Information Law Possum

I’m a big fan of Google’s image search, even though we cannot actually search images, but only text that is associated with images. But what about this: Will it eventually be possible to implement a biometrical search engine where the user can pick a picture of a person, the search engine analyzes it through face recognition, and yields images from the web that match the biometrical data of the reference image?

I’m not sure how sci-fi this scenario is, but here are two use cases:

• If there’s only one website that (legitimately and with your consent) displays your full name next to your image, anyone could find out your name based on a picture of you. In other words, the picture-name link, which is unidirectional in present image search engines, would become bidirectional.
• Anyone could reconstruct a considerable portion of your social network based on previously anonymous (or pseudonymous) pictures of you that somebody uploaded to FlickR and the like.

The legal consequences of this are pretty obvious (tags: privacy, data protection, digital identity, national security). In my opinion, the most problematic aspect of biometrical search would be its retroactivity, as the huge number of “legacy” pictures on the web would become unique identifiers of us against our reasonable expectation at the time of their upload.

So, if biometrical search is/were more than science fiction, should it be banned? — I don’t think so: The problem is not the technology itself, but a lack of information control by the person the information is about. Therefore, a better remedy would be to offer citizens a tool which enables them to have their biometrical data removed from the (biometrical) search index, similar to Google’s existing tools to remove content from its cache.