google. This is already bad enough, but now there is this new threat on our already near-extinct notion of having any privacy.

It comes in the form of a new technology that can recognize faces in pictures. This is first being used on a photo-sharing site called Riya, but it can be easily deployed throughout the Internet. So even if you have been careful to keep information about yourself from being easily accessible online, such as not joining facebook.com or keeping your blog anonymous if you have one, you would end up online anyways if people took pictures with you in it, and upload the pictures online. Even if you don’t upload pictures of yourself online it might end up there anyways because of camera-happy friends and acquaintances. So in the future it might be possible to know what a person looks like just by simply googling for them. You would also know who they hang out with, and what places they have been. It is intimate details like this that I don’t what to be spread all around the Internet, and makes me fear about the future of privacy.

Some people might say that this technology would be good for law enforcement, allowing computers to sort through images captured on the cameras that’s becoming increasing ubiquitous over the years, and identify criminals and terrorists. This couldn’t have been possible before because its simply too time consuming for humans to look through that many images and video feeds. But even if the technology is 99 percent perfect at identifying someone, this will still cause thousands of false positives, and greatly inconvenience both citizens and law enforcement. Somehow I am just not satisfied with trading away my personal rights of privacy, just to be a little safer from criminals. With the way things are going now, privacy, as we know it, may not even exist in the near future.

Wanting to have your personal information private isn’t the only reason to be concerned about privacy. If you have too much information online it makes that much easier for people to use that data to masquerade as you to apply for credit cards under your name, withdraw money from your checking account, get a loan using your name, etc. Then they would spend all the money and leave you with a whole bunch of bad credit under your name. This crime, called identity thief, has become the fastest growing crime in the United States. People that have this happen to them often need to spend considerable time and money to clean up the mess, to get their credit rating back to the right place.