facial recognition is too creepy even for Google

Google warns against 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

Matt Warman
By Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Editor 11:57PM BST 18 May 2011

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”. …more