Face recognition Goggles blocked after privacy pressure

Tue 15 December 2009 13:00, Editors

One of Google newest launches, Goggles, is already feeling the pressure of privacy concerns. With the service mobile phone users can take a picture and find out more about the object they just shot. Now Google has blocked the service ability to recognize people and find out more about them because of privacy issues.

Goggles can already 'recognize' millions of objects, including some faces. The fact thaty people could look up people without them knowing it has raised privacy concerns. Google has confirmed its blocking this feature.

Marissa Mayer said:

"We are blocking out people's faces if people try to use Google Goggles to search for information about them. Until we understand the implications of the facial-recognition tool we have decided to make sure we block out people's faces. We need to really understand how this tool affects people's privacy and we cannot change that decision until we do."

The fact that people would be using the feature for these kind of purposes is no surprise. Last week Mayer actually commented on it at LeWeb saying that that would be a possible future image, that people are looking up each other. That Google is taking the feature down so soon is a blow in the face of Google who already has a lot of privacy issues to deal with.

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