Facial recognition technology isn't part of science fiction anymore, it's something that's being employed by a handful of governments around the world, and even private enterprise is getting in on it with applications like Facedeals. If you don't want to be pinged in public by a surveillance suite though, hacktivist group Anonymous have made a handy instructional video to keep you safe.
Android: Locking your Android phone's screen is a matter of basic security, but Visidion AppLock takes your privacy to the next level by using facial recognition to lock specific apps on your Android phone.
Google Image Search now makes the filters for faces, photos and news images available directly on the results page. Previously, one had to click through to the Advanced Image Search to refine your image searches. You'll find the drop-down menu to select between filters to the right of the existing menu to refine your search by image size. Which makes it even easier for fair use-enabled photochoppers to find places and faces for satirical digital compositing.
Google's Picasa is seeing updates on both the web- and desktop-based versions of the popular photo management application. The biggest new feature is coming to Picasa Web Albums in the form of people tagging, a Facebook-style tool that lets you tag faces in your photos by name and then view pictures of that person by simply searching. The difference between this and Facebook is that Google identifies all of the faces in your pictures automatically and groups together the faces that it thinks are the same, making people tagging extremely quick and easy to do. According to technology web site CNET, Google will also be releasing a new beta version of Picasa for the desktop today, the main improvements to which include a movie maker and online synchronisation of every edit of a photo. The download isn't showing up for me yet, but people tagging is live, so give it a try and let's hear what you think in the comments.
