Strangers no more: A new app that IDs faces

When I wrote this post a few days ago about our dwindling 15 minutes of anonymity on the internet, I almost included a bit on how the coupling of facial recognition technology and smartphone cameras will enable us one day to obliterate the anonymity and mystique of any stranger we encounter on the street. One day.

But that day is already almost here.

A Swedish company has created a new app called Recognizr that can analyze the face of a stranger and deliver that person's name and social networking presence, if any.

It's strictly opt-in (at this point), meaning you can pull up only the data of people who have chosen to be added to Recognizr's database. (Which begs the question, who are those people?!) But there's often a fair amount of societal pressure to opt-in to these things (see Facebook). And as Popsci.com notes, "where social networks go, advertisers and other more invasive data mining schemes are sure to follow."

Is all this unsettling? Yes. But you won't find too much hand-wringing here. For an explanation of why, let me punt for a moment to the brilliance of David Foster Wallace and this excerpt from his novel Infinite Jest (pg. 150):

"[T]here's some sort of revealing lesson here in the beyond-short-term viability-curve of advances in consumer technology.... First there's some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech... which advance always, however, has some unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then the market-niches created by those disadvantages... are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors."

DFW was referring there to the (imagined) rise and fall of videophones, which went thus:

1. Everyone jumps on the videophone bandwagon.


2. Consumers quickly find the use of videophones emotionally exhausting and stressful because: a.) callers on the other end now know when they're doodling, filing their nails, channel surfing, etc., instead of giving callers their full and undivided attention; and b.) they can no longer take a call without worrying about how they look and the unflattering nature of videophone cameras.


3. In response, entrepreneurs develop masks, then full-body suits, then full-fledged surrogates to plop down in front of the videophone, all of which become increasingly expensive and ridiculous and so-not-worth-it.


4. Everyone ditches their videophones and goes back to the voice-only version.

It's not much of a stretch to see that paradigm coming into play with facial recognition technology, should it ever reach a level of obtrusiveness I'd resent. So I'm not too worried.

Still. I, for one, am going to be very mindful about my tech choices, because (and I'm paraphrasing Ferris Bueller here) Technology moves pretty fast these days; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, it's going to roll you.

Now. Where did I put my beloved iPhone...