According to foreign media reports, facial recognition technology has existed for several decades, but until recently, its development has been relatively slow, and it is mostly used in law enforcement department databases. However, such a situation may change, and the results of the changes may cause digital privacy advocates to shudder.

An example is PittPatt (now acquired by Google), developed by Carnegie Mellon University. It can quickly identify you in photos, match similarities with other photos on the web, and find other information on the web. .

An industry source wrote: "Using Carnegie Mellon's cloud-based mobile application PittPatt, a casual snapshot of a person can be matched with his online identity in less than a minute. PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition tools can Find your public pictures on social networks like Facebook, Google+, or find more formal sites, such as corporate websites or college athlete portraits."

This technology may have some incredible ways to use, but the wide availability of facial recognition can also cause serious privacy problems. Friends who automatically tagged photos may give criminals an opportunity.

Google knows the risks. Even before the acquisition of PittPatt, Google itself had developed a powerful facial recognition tool, but out of concern for privacy, Google refused to add it to any publicly released applications. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has said that the privacy implications of facial recognition are "very worrying" and the company will probably not add this tool to consumer mobile applications. Even so, this will not prevent third-party developers from adding this controversial technology to Android applications.

Apple and Facebook Join Face Recognition Game Some Facebook users may feel uneasy when they first see Facebook's facial recognition function: After uploading a friend's photo, Facebook will automatically identify the person in the photo and ask if the user wants to do it accordingly. mark. Facebook launched this feature globally this summer. The user can "choose not to use" this function in the privacy settings.

When Apple acquired a company named PolarRose in 2010, it made it clear that it intended to let the iPhone recognize the face in some way. Although Apple refuses to integrate this technology directly into iOS, it has made facial recognition available by giving developers new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). For example, the iPhone application RecognizeMe can unlock the device by scanning and identifying the owner's face.

Giants like Google and Apple refuse to launch the technology in a way that makes mobile facial recognition technology vulnerable to abuse, but that does not mean that other companies will not. As long as high technology exists and continues to evolve, it may only be a matter of time before such tools appear on your smartphone.