The International Biometrics and Identification Association (IBIA), a trade association promoting the appropriate use of identity and security technology, is raising a red flag on an impending “perfect storm.” caused by the combination of photo tagging and tag suggestion through facial recognition technology.
The IBIA warns that this perfect storm may destroy the barrier separating our online and offline identities, altering our notions of what constitutes privacy in today’s connected world.
Aside from legal action, there are a few steps that can be taken to protect individual privacy. According to IBIA, banning the technology is a “desperate act” and ultimately futile. As IBIA report author Joseph Atick points out, past attempts to stifle useful technologies have been unsuccessful, and facial recognition is too vital a security tool to throw out with the bathwater.
Atick argues we must begin by changing the way we look at identity-tagged images in the cloud. These, Atick says, must be treated like any other personal identity information and should be subject to the same protections as social security numbers, financial data and health care records. Accordingly, any security breach on an image site should be countered with equal severity.
Additionally, Web sites hosting identity-tagged images should set up protections against software that aims to harvest images for the creation of databases.
