Facial Recognition is the Future of Social Search

Nokia’s concept video shows what they think mobile computing will be in 2015.  The list rounds out the usual suspects of future-tech: cloud computing, geolocative services, service-anywhere and facial recognition, to name a few.  The last one tweaks my concerns about data harvesting and social stalking as presented the last two days (Thoughts on the OGI and Surveillance Society).  Seems like this is privacy week at the Future Digital Life.
Nokia isn’t the only one delving into this aspect of computer vision as Qualcomm gave a sneak peak into their future products and facial recongition tied to social networking is one of them.  Ben Sillis from Electricpig reports what the Qualcomm European president presented:

the company’s European president, Andrew Gilbert, showed how you would soon be able to point your phone’s camera at a person, then instantly bring up their Facebook and Twitter profiles, along with recent updates and all the details said victim (Karmen, in the above picture) has chosen to make public about themselves.
 Gilbert admitted that the possibility raised serious privacy issues – you could theoretically pull up a person’s home address through automatic whois requests – but ethics aside, it’s an interesting next step for augmented reality apps, which layer data over the surroundings and have started to take off in a big way over the last year. As phones get faster and more powerful, what’s to stop people integrating this form of search?
Gilbert described a future where the “handheld device becomes the remote control of your life”. If you ask us, we’ve already reached that stage – would you take it to the next level like this?

Personally, I wouldn’t mind facial recognition tied to my social services as long as I controlled who had access to my face data.  Things get tricky when you have access to search anyone in your viewing distance.  Either way, facial recognition is sure to be part of the future of social search.

Source : thomaskcarpenter.com