An article over at newscientisttech.com caught my eye.

It is regarding a new search engine that uses sophisticated facial recognition to allow users to identify and find people in online images and it is due to launch next month.

Civil liberties groups say the biometric-style tool could compromise the privacy of anyone who has their picture online, and with so many people putting images online whether it be a myspace profile or flickr album this could be a concern.

Although in my opinion, those who put images of themselves online waive the right to certain privacies since they are allowing anyone with internet access the ability to view the images.Where this is not true are the cases where the images have been put online without the knowledge or consent of the persons in the image.

The technology being used in this new search engine isn’t all that new – this kind of identification has been around for a while but never used in such a public way. There is an avi over at polarrose.com which shows how this technology works.

In short, it is a browser plugin that a user would download and install for Firefox or Internet Explorer.

The plug-in detects people in online photos and places our signature rose approximately where the pinhole of their shirt would be. A click on the rose will bring up a tooltip with relevant information, including name and other photos found of the same person. As a user, you help train our engine by tagging names or verifying the data generated by Polar Rose or by your fellow users.

This is fine, however I can see potential issues as people won’t just be tagging themselves but other people. What if someone tags me in a photo, I may not want to be searchable but the fact that someone has now associated a picture profile with my details which are stored in one central location means that others will be able to search for photos of a similar nature.

One positive is that celebrities and others may be able to keep better track of where photos of themselves reside and maybe this will enable them to take inappropriate photos down.

Anyway this will certainly be an interesting topic in coming months. The plug-in is due to be released in January and you can read the NewScientistTech article or visit the Polar Rose website to find out more.