This is an appropriate time to repost what we had to say the last time Google felt compelled to disavow facial recognition technology in relation to Glass.
June 3, 2013
If it's a camera, it can be used for facial recognition
Google outlaws facial recognition apps on Glass for now (CSO)
Google's announcement should be taken to mean that Google isn't going to integrate facial recognition into Google Glass. Facial recognition apps won't be on the Google Play store. And, at least for now, they won't be facilitating face rec. in other Google services such as YouTube, search, Gmail, and Google+. [end repost]
In a twitter exchange, John at M2SYS nails exactly why every Google Glass face rec denial sounds so silly: The device screams for facial recognition applications and everybody knows it.Google announced late Friday that it will outlaw facial recognition and other biometric identification apps on Glass, its networked eyewear still in prototype phase that's expected to be commercially released later this year.If it's a camera, it can be used for facial recognition. Facial recognition is really just a specific type of image analysis. It doesn't matter where the image comes from. It could be a 19th Century daguerreotype or a picture taken from space. The software doesn't care. Presumably running the open source Android operating system, as a head-mounted sensor array with a camera, there is little or nothing preventing application developers from passing images collected via the headset through facial recognition applications not developed by Google.
“As Google has said for several years, we won’t add facial recognition features to our products without having strong privacy protections in place,” Google’s Project Glass team said in on its Google Plus page.
Google may have publicly said this, however until now its developer policy did not explicitly rule out apps that can do facial recognition.
Google's announcement should be taken to mean that Google isn't going to integrate facial recognition into Google Glass. Facial recognition apps won't be on the Google Play store. And, at least for now, they won't be facilitating face rec. in other Google services such as YouTube, search, Gmail, and Google+. [end repost]
Terrible with names? Suffer from prosopagnosia? Wonder where you've seen that person before? There's an app for that.
