Google’s new Chrome browser isn’t the only spiffy technology to come out of Google this week. Google is also releasing a new version of its Picasa photo-sharing application, complete with digital facial recognition. But the new facial-recognition feature won’t cause biometric data companies to lose any sleep.
“This upgraded Picasa site is designed to expand people’s digital photo experience and to make it easy and safe to share your photos with the world,” said Mike Horowitz, a Google product manager.
“Our face-recognition technology automatically groups pictures containing similar faces so users can quickly label a number of pictures at once. Our software determines which faces are roughly similar by looking at a few basic measurements, like the relative distance between a person’s eyes and nose, and nose and ears,” Horowitz said.
The facial recognition depends on users tagging photos of people with a new Add Name Tags function. Picasa provides a wizard to walk users through the ID process and serves up groups of photos with similar faces, so users can educate Picasa about who is who.
The new function appears to address one of the limiting factors of online photography software — the tedious process of typing in tags and captions to identify the people in photos. In this regard, things have not progressed much from the days of scrawling identification on the back of photo prints.
If Picasa can accurately identify people, that would appear to give it a major leg up on popular photo sites like Flickr and Shutterbug.
But the technology also raises the possibility that users will be feeding Google even more valuable personal data. By knowing who is in someone’s personal snapshots, Google could connect the dots and deliver sophisticated advertising messages. And this information would be far more powerful than today’s social-networking sites.
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