Technology Assignment

There is new technology being produced every month, and with that there is bound to be something cool that shows itself. Everyone pretty much knows a little bit about facial recognition. It is most commonly used by Federal Agents to track down criminals. Well now there is a new use for it that is being developed by Google.

Imagine this scene. You are in a location where you think you might know a person, but you are too shy to go up and talk to them. You take out your phone and move it from one side of the room to the other scanning the faces of everyone. The next thing you know, you have all of their social media information that pops up on your screen. Now you can determine if you know the person or not.

Right now facial recognition is still in the “Developing stages.” When you take pictures on your phone or camera it has the capability to recognize certain features to know that what is being focused on is a face. What it can’t do yet is tell you to whom the face belongs to.

Can you imagine a future where you point your phone in the direction of a person and it pulls up their entire profile on some social media platform? Personally, I have two thoughts on that:

• The ultimate stalker will be born
•         The ease at which people can learn about someone else will make our society even more lazy

For my first thought of the ultimate stalker being born is technology like this will allow a person to sit down anywhere and gather information on another. If that isn’t creepy to you I don’t know what is. Also it dives into the world of personal privacy being breached. And it also brings up the ethical issue of is right for someone to gather data from you without your knowledge.

I think in our society we are already heading in a direction where people are more prone to be less social with others. So the ease at which people can learn about someone else will take the amount of laziness to the next level.

Now with all of that being said, I think there is some good that can come out of this as long as people use this technology in the proper way. One way this could be good is that by looking up someone’s profile it can give a person the opportunity to find out likes and dislikes, so they can go approach a person and have something to talk about.

Will this technology be available to the public in the next five years? The best answer to that is no, but companies are making strides to one day be able to get there. I hope that when that day comes people are still willing to talk to others face to face.

http://mashable.com/2009/06/01/social-media-future-tech/