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May 19, 2011

Google warns agains facial recognition database

Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has warned Governments against ‘foolish’ legislation – and said facial recognition is too creepy even for Google



Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, has said that the search giant would not build a database capable of recognising individual faces even though it is increasingly possible.
Mr Schmidt, speaking at Google’s ‘Big Tent’ conference on internet privacy, said that the rapid development of facial recognition technology has been one of the things that has surprised him most in a long career as a computer scientist. Such “surprising accuracy” was, however, he said, “very concerning”.
Asked a question about coining the phrase “crossing the creepy line” to describe an aspect of how Google thinks about privacy, Mr Schmidt indicated that, for him, a database utilising facial recognition advances was “unlikely” to be a service that Google would create. He suggested “some company by the way is going to cross that line”.
Mr Schmidt, however, warned regulators and legislators against trying to prevent worrying services in such a way that may stifle innovation. “Hopefully the French or any other country won’t pass laws that are so foolish they force Google to not be able to operate in those countries,” he said referring to a French law requiring internet companies to retain unencrypted passwords for a year.
“Well-meaning people in government write something which is pretty broad and you have to be careful when you do this kind of regulation,” Mr Scmidt said in answer to a related question. “You might affect something and have an unintended consequence. So that is what we are always concerned about.”

20 comments:

  1. soon sci-fi movies will be reality

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  2. Oh my god! is it real? i am quite afraid about invigilations like in Orwell.

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  3. I'm waiting for archiviations of brains in Hard disks

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  4. Lol in 10 years you will be able to upload a picture and find any picture in the world of that person and their info...sweet deal

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  5. If it doesn't go this far tomorrow, it will the day after.

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  6. good to know google thinks it is too creepy to check me out

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  7. Strange, I thought google would be supportive of such things. What a scary thought though.

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  8. From what is available commercially now in face recognition software, especially what is given free like in Lenovo laptops, sucks.

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  9. Google's saying is 'Don't be evil', but uhhh... think this counts!

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  10. if it is possible it will be done

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  11. they don't need it, they have the voice recogn. software...

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  12. Too creepy for google, that's saying something.

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  13. She has a pretty manly chin.

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  14. Too creepy for Google? This coming from the guys who went around the world taking pictures of everyone and checking their open WiFi ports?

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  15. Really creepy stuff, man. Hopefully it never happens.

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  16. Info age means an increasing lack of privacy :/

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  17. put it this way, sooner or later, something like iRobot WILL happen, and the result won't be what happened in iRobot.

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  18. Well Wikipedia is just a synonym for Minitru

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