sadly i had thought that untagging myself on the internet was enough to avoid my reputation from becoming harmed via job background searches. I was incorrect. There is a new tool out on the internet that is allowing both employers and individuals to gain access to photos that have been uploaded of yourself that you are tagged and untagged in. This tool uses face recognition software to find these images.
The sick thing about the application is that it allows not only you to find photos of yourself but you can use the same face recognition software to stalk other people as well. I find the idea revolting as it intrudes on personal liberties. This is yet another reason for people to be careful what images they allow people to photograph them of.
While face recognition software isn't new, this new practical use of it is a fairly new introduction to what may become a terrible tool for cyber stalking. Up until now, untagging a photo is how you hide a photo from your Facebook friends, however with this new tool that may not be possable.
With this new software i'm sure we'll see many more cases of individual stalking each other in the future by bypassing the social networks engineering programing.
There are more than 850 million photos are uploaded every month by Facebook’s 200 million or so users, in other words if this application becomes popular you can expect to seea great deal of photos being hidden throuh hightly advanced privacy settings. No longer will we run into photographs that people only want accessable to a few friends due to this application that will pop up in the future.
This is however good news for PR managers to some extent and a nightmare for those just getting into the buisness.
What makes this particuarly bad, is the software is open source. This means some bored programmer out there will be able to universalize it and have it run on every social network as well as google image stock out there. Cached sites will be used, and perhaps if they are bored enough they will intigrate some source code from webcrawlers that invade private servers. What this means is eventually it may lead to the point where nothing is private online due to this. Any image taken of you and put online with or without your notice will be available for people using this tool. Bad news for people with social lives, the real question is how significantly will this effect the average person? Or will the people that it effects the greatest be our stars or celebrities, or people who have a social side and a professional side? To where exactly will this kind of privacy invasion end?
- Rory Williams
