Picture This

I have a Flickr stream, and I take a lot of photos of people, my friends in particular. It seems natural to tag their names in the photos - but I stopped doing that.

There are a few services out there working on facial recognition; one of them is Polar Rose (a Swedish company with $5.1 mill in funding). PR relies on users to tag the faces of people; the software can recognize that a face is depicted and, I believe, first relies on users to tag them. After some tagging, the software seems capable of matching a name to the face on its own.

I entered the name of a friend of mine; they didn't have him in the database, but they did refer me to an external website of a company he once worked for, where they speculated a photo of him might exist. They were right - there was a photo of him there. The majority of the photos in their database appeared to be celebrities. (Google Image Search, anyone?)

Anyway, I've decided to stop tagging photos on Flickr with my friends as a part of good netiquette. If people want their names attached to their faces where public search engines can tag them, I guess they should be able to choose it. (I need to think a little more about Facebook, but you can de-tag yourself there.) Could Polar Rose use Flickr title and tags as a shortcut? Will you be able to opt out of PR? Robot.txt for your face?

Despite my privacy apprehensions, I could imagine getting sucked into tagging like you get hooked to a game. What's that bar game with the half-naked people? Photo Hunt!

UPDATE:
I discovered this today from EPIC:

In September of 2007, Facebook introduced public search listings. Previously, only Facebook members could search Facebook for other users. Now, non-members will be able to search. Further, major search engines such as yahoo and Goggle will index the public search listings. The listing shows a limited amount of information such as name, profile picture, and Friends.