This morning I seen a report on the local news about when Rangers fans went mental around the streets of Manchester last year, GMP have released footage and images of people that they are looking for in connection to the violence that took place. The GMP Uefa Cup Identification site is aimed for people to basically name drop the people if they recognise them. This led me to thinking, i bet at least 95% of these guys are online and using Facebook, Bebo, or MySpace. What I also thought of is seeing the recent MacWorld Keynote with the iPhoto ‘09 and its new facial recognition software.
Facial Recognition
Most facial recognition works in the same way, using nodal points on a persons face and then matching that up to another image to find exact matches or similar people. Each human face has around 80 nodal points like distance between eyes, width of nose, depth of eye sockets etc
More information on Facial Recognition here.
My Questions
Why don’t social networks help in fighting crime by utilizing Facial Recognition Technology and its VAST number of images, surely the technology is not that hard to implement?
What would the privacy implications be?
Would this either Lower Crime Rates or Lower the Number of People that use such sites?
I personally would love to see this technology available to the police and do think that people would thing twice knowing that they can be tracked through their favorite social networking sites. Whether or not this actually happens is another thing.