Woah, hold it right there. So some guy on the road can pull a picture of me and get to know a LOT about me? That's kinda cool, but it creeps me out. If this can't make a person paranoid about privacy, then nothing can.
They can connect your face to a lot of information that you've already made public.
I'm not sure that privacy enters into it.
Well till now, they would have to know atleast my name to get said publicly available information.
Till now, they would need the information that connects your face to your name. This app also needs that information to be publicly available.
If this app can connect your face to a body of data, then a person could have done the same without it.
A good test for this might be to use tineye to search for a picture of yourself.
I can't find the source but if you constrain the search space to, say, geographic area or social network (e.g. if one person in your group is recognized - are you linked) - it's scary how much smaller the search space is (hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds).
I don't see how useful this is, unless you are just really bad with faces.
That's a legitimate use case.
Coming soon: masks made of frosted Plexiglas.
Ready to be bought by Google, integrated into Google Goggles?