Police Upgrade To Facial Recognition
The future arrives sooner than we think. While the idea of Robocop seems like a futuristic fancy, the Dubai police have moved one step closer to achieving this by adding facial recognition to Google Glass.
Just in case you have been living in an internetless cave for the past two years, Google Glass is a pair of spectacles made by Google where the lenses act as computer screens. For more details on what Google Glass can do you can visit the official Google Glass webpage.
The Dubai Police Department has taken this piece of technology a step further by adding facial recognition software that is linked to a database of criminals. According to the Dubai Police spokesperson, software has been written that allows the glasses to identify criminal's faces and alert the detective wearing the glasses. They have also stated that the glasses will be rolled out in two phases. In the first phase the technology will be used to fight traffic violations and any other vehicular offences. Then in the second phase the police Detectives will get a chance to use the wearable's in their day to day crime solving business.
Dubai isn't the only place where such a roll out is taking place. The New York City police department also started testing out Google Glass in investigations at the beginning of this year. They are yet to publish the results of their tests.
With the correct software the glasses can also record facial movements and twitches and detect whether a suspect is lying or not.
While this is great news for crime fighting it's not so good for our privacy. Imagine someone having all the information about you just by looking at you through a pair of Google Glasses. Considering that almost all your information is available online in some form or fashion this does not bode well for our privacy.
Google is fully aware of this and as such will not allow facial recognition software to be available through the Glass app store. But this doesn't mean much because developers can still make this software available off the official Google market.
In a few years these glasses will be available to the public like mobile phones and at this point I'm sure they will have other features such as voice recognition and mood detection. In lieu of these developments the best we can do is be careful of what we publish online, someday that will be your CV.