Mr Schmidt said: “Facial recognition is a good example . . . anything we did in that area would be highly, highly planned, discussed and reviewed. When you go through these things, you review your management procedures.”Apart from Google's history with privacy issues, they do face a dilemma, as the article points out. There is no reason to limit search terms to text only. Some innovator will bring search into the visual arena and enable a picture to be used as the search term. Without new regulation, that means that at some indeterminate point in the future* someone could take a picture of a face with a cell phone and find out a lot about that person.
These tools are coming. They will bring huge productivity gains. They will be abused.
Those concerned about the effects of technologies like Google Goggles upon their family's privacy would be well advised to think about what information about them exists online and what they do now to manage who has access to it. Most of us have near-total control over what personal information ends up on the internet. If the only thing keeping online information about you "private" is the lack of better search engines, then it might be a good idea to reevaluate how much personal information you post/allow to be posted online.
It is possible, even likely, that the internet will become both more private and less private. More private as Google increasingly respects the interests of content owners (FT again). Less private as better search brings more of the internet to users attention.
*The technical challenges of using a picture of a person's face as the only search term for a search of the internet for facts about that person are extremely daunting. If you take a picture of an apple, presumably the search would return lots of pictures and information relating to apples. If you take a picture of a person, presumably the search would return lots of pictures and information relating to people. Converting an object recognition search that has yet to be deployed into an facial recognition search is a long way off.
