"and that caused Google to back off the research". Do you have an article or other sources for this? It sounds very interesting.
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/06/08/face-recognitio...
"Google’s Eric Schmidt last week stated that facial recognition was the only technology the company has ever held back from the public. 'We built that technology and withheld it [because] people could use in a very bad way,' he said at the D9 conference"
seems like google just doesn't want to have too much negative backlash