Thursday, December 1, 2011

secure.me: Includes a Facial Recognition Tool for Parents of Facebook Users

German secure.me offers parents more control over children's Facebook accounts (Yahoo! News)
Among the features offered is photo monitoring which uses biometric face recognition to scan the social network for pictures of the target profile, even if not tagged. The service offers privacy setting suggestions and informs about unsafe links popping up in friend network. Interactions between friends can also be monitored, as well as apps and pretty much all activity from new friends, to liked pages or check-ins. Past data and events can be compiled and analyzed if needed.
Biometric technologies can be protective or corrosive of privacy.

What I find interesting about this story is that secure.me seems to be a nearly identical use of facial recognition technology to the one that has been attracting a lot of negative attention to facebook.

The difference is in who controls the information gathered with the help of the technology.

It's not the tech; it's the people.