Brooks Digital Marketing

Yet another mind blowing application from Google’s international super geek team. This time the two friendly engineers show us how they have somehow managed to create a search that is powered by photographs taken from your phone.

It is easy to see how photos with text can be searched as text recognition software has been around for some time however the ability to recognise and return results related to just plain old pictures is quite baffling to me.

So the question now is, what is this useful for? The obvious examples are presented in the video and include recognising artwork and grabbing data from business cards but how does this impact privacy?

Let’s assume that to return results Google has to have a similar picture to reference and we expect that all the photography that has been going on for the maps application will be the source for searches on building or urban areas in general.

So how about people searches? If you are active on social media there’s a good chance you have added one or two photographs of yourself that are tagged or have Alt text in the HTML. Google can search it’s index, match your image and return your name, employer and whatever public data you have to anyone that takes a photo of you.

If you ask me the implications of that sort of power are pretty scary.