Around 2011, there was a lot of chatter about an algorithm supposedly so scary Google wouldn’t release it. It would allegedly help you find people just from snapping images of their face. As with so much of today’s reality, what was a cool and spooky ghost story in 2011 has become just another intrusive and unpleasant fact of life in 2023: for a monthly fee, a face recognition service will help you find online photos of whoever you upload into its maw, whether it’s a snap in the street or an old photo of someone you wish you still knew.
Back then, I wrote a bit about some of the unforeseen consequences of this tech, both good and bad. Only one of the pros still has any relevance, and it’s finding traces of your life in the snapshots of far-flung strangers. But now that you can magic erase photo-bombers out of your smartphone pictures, we might just be left with the cons. (Please excuse the cringey Facebook references, which have definitely failed to age gracefully).
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons user Wanderlust, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
