Google Picasa

I don't use Google's Picasa photo manipulation and management software. It's not Free Software; it's free as in beer, but not free as in freedom.

That said, my family does use the program, and recently downloaded the newest version. Google has added a cool but slightly creepy feature which extracts faces from pictures and tries to assign names to them. It looks at each picture, and identifies regions which are probably faces, and then it presents you with equally sized thumbnails of each face, so you can tell it who they are. Small faces in the background, large faces up front - they're all scaled to the same size, so some are really sharp, and some (the small ones in back) are kind of blurry.

Of course (?) the program can't know at the start who each face belongs to. You start assigning names to the thumbnail pictures, and Google adds the names as tags to the photos. So far, that sounds like a Facebook for your photo album, albeit with the cool face detection. But here's where it gets creepy.

Once you start tagging the faces, the software learns, and starts suggesting names for the faces. Not only is the detection pretty good for current faces - it is also smart enough to match earlier and earlier faces, so it eventually can find baby pictures with disturbing accuracy. My family trusts Google, and believes Picasa is not publishing the face recognition patterns up to the "mother ship", Google's servers. I'm not so sure. Google has had some issues with grabbing your private data recently. With governments making big investments in closed-circuit televisions to monitor public areas, they need a good way to match names to faces. How tempting it would be for a government to work with Google to patch Picasa to upload all those face matches so it can determine who's showing up on those street corners, at those rallies, in the subways, etc.

Just be careful.