The Birth of Recognizr: The Loss of Anonymity?
Is Recognizr the new stalking tool? Is anonymity, one of the internet’s greatest assets, slowly loosing its relevance?
Recognizr promotes itself as The Internet Business Video Card
“An application that lets users point a smart phone at a stranger and immediately learn about them premiered last Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Developed by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a Swedish mobile software and design firm, the prototype software combines computer vision, cloud computing, facial recognition, social networking, and augmented reality.”
Its functionality, as may be seen from the video above, is simple. You own a smartphone with a 5 megapixel camera, take a photo of yourself, register it with Recognizr.
In future, if someone snaps a picture of you at a bar, restaurant or the gym, Recognizr will be able to tell him/ her (creepy stalker person) your name, together with all relevant social media links including Facebook & Twitter. To say anonymity is a lost cause, would be inaccurate at this point. Recognizr, as a product allows its user to opt in. In other words, if you don’t want strangers to be able to access your world from a single photo, don’t register.
However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind
1. Facebook & Twitter privacy no longer exists – just because you block “Jack” from being a Facebook friend, it doesn’t mean he won’t be able to see what you’ve been up to via Facebook mutual friends like “Jill”/ RTs on Twitter from @RandomPersona1
2. Nothing you say online is ever private – someone out there in cyberspace might think a recent picture of you, a recent event, wallpost or tweet is interesting and this “interesting” article could turn up on a few blogs, Google Popular (1000+) and almost 5-6 billion will know
3. What happens at Starbucks might possibly turn up on YouTube. With the surge in smartphone sales over the past year what happens offline will be seen online.
4. There no longer any distinction between online and offline. Both worlds have merged.
So back to the question – is anonymity online losing its relevance?
Is it no longer existent? After all, there are some people out there who create multiple facebook/ myspace/ twitter accounts for the purpose of being “unsearchable”.
6 Degrees of separation – has it shrunk down to 2?
Great article by Tac Anderson – You Can’t Hide from the Web
